Saturday 27 August / Sunday 28 August 2016
Follow us on Twitter @FTLifeArts hands, fingers splayed, to suggest something constantly at risk of disappearing. Art’s value — both cultural and monetary — is established by it being seen, sold and talked about. With this in mind, galleries are increasingly taking on the representation of artists’ estates alongside their representation of living artists. At the prestigious international gallery Hauser & Wirth, which has approached the field with particular vigour, almost a third of represented artists are now estates or foundations — 21 in total. Seventeen of these were taken on in the past decade. As Würtenberger explains, “The higher end of the contemporary art market has become so competitive, also for the art dealers of the big artists, that they are looking again into the estates to see what are the undiscovered treasures that they can bring to the surface.” Adam Sheffer, president of the Art Dealers Association of America, says that talking to artists about estate planning and archiving is now a “standard part of the dialogue” at many galleries. “When you begin a career and you start
Ugly and expensive infighting between inheritors and trustees has touched many estates to have work enter the market, you have to think about everything as specific as archiving, as keeping extremely careful records, because down the road when it comes to the value of your foundation and issues around authenticity, the earlier you start the better,” he says.
The artistic afterlife In an inflated art market, looking after an artist’s estate has become a serious business. Harriet Fitch Little looks at where it can go right – or wrong
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efore he killed himself in his Manhattan studio in February 1970, the artist Mark Rothko wrote a will that was firm in its wishes if not its wording: his estate should not, it requested, be atomised and disappear into the vaults of the very wealthy. To this end, Rothko had engaged three friends as executors, and set up a foundation. Yet following the artist’s death, and that of his wife Mary Alice a few months later, the executors did indeed break up Rothko’s estate, selling a large part of it to the Marlborough Gallery at extremely deflated prices, and giving Marlborough the right to sell other canvases on consignment for higher than normal commission. The following year, Rothko’s 20-yearold daughter Kate sued on behalf of herself and her younger brother. A protracted court case revealed the cosy ties between executors and gallery. The case was won but the damage was already done. Many of Rothko’s paintings, including his daughter’s favourite, “Homage to Matisse”, had already been sold on and weren’t coming back. A similar fate befell the legacies of other famous artists. Pablo Picasso died intestate in 1973 having been possessed by the superstition that making a will would hasten his demise. He left 45,000 works and seven heirs — a settlement that took six years and $30m to negotiate. Salvador Dalí, who died in 1989, had set up a foundation but left his affairs in such disarray (and therefore so open to forgery) that, 27 years later, the market for certain works of his still hasn’t fully recovered. The story of Rothko’s “orphans”, as the critic Robert Hughes laconically captioned the artist’s heirs, fascinated
the public of the time: it was “a betrayal the art world can’t forget” according to the New York Times; a “spectacular scandal” in People magazine. It was also, for some observers, the moment that alerted artists and dealers to the fact that legacy management wasn’t an abstract concept: securing an artistic afterlife was a business concern, and that business could go badly wrong.
From main: Pablo Picasso with his son Claude in 1955; Mark Rothko’s ‘Orange, Red, Yellow’ (1961); Henry Moore with his daughter Mary in 1948 Getty Images; Bridgeman images
Forty years after the judge in the Rothko case decided that each of the canvases sold to Marlborough was worth at least $90,000, Christie’s sold Rothko’s “No. 10” for $82m ($86.9m with fees) in a week when the auction house’s sales totalled more than $1bn. As Andy Warhol once put it: “death means a lot of money, honey”. In today’s inflated art market, the significance of securing an artist’s estate seems all too obvious. But sky-high prices have increased tensions, too. Ugly and expensive infighting between inheritors and trustees has touched many estates since Picasso’s. More recently, a rash of authentication lawsuits has risked crippling some of the world’s wealthiest foundations: over the past five years the authentication committees attached to several major artist’s estates have stopped offering opinions on works brought to them because they are worried they will be taken to court over unfavourable rulings. Warhol’s was the first to fold, announcing in 2011 that, “We’d rather see our money go to artists than lawyers.” Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock were among those who followed. Loretta Würtenberger is director of the Institute for Artists’ Estates, an organisation founded earlier this year
that is the first to dedicate itself to questions of legacy planning and management in the art world. A copyright lawyer who has managed the estates of the Dadaist Hans Arp and his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp since 2009, Würtenberger traces the importance of securing an artist’s estate back to the growth of art as an asset class, rather than to specific high-profile cases such as Rothko’s. “The artists of the 1940s and 50s, those were the first artists from the superstar point of view,” she says. “Having died away, you now have these huge rich estates. We’ve never seen that before.” The Berlin-based institute has joined a field that has expanded rapidly over the past five years — a rather delayed response, perhaps, to the boom in the contemporary market that got under way in the 1990s when contemporary art started to regularly outsell Old Masters and Modern artists at auction. It’s an industry that is, almost by definition, playing catch-up: avoiding the arguments, lawsuits and questions over authenticity that have plagued art’s early “superstars” is something that requires advanced planning, and in many cases it’s simply too late. For example, says Würtenberger, the loss of authentication committees is a trend that has worrying consequences. “It’s really a pity because an estate, especially if they do a catalogue raisonné [a publication that comprehensively lists all the known artworks by a particular artist] is the natural source of knowhow for giving authentication.” It is up to the trustees of an estate to ensure that this activity is sustained after the artist is gone. Würtenberger puts it like this: “You have this oeuvre, this bucket of gold which you try to grasp in its totality,” she says, lifting her
The sculptor Henry Moore was the first British artist to reckon with his legacy on an institutional scale. He set up the Henry Moore Foundation in 1977, creating a structure so rigid that he was obliged to become its employee and draw an annual salary for his work. According to his only child, Mary Moore, he found parts of the process a “real bore”: “In a way what you’re doing is turning yourself into an institution while you’re still alive,” she says. Continued on page 2