The Trials of Mark Rothko

Abstract

MARK ROTHKO'S LIFE AS A PAINTER was framed by two lawsuits. In the last ten years of his life Rothko became increasingly dependent upon his accountant, Bernard Reis. Reis was a well-to-do Marxist who lived on New York's Upper East Side and whose clientele included many of the Abstract Expressionist painters. For someone like Rothko, who had spent most of his life struggling with poverty but who now was receiving formidable sums for his work, Reis was a welcome source of advice on taxes, contracts, dealers; Reis could take care of the commercial side of art, freeing artists to do what they were most interested in doing-their work. But Reis liked to put his business dealings on a friendly, personal basis. A collector, he would accept paintings in exchange for his services; he liked to entertain his clients at dinner parties, and, beyond that, he sought to become their friend, confidant, adviser. Some artists grew suspicious of Reis's methods and motives and took their business elsewhere. But Reis became especially intimate with Rothko. In the end, however, he betrayed Rothko. After Rothko's tragic suicide in February of 1970, Reis became an executor of the estate; he was already a director of the Mark Rothko Foundation, set up by Rothko to preserve and promulgate the eight hundred works that were still in his possession at the time of his death. Reis had been working closely with Marlborough Galleries, Rothko's dealer; in April of 1970 he went on their payroll. Subsequently Reis, operating as an executor of the estate, sold one hundred of Rothko's paintings to Reis's own employer, Marlborough, at very low prices; still later, operating as one of the directors of the foundation, he participated in a decision to consign the remaining seven hundred works to Marlborough for twelve years, on terms very favorable to the gallery. Reis was self-dealing. In November of 1971, however, Rothko's daughter, Kate, asked her guardian, Herbert Ferber, to initiate legal action to void the contracts with Marlborough-a case she eventually won.2 The suit over Mark Rothko's estate is now well known. But it was foreshadowed by an earlier lawsuit in which the twenty-five-year-old Rothko sued to receive promised value for his work as an illustrator. That legal battle also revealed Rothko's dependency on an older Jewish male who turned out to be untrustworthy. The first Rothko trial thus forces on our attention a social and psychological history that seems to have been obliterated from Rothko's mature painting and