Far Out Magazine
By Poppy Burton
August 10th, 2023
Kate Rothko Prizel, the daughter of renowned abstract artist Mark Rothko, once said being 19 was the worst year of her life. Still only a teenager, in 1970, Prizel was embroiled in a bitter legal battle with her father’s estate executors and the directors of the Marlborough Fine Art gallery.
In 1970, the body of her father, Rothko, was found in his Manhattan studio following a grisly suicide that reportedly left him surrounded by a pool of blood eight feet wide. Six months later, her mother (and Rothko’s second wife) dropped down dead while Prizel’s younger brother, only six years old at this point, sat in the next room watching TV.
The art world’s response to this tragedy was a sign of the cruelty to come, with art critic Robert Hughes dubbing Prizel and her brother “The Orphans”.
Within two years of the consecutive funerals of their parents, Prizel and brother Christopher sued the executors of their father’s estate, claiming they had conspired to “waste the assets” of Rothko’s estate to defraud the siblings of their fair share. The assets in question were a huge collection of 789 paintings – which at the time were estimated to be worth around $32million. They argued the three trustees – Bernard Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Marton Levine, who owned the Marlborough Gallery – had knowingly sold these paintings to the Marlborough for far less than their true market value.
But after four gruelling years, it was a landmark win… The verdict was fittingly damning, and all three executors were thrown out for “improvidence and waste verging on gross negligence”.
The trial record revealed that the gallery had been stockpiling the undervalued works instead of selling them in order to ensure both a low market saturation and a high Marlborough inventory, anticipating a heightened value in the market after Rothko’s death. Further, the 100 paintings ‘sold’ after Rothko’s death by the estate executors through Marlborough were not sold to bona fide purchasers, but were instead retained by the gallery which shuffled the sale monies through its accounts in Europe, and which then quickly ‘re-sold’ the works to actual purchasers for 5 to 6 times the value declared by the estate. Many works were sold this way by the Marlborough with the complicity of the executors despite the court’s injunction against selling any works while the case was unresolved and still before the courts.
“Rothko case”, Wikipedia
Ultimately, certain directors at Marlborough were convicted of defrauding the Rothko family, and in 1975, the court ordered the gallery to pay over $9 million in damages and costs, and also ordered the gallery to return 658 Rothko paintings it still held.
