The Art Newspaper

Disgraced Madoff investor’s Rothkos

Works to go to Moscow

By Lindsay Pollock and Charlotte Burns. From Frieze daily edition
Published online: 15 October 2009

A $310m cache of Rothko paintings, sold earlier this year by one of the key financiers involved in the Madoff scandal, will go on show at Moscow’s Garage Centre for Contemporary Art next spring. The centre was founded in 2008 by Russian heiress Dasha Zhukova and her billionaire partner Roman Abramovich.

The collection comprises 12 paintings and a work on paper that date from 1949 to 1969. They include Rothko’s historic studies for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building and Harvard University.

The collection was sold last July in a deal brokered by PaceWildenstein’s director Marc Glimcher, who earned an $11m commission in what was probably the largest private transaction of the year. The seller was New York financier J. Ezra Merkin, a central figure implicated in the $50bn Bernard Madoff fraud. The identity of the buyer was not revealed. The receipts from the sale are frozen while New York’s state attorney investigates the Madoff case.

The Garage exhibition will be the artist’s first solo show in Moscow. “The idea of doing a Rothko show in Moscow was a dream,” said Glimcher, but “I knew it wasn’t going to happen. There was no way to get the work.” That changed when Merkin, the largest private Rothko collector, was implicated in the Madoff mess.

News of the show raises speculation that the buyer may be a Russian. Show organisers deny it is Abramovich. “We can absolutely confirm that the owner isn’t Roman Abramovich, or any organisation relating to him,” said Garage international co-ordinator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst. The show will run for three months.