Keeping an artist in the public eye, of course, is crucial to a dealer’s main business: marketing his or her work when the estate decides to sell. The timing of and reasons for that decision vary. Stevens says the Smith estate rarely unloads works, wanting to maintain a large collection so it can facilitate exhibitions. When pieces are sold, they go to museums or into major private collections, where, he says, they "will contribute to the understanding and appreciation of David Smith’s work."

At the other extreme is the Warhol estate, although its major selling days are now past. The artist, who died in 1987, directed that the majority of his assets go to fund "the advancement of the visual arts." Over the course of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Gagosian helped the executors sell large numbers of works to create an endowment for the Warhol Foundation. Since many of the paintings in the estate were from series — like the camouflage and Rorschach ones — made in the 1980s, when Warhol’s reputation was in decline, Gagosian had to create a new critical assessment and market for the late work, which Gagosian’s Good says people were relatively unaware of. It did so in part by presenting more than a dozen Warhol shows in the course of a decade.

Timing of sales is often determined by other events in the art world, such as those that highlight an underappreciated aspect of an artist’s work. Joan Washburn, who represents the Jackson Pollock portion of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (the Robert Miller Gallery represents the Lee Krasner estate) chose 1998, when the Museum of Modern Art held its major Pollock retrospective, to mount an exhibition connecting Pollock’s paintings from the 1930s and ’40s with the murals of the Mexican artists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. "We certainly worked very hard to time it to the moma exhibition, but [also] to show a new angle on Pollock."

Some relationships sour. In 1998 a British judge severed the tie between Marlborough and the estate of Francis Bacon, which filed a suit accusing the dealer of undervaluing works, but later dropped the case. In general, though, these relationships are mutually beneficial, and dealers continue to vie for major estates. "The gallery is growing," says Good of Gagosian. "We’re always looking for great art and great shows."

"Great Estates" originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2009 Table of Contents.