Pierre Levai, a dealer who ran the New York operations of the now-defunct Marlborough Gallery, greatly expanding the enterprise’s clout in the US, died at 87 in Miami on June 26.
For decades, Levai oversaw the New York branch of Marlborough, a gallery founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. The gallery then expanded to New York in 1963.
While Marlborough gained an international following for its high-quality exhibitions, the gallery more recently became mired in behind-the-scenes disputes over how the business was run. Marlborough began winding down operations this past June after 80 years in operation.
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Born in Paris in 1937, Levai attended Sciences Po, studying political science and philosophy, and later took an internship at Galerie Kahnweiler, a storied gallery in the French capital known for boosting the profile of artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Lloyd, the Marlborough cofounder, was his uncle, and family ties led him to become the leader of New York operations in 1963.
Marlborough’s New York gallery staged acclaimed exhibitions for artists ranging from Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell, and Alex Katz to Marisol. But one exhibition in particular, a Philip Guston show held in 1970, came to define the gallery.
That show marked Guston’s return to figuration after an abstract period and featured paintings containing a person that appeared to wear a Ku Klux Klan hood. The show polarized critics, though it is now considered key within Guston’s artistic development. (The scandal over those works would resurface once more when, in 2020, the National Gallery of Art controversially postponed a Guston retrospective, fearing that audiences would misunderstand these paintings in particular.)
At the same time, Marlborough faced widespread scrutiny after Rothko’s daughter accused the gallery of improper business practices. In 1975, some directors at Marlborough were found guilty of having defrauded the Rothko family, tarnishing the gallery’s reputation. (Levai was not among those directors.) Yet Marlborough continued maintaining a steady presence in New York, even opening several locations in the city prior to its closure earlier this year.
Max Levai, Pierre’s son, joined Marlborough in 2012 and ultimately became its president. In 2020, the gallery announced that it would shutter. Then, several months later, dueling lawsuits between Max and two board members centered around allegations of financial mismanagement, with the trustees claiming that Pierre withheld works. Max claimed he had been ousted from his position and made the decision to close the gallery while Pierre was sick with Covid, an allegation that the gallery denied.
Both lawsuits were settled. Marlborough continued to remain open for four more years.
Franz Plutschow, a Marlborough board member, told ARTnews earlier this year, “We are indebted to our expert and dedicated employees, including those who will continue to work with us as we now wind down the business. As we do so, we are mindful that the extraordinary breadth and depth of our inventory testifies to the relationships formed over the decades with some of the most important artists of the modern era.”