Marlborough: the rise and fall of a mega-gallery

In 2024, almost 80 years after its founding, the Marlborough Gallery – once referred to as a “mega-gallery” – began winding down its operations in London, Madrid, Barcelona and New York.

This marked the end of a mostly illustrious era. At its peak, Marlborough was a significant and influential player in the modern art world on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, exhibiting and representing many of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

A history in art

Marlborough Fine Art was founded in 1946 on Old Bond Street, London by Austrian émigrés Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. Their first exhibitions were relatively traditional, focusing on Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and French Modern masters.

From the early 1950s, Marlborough exhibited European masters of the 19th and 20th centuries, among them Degas, Renoir, van Gogh, Cassatt, Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. In 1954, the gallery displayed Picasso’s ceramic works, which were rarely seen at the time. By the end of the decade, Marlborough had begun its shift towards representing contemporary artists.

From the 1960s – a period of expansion and arguably the gallery’s heyday – Marlborough held some truly groundbreaking shows featuring Pollock, Schiele, Kandinsky, Schwitters and the Bauhaus, as well as artists from the New York scene. During this period it also exhibited many of the leading artists working in Britain, among them Frank Auerbach, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, R.B. Kitaj, Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud and Paula Rego.

Marlborough New York – originally “Marlborough-Gerson” – opened on Madison Avenue in 1963 and quickly became a trailblazer of the international gallery model, one that continues to dominate the art world today, for better or worse.

The New York gallery championed Abstract Expressionism, showing work by Richard Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, David Smith and Clyfford Still, and representing estates including those of William Baziotes, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Ad Reinhardt.

International expansion continued through the 1970s, with spaces in Montreal, Rome, Tokyo, Toronto and Zurich, later followed by a Madrid gallery, where Marlborough represented major Spanish and Latin American artists. A further gallery was established in Monaco in 2000.

Troubled waters

In 1972, Marlborough’s reputation suffered a severe blow following a scandal involving the estate of Mark Rothko, whose works had been sold to the gallery for below market value. This led to an infamous legal trial during which some distinctly shady dealings were brought to light. Despite the controversy, the gallery survived and continued its work.

By 2019, however, cracks were beginning to show – for different reasons. Leadership issues fuelled a family dispute at the same time as the business was facing financial difficulties in an ever-more competitive and globalised art market. The decline of this once-storied gallery was slow, drawn out and complicated by a degree of acrimony (The Art Newspaper covers this intriguing story here).

The closure of Marlborough after eight decades would doubtless have been immensely difficult for those directly involved. But given that few galleries survive more than a few years in the mercurial art world, there must have been something rather extraordinary about this influential institution.

House style

At Skylona you’ll find dozens of examples of exhibition catalogues and ephemera spanning the history of Marlborough, many created by graphic designer and artist Gordon House, as illustrated below.

Best known for designing the Beatles ‘White album’ cover, Gordon House was a notable figure for British art galleries.

He helped to shape the graphic direction of countless exhibition catalogues and promotional material, in many cases developing distinctive, cohesive visual identities for galleries; evident across much of the Marlborough material you can see here. 

Marlborough Gallery catalogues at Skylona >