Whatever an estate’s objectives, a powerful, well-capitalized gallery can provide significant support. In return, the gallery gets the prestige of representing an important artist and playing a role in burnishing or even reinventing his or her reputation. Of course, there are also sales and commissions, although dealers generally take a somewhat smaller cut with estates, just as they do with very famous artists, because the greater value of the work gives its owners greater leverage. Still, the opportunity to rewrite art history is in many ways the more important motive. "It really isn’t a market-driven thing," says Barry Rosen, an art historian who manages the estates of Hesse, Lozano and Allan Kaprow.

This sentiment is echoed by Hauser & Wirth’s Berktold, who is intimately involved with the gallery’s representation of several estates, including those of Hesse, Lozano, Kaprow and Jason Rhoades. "You become a certain authority for the work of the artist," he says. "It’s a huge responsibility, which comes with a lot of work, but in a way, you also gain reputation."

Connections with estates and individual heirs give galleries an inside track in borrowing pieces, allowing them to mount shows museums would kill for. Gagosian, for instance, was able to stock its recent exhibition of late Picassos with pictures lent by several members of the artist’s family who maintain control over his legacy and with whom the gallery has relationships. Although only 10 percent of the pieces were for sale, the exhibition generated buzz and brought in major collectors and museum curators, says John Good, a Gagosian director who works with the Smith estate and the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, among others. Mounting historical shows like this one "strengthens the whole program; it makes everybody look good," including the dealer’s living artists, he adds. "For John Currin to be shown at the same gallery that shows Giacometti is pretty great."

Even if an estate doesn’t have a huge amount to sell, representing it may attract secondary-market works by the same artist from collectors who figure the gallery knows the material and is good at promoting it. Other benefits flow from helping executors publish catalogues raisonnés, a process that not only confers the prestige of participating in a scholarly project but also enables dealers to find out where major pieces are. Earlier this year PaceWildenstein president Marc Glimcher launched a publishing company, Artifex Press, dedicated to creating digital catalogues raisonnés. Among its first projects will be catalogues of Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, both represented by Pace.

Galleries also provide various kinds of support to museums mounting exhibitions of work by deceased artists they represent, says Ann Freedman, president and director of Knoedler, which handles the estates of Milton Avery, James Castle, Jules Olitski, Richard Pousette-Dart and others. Knoedler recently collaborated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art on its Castle retrospective, helping to locate works and serving as a liaison between curators and family members. Elyse Goldberg, a director at the James Cohan Gallery, in New York, cooperated closely with the curators of the 2004-05 Robert Smithson retrospective, which started at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and traveled to the Dallas Musuem of Art and the Whitney. Goldberg, who has worked with Smithson’s estate and with his widow, Nancy Holt, since the mid-1980s, says she and Holt helped them locate works and consulted about which ones should be included.

Dealers may also provide funding for such shows. The Cohan gallery, together with the public-art group Minetta Brook, raised the money to realize Smithson’s Floating Island, a tugboat covered with rocks and trees that traveled around Manhattan for a week during the Whitney show.

Such partnering may not add to galleries’ bottom line, but participating in high-profile museum projects still redounds to their advantage, adding luster to their programs over the long term. The interest in LeWitt since his death in 2007 — including a wall-drawing retrospective at Mass MOCA, which will be on view until 2033 — is surely a bonus for Pace, which beat out several other galleries for LeWitt’s estate.