Artfinger: Turning Pictures into Gold

The Japanese art market is, at present, one of the wonders of the world. Erratic and (when coping with Western art) often bizarre in taste, Japanese collectors have become the Texans of the Far East, splurging up to 2000% more than real market value on second-rate Chagalls and Modiglianis, and giving the still embryonic Tokyo market an estimated gross of $1 billion a year on paintings alone. No wonder, then, that Tokyo has attracted a number of big Western dealers, including the most formidable of all--Marlborough Fine Art.

Whereas most of Tokyo's 500 galleries are one-room affairs, Marlborough, typically, is preparing to open in a palatial house in the fashionable Tokyo district of Hiroo. Massively funded--its Japanese stockholders include the heads of Sony and Panasonic--Marlborough-Torii Ltd. seems prepared, as its Japanese president, former Adman Tatsuya Torii, put it, to "bring internationalism to the Tokyo art market once and for all." This will not make the intruder popular. But then, Marlborough has never made a virtue of popularity. It is --as exasperated rival dealers are wont to point out--the General Motors of the art world, with branches in London, New York, Rome, Zurich, Montreal, Toronto.

Less a gallery than a multinational corporation, Marlborough in 1969 grossed $11 million from sales, and claims that for 1973 that figure will have increased to $25 million. The corporate style is present everywhere:

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.

Discreet Lobbying. This structure is the invention of one man--Frank Lloyd. The style, in its secrecy, 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 are used to packing their scrolls. "Lloyd-san," purrs his Tokyo partner Torii, "almost seems to understand Zen." Marlborough prints the most elaborate color catalogues in the business for its shows, and accompanies a major exhibition--David Smith, say, or Francis Bacon--with a campaign of discreet lobbying with collectors. It is indicative of Marlborough's reputation for secrecy--and for giving cash on the barrel--that when New York's Metropolitan Museum wanted to raise some quick funds last year by selling its Rousseau Tropics and its Van Gogh Olive Pickers (TIME, Feb. 26), Lloyd was chosen. It is equally typical of Lloyd's nerve that he disposed of the Rousseau in Japan and the Van Gogh to the Goulandris collection in Europe, at a profit of somewhere near $2,000,000.

Thereafter he sat back indifferent to the barrage of criticism against the Met, and ran a Marlborough ad announcing: "Unlimited cash available for works of art."

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.

The case may be the stiffest test yet of Lloyd's powers of survival. But then, he is an exceptionally gifted survivor. Frank Lloyd was born in Vienna in 1911. His name was Franz Levai; his father was a well-off dealer in antique furniture, silver and china. At 20, young Levai got a job with a large Viennese coal company, soon launched his own oil business, and by the mid-1950s owned a string of gas stations in Austria. When the Nazis came in 1938, the young entrepreneur fled to Paris and later to England. Broke and speaking only fractured English, he joined the Pioneer Corps and from there secured a transfer to the Royal Engineers as a battlefield tank mechanic.

At this point, reasoning that he would stand no chance of survival if captured by the Germans as Franz Levai, Austrian Jew, he changed his name to Frank Lloyd. It is said that he chose the name because of its reassuring similarity to Lloyd's of London. On Dday, his unit landed in Normandy. A brave and aggressive soldier, Lloyd fought in the tank corps across Europe. In a tank explosion in Germany shortly before the war's end he was severely wounded and temporarily blinded.

In 1946, Lloyd and a wartime Viennese friend, Harry Fischer, began their partnership as booksellers and art dealers in London. Lloyd astutely realized that, with postwar taxation and the wartime ruin of landed estates, the great English collectors of the prewar years would now become sellers. He gained access to them and their collections through David Somerset, heir presumptive to the Duke of Beaufort. Over the past two decades, Somerset--who hobnobs with such figures as David Rockefeller and Aristotle Onassis--has been invaluable to Lloyd, steering collections and clients toward him and, best of all, introducing him to the Italian auto magnate Giovanni Agnelli, an impassioned collector. The chain of contacts now reaches to Pope Paul VI, whom Lloyd obtained as a prospective client during a private audience a few years ago.

Early in 1960, Lloyd decided to move from Old Masters and Impressionists into the work of contemporaries. "When I saw that prices were going up so fast," he explains, "I said there may come a day when we can't buy important old pictures. We have to sign up living artists." Up until then, the relationship between artist and dealer in London had tended to be a gentlemanly business based on unwritten promises; the word promotion was never heard.

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."

Marlborough now represents 66 living artists, a few of them giants--including Bacon, Henry Moore and Clyfford Still. The majority, however, are middle-of-the-road figures like Fernando Botero, Michael Steiner or Richard Diebenkorn. Marlborough also manages the estates of David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Ad Reinhardt.

For its efforts it usually takes a 50% cut on sales, compared with the 33Y3% to 40% charged by most galleries. Lloyd tells painters: "You have a choice. You can ride in a Rolls-Royce or a Volkswagen. If you want to ride in the Rolls, it is going to cost you more money. But it pays in the long run."

Lloyd's policy has always been to promote established artists, not to rear unknowns. Understandably, other dealers--especially the ones who brought some present Marlborough stars from obscurity--dislike this. Among them, Lloyd's unpopularity is notorious. "It's a bit like stealing a patent," says London Dealer Peter Gimpel, who lost Sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick to Marlborough. When another London dealer discovered that she had lost a prominent artist to Lloyd, she contemplated a lawsuit. Presently her banker called to say that her credit would dry up if the suit reached court. She dropped it.

