Word: marlborough
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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muted and elegant gallery spaces, white walls, slate floors, discreetly hushed viewing areas. The branches of the Marlborough group are linked by telex machines, clacking out their information and requests. New York is asking Rome to make hotel reservations for Marlborough's Japanese partners; London reports its day's schedule of auction prices. It is an atmosphere in which bankers and brokers feel instantly at home, removed from the puzzling messiness of the creative life...
...luxuriousness and finely tooled indifference, is a corporate version of his own, writ large. At 61, Lloyd is tanned by the Caribbean and tailored like a German banker, a diminutive block of energy, velvety charm and wolfish flair for business. He is also a showman, and every detail of Marlborough's presentation comes under his supervision. Nothing gets left to chance or whim. Thus when selling a Modigliani or a Picasso in Japan, Lloyd reveals it to the client in a lined box with a lid instead of hanging it framed on a wall; that is how Japanese collectors...
Thereafter he sat back indifferent to the barrage of criticism against the Met, and ran a Marlborough ad announcing: "Unlimited cash available for works...
Ensconced at the center of his maze of companies like a pear-shaped Minotaur, Lloyd seemed, until lately, to have created an impregnable position for himself. But next fall Marlborough goes to court to defend itself in a civil suit almost without precedent in the art world. The heirs of the late abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, together with the New York State attorney general, are charging that Marlborough and the executors of Rothko's estate conspired between them to defraud the estate by grossly undervaluing the paintings...
Lloyd offered the artists an efficient sales system along with contracts and guaranteed minimums. Says Artist Victor Pasmore, who joined Marlborough in 1960: "They were the first in London to put the whole contract with artists on a professional basis. They give you a great deal of freedom...