Leading London art gallery to close, including its Spanish locations

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The board of trustees of the 78-year-old Marlborough Gallery, one of the world’s oldest and most high-profile commercial galleries, has announced that it will shut up shop in the coming months.

“After long and careful consideration, we made the decision that now is the time to sunset our nearly 80-year-old firm,” Franz Plutschow, a member of the Board of Trustees, said.

All of the blue-chip gallery’s locations – in London, New York, Barcelona and Madrid – will be closed and sold, in addition to the thousands of artworks in Marlborough’s inventory.

Part of the proceeds from these sales will be donated to not-for-profit cultural institutions that support contemporary artists, the gallery said in its statement.

No reason was given for the closure, which follows a dispute over succession after the death of its founders, along with the departure of two of the gallery’s leading artists, Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego.

The gallery was founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd, a Jewish immigrant who fled Austria in 1938, and Viennese emigre Harry Fischer. Marlborough went on to represent some of the most important contemporary artists of the post-war era, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Paula Rego and Barbara Hepworth.

After opening a space in New York in 1963, Marlborough represented the estates of renowned artists such as Jackson Pollock and Ad Reinhardt, and garnered a reputation for selling works by the likes of Cezanne and Rothko. Spaces followed in Madrid (1992) and Barcelona (2006).

The history of the gallery has not been without scandal, however – before being mired in a fight for succession, the 1960s and 70s saw Marlborough embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute with Kate Rothko, daughter of painter Mark Rothko, and the executors of the painter’s estate. Marlborough and the trustees lost the case, with the gallery ordered to pay over $9 million (€8.72 million) in damages and fines.