Resistant Labyrinth. Though most are content, not all the Marlborough artists have stayed with Lloyd. Italian Sculptor Gio Pomodoro broke away "because, in five years, Mr. Lloyd had set foot in my studio twice. I don't like that kind of rapport, abstract and unconnected with any of my problems."

Pomodoro cites the time when, after keeping the sculptor waiting a week, Lloyd gave him an appointment at his New York gallery. "You see, my dear Gio," Lloyd began, waving his Montecristo across the desk, "you artists exist because there are merchants like us."

Marlborough is shrewdly organized as a tax-resistant labyrinth of branches, service contracts, numbered accounts, paper and holding companies. The branch companies are linked to a parent corporation, Marlborough AG (incorporated in Liechtenstein), which is in turn owned by Lloyd's family-controlled trust, which was set up to reap the tax benefits of such an enclave.

Marlborough, in its various national forms, is merely a corporate shell holding the land and furnishings of the galleries. The ownership of the paintings and bank accounts is distributed among Liechtenstein, Nassau and Switzerland.

The linkages within the Marlborough group are complex. Thus the Swiss branch, Marlborough AG (Zurich), was owned by a company called Bruha AG, whose director, Industrialist Bruno Haftel, lived in Argentina. In 1972 Lloyd bought Haftel out, dissolved Bruha, and reconstituted the holding company as Art Finance AG, which also owns the New York branch of Marlborough. Art Finance AG's director, William R.

Sthaelin, is the head of a prosperous Zurich law firm.

Lloyd also has a number of paper companies set up in Liechtenstein and linked to the Marlborough group by private service contracts. They carry bland, brass-plate names like Kunst und Finanz AG (Vaduz). Some are holding companies for paintings and sculpture.

Others, apparently, serve as "independent" intermediaries for transactions between one branch of the Marlborough group and another.

Cautious Diver. In selling to the new plutocrats, who can often avoid taxes by dealing through the convoluted international network, Lloyd has become a rich man; he is rumored to be worth at least $25 million. He has a holiday home in Cap d'Antibes that he bought from Uranium Tycoon Joseph Hirshhorn. But Lloyd officially resides with his second wife, Susan, 36, and their two children in a beachfront house in Nassau. An avid fisherman and water-skier, Lloyd also likes to scuba dive, but to make sure that he does not descend too far, he ties one end of a 20-f t. rope to an inner tube and the other to his tank. With similar caution, he never goes to an auction without knowing exactly what he will pay for a painting. His chief reading is financial reports, and even in Nassau he often works a 16-hour day.

Lloyd has always been able to deal with special freedom, since he is unencumbered by any affection for the works of art he buys and sells.

Once, when a Marlborough employee in London suggested that he keep a particularly fine picture for himself, Lloyd said scathingly: "How many times have I told you that I only collect money, I don't collect pictures!"

The big question in the art world these days: Will Lloyd's empire--specifically, its New York branch--ride out the approaching Rothko lawsuit undamaged? When Mark Rothko committed suicide in his New York studio in February 1970, he left a will (made in 1968) directing that the bulk of his estate be used as a fund for struggling old artists. The executors were Bernard J. Reis, Rothko's accountant, who became a director and salaried treasurer and secretary of Marlborough's New York branch in January 1970; Theodoros Stamos, a painter friend of Rothko's; and an anthropologist named Morton Levine.

Obviously, it was Rothko's hope to raise as much money for the foundation as possible. Since he left 798 paintings, and his major works were selling for as much as $130,000, the sum might have been upward of $30 million. What actually happened was that Rothko's three executors sold 100 paintings for $1.8 million to Marlborough AG in Liechtenstein. Marlborough paid $200,000 down, and the executors agreed to spread the rest of the payments interest-free over twelve years--a huge discount in all, down to approximately $9,000 per canvas. Moreover, Marlborough was to have sole sales rights over the remaining 698 paintings and get a 50% commission on every sale.

In 1971 lawyers representing Rothko's children and the New York State attorney general's office brought suit to void the sale, remove the executors and recover damages. Their charges? That Marlborough had forced the deal far below the market value of the 100 Rothkos it had bought and, worse, that a "conflict of interest" existed with two executors. Reis, they charged, was compromised as a representative of Rothko's wishes by the fact that he had gone to work for Marlborough; Stamos, because he exhibited his paintings there. Reis and Stamos denied all charges.

"When Lloyd is down," predicts Art Dealer Richard Feigen, "everyone's going to be ready to jump." But they have not jumped yet. Lloyd, more than any other single dealer, implanted in the minds of the postwar rich the idea of art as investment, and after 25 years of operation, Marlborough exudes fiscal power like a dew. Moreover, the stamp Lloyd has put on the very nature of art dealing is probably ineradicable. Because of him, the world of genteel connoisseurship--tea with Lord Clark and the ghost of Bernard Berenson--has given way to that of the Zurich gnomes and their international equivalents.

That is just the way Lloyd wants it.

One is reminded of the night in 1963 when Georges Wildenstein, the legendary Paris dealer, died. Lloyd was approached by Leslie Hyam, director of Parke-Bernet, at a party in Manhattan.

"Well," said Hyam silkily, "now that Wildenstein is dead, you'll be the most hated man in the art business." Delighted, Lloyd spent the rest of the evening bragging about Hyam's remark.

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