Great Estates

Sol LeWitt Andy Warhol Milton Avery Pablo Picasso Agnes Martin Alberto Giacometti Francis Bacon Henry Moore

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When Theo van Gogh died, in 1891, his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, was left with an attic of full of paintings by her brother-in-law, Vincent, and the conviction that they were worth more than the rest of the world thought. Over the next three and a half decades, she cannily oversaw the elevation of Vincent’s reputation by donating his paintings to museums and publishing his correspondence with Theo.

Her degree of prescience may be rare, but others connected with deceased artists, professionally as well as personally, have skillfully managed to nurture their posthumous reputations and markets. Dealers, in fact, have found that representing late talents can be as lucrative as working with those still producing. In the past decade or so, the competition for estates — whether of well-known artists or ones ripe for rediscovery — has become more intense, with powerhouse galleries luring some executors away from dealers with whom they had had longtime relationships. In the late 1990s, for example, the executors of the David Smith estate, which had been managed by Knoedler & Company, in New York, for more than 25 years, decamped to Gagosian. And last fall, the estate of the painter Alice Neel, long represented by the Robert Miller Gallery, moved to David Zwirner.

For executors, a gallery with a large staff and significant capital provides access to important forms of assistance, from the basics of researching, photographing and conserving works to financial support for museum exhibitions and the preparation of catalogues raisonnés. Peter Stevens, the executive director of the David Smith estate, says that one reason behind its switch to Gagosian was the size of the dealer’s Wooster Street gallery, in SoHo, which at the time was unique — and important for mounting sculpture shows.

In addition, switching to a blue-chip gallery can effectively present a deceased artist’s work as "new." Stevens cites as another factor in the estate’s decision to change representation the fact that Gagosian "was moving the art business in a different direction, which was able to connect more with the contemporary gallerygoer." In October 2008, the London and Zurich gallery Hauser & Wirth, with the Old Master dealer Colnaghi, mounted a show in London of the work of Henry Moore in collaboration with the Henry Moore Family Collection, a body comprising the sculptor’s daughter, Mary, and her children. Moore’s sculptures were installed on curving platforms designed by the architects Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher that were meant to complement their organic shapes. For Londoners familiar with Moore’s work, "it was an interesting challenge to see it in a contemporary context," says Florian Berktold, a director of Hauser & Wirth in Zurich.

Jeremy Lewison, the art consultant and curator who advises the Neel estate, echoes this rationale in explaining the decision to move to Zwirner. "We felt it was important to see Alice in the contemporary context and not simply as a historical figure who’s dead and gone," he says, adding that many contemporary artists are interested in Neel’s work, including such painters on Zwirner’s roster as Marlene Dumas and Chris Ofili.

The change of context can push up values. After Hauser & Wirth took on the estate of Lee Lozano, in 2004, prices for her paintings reportedly increased from the low five figures to almost a million dollars.

Estates and their needs are as varied as the artists involved. There may be just one executor, perhaps the artist’s widow, son or daughter, or a more formal organization.

A large amount of work may be available to sell, as in the case of Andy Warhol, or very little, as with Eva Hesse, who died in 1970 at just 36. By the time Hauser & Wirth took on Hesse’s estate a decade ago, most of her major sculptural pieces were already in public collections. Some artists stipulate in their wills that their estates should support charitable missions. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is charged with using its assets to provide grants for institutions, scholars and critics, while the Pollock-Krasner and Joan Mitchell foundations make grants to living artists.

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.

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.