Pierre Levai, a seller who ran the New York operations of the now-defunct Marlborough Gallery, enormously increasing the enterprise’s clout within the US, died at 87 in Miami on June 26.
For many years, Levai oversaw the New York department of Marlborough, a gallery based in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. The gallery then expanded to New York in 1963.
Whereas Marlborough gained a world following for its high-quality exhibitions, the gallery extra lately turned mired in behind-the-scenes disputes over how the enterprise was run. Marlborough started winding down operations this previous June after 80 years in operation.
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Born in Paris in 1937, Levai attended Sciences Po, finding out political science and philosophy, and later took an internship at Galerie Kahnweiler, a storied gallery within the French capital recognized for enhancing the profile of artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Lloyd, the Marlborough cofounder, was his uncle, and household ties led him to change into the chief of New York operations in 1963.
Marlborough’s New York gallery staged acclaimed exhibitions for artists starting from Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell, and Alex Katz to Marisol. However one exhibition particularly, a Philip Guston present held in 1970, got here to outline the gallery.
That present marked Guston’s return to figuration after an summary interval and featured work containing an individual that appeared to put on a Ku Klux Klan hood. The present polarized critics, although it’s now thought-about key inside Guston’s inventive improvement. (The scandal over these works would resurface as soon as extra when, in 2020, the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork controversially postponed a Guston retrospective, fearing that audiences would misunderstand these work particularly.)
On the identical time, Marlborough confronted widespread scrutiny after Rothko’s daughter accused the gallery of improper enterprise practices. In 1975, some administrators at Marlborough have been discovered responsible of getting defrauded the Rothko household, tarnishing the gallery’s repute. (Levai was not amongst these administrators.) But Marlborough continued sustaining a gentle presence in New York, even opening a number of places within the metropolis previous to its closure earlier this yr.
Max Levai, Pierre’s son, joined Marlborough in 2012 and in the end turned its president. In 2020, the gallery introduced that it will shutter. Then, a number of months later, dueling lawsuits between Max and two board members centered round allegations of economic mismanagement, with the trustees claiming that Pierre withheld works. Max claimed he had been ousted from his place and made the choice to shut the gallery whereas Pierre was sick with Covid, an allegation that the gallery denied.
Each lawsuits have been settled. Marlborough continued to stay open for 4 extra years.
Franz Plutschow, a Marlborough board member, advised ARTnews earlier this yr, “We’re indebted to our professional and devoted staff, together with those that will proceed to work with us as we now wind down the enterprise. As we achieve this, we’re conscious that the extraordinary breadth and depth of our stock testifies to the relationships fashioned over the a long time with a number of the most vital artists of the trendy period.”