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Rauschenberg’s $2.3bn Estate and the Three Trustees Who Want $60m from It

August 21, 2013 by Marion Maneker

Young Rauschenberg

Patricia Cohen has another excellent story in the New York Times about three trustees of Robert Rauschenberg’s estate who believe they are owed $60m in fees for their work. The three men have already paid themselves $5.7m in fees out of the $60m outstanding as well as having been paid $3.9m in salary or consulting fees for other work connected to the recently deceased artist. One of the men even got a $3.6m house in Rauschenberg’s will.

All of those numbers, however, pale in comparison to the estate Rauschenberg left behind. Cy Twombly’s estate was an eye-popping $1bn but the artist had been married to an extremely wealthy woman. Only his executors know how much of that value came from the artist’s work. But the Times puts the Rauschenberg estate at a conservative $600m with room for much greater valuations:

Estimating the value of works by even well-established artists like Twombly or Rauschenberg is notoriously difficult given how fickle the art market can be. In the 2009 federal tax return prepared by Mr. Grutman’s firm, the value of Rauschenberg’s estate was listed as nearly $606 million. When the trust finally turned over the majority of the assets to the foundation three years later, in May 2012, it listed the estate’s value as more than $2.3 billion.

Foundation Fights Fees for Artist’s Trustees (NY Times)

A Really Big Rauschenberg Goes to Chicago

June 10, 2011 by Marion Maneker

Carol Vogel’s column announces James Cuno’s last acquisition for the Art Institute of Chicago:

“Short Circuit” was included in a traveling show of “Combines” that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005 and in an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street space in Chelsea last year. Museums rarely say what they pay for an acquisition, and the Art Institute did not divulge the cost of “Short Circuit.” But experts familiar with Rauschenberg’s work believe it is worth between $15 million and $20 million. “This was something Rauschenberg kept all his life,” Mr. Cuno said.

Now Starring in Chicago, a Prime Rauscheberg (New York Times)

Laura Paulson on Rauschenberg's The Tower

April 28, 2011 by Marion Maneker

In this Christie’s video, Laura Paulson gives the art historical context behind Rauschenberg’s The Tower that should set a record price for the artist next month.

It's Castelli's Art World, We Just Live In It

June 15, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Amanda Vaill does a brilliant job of synopsizing Annie Cohen-Solal’s biography of Leo Castelli in the Washington Post. Vaill singles out the 1958 show that launched Rauschenberg and Johns, then she goes on to describe the next 20 years of Castelli’s career that seems strangely familiar to today’s art world:

Castelli represented virtually every major American artist of the next two decades, from Frank Stella, James Rosenquist and Richard Serra to Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Indeed, Cohen-Solal suggests that his championship of American artists won them “new stature at home and abroad” and “introduce[d] major new currents into the flow of art history.” Castelli was at the center of controversy numerous times — for, among other things, the alleged arm-twisting at the Venice Biennale that led to Rauschenberg’s receiving the top prize in 1964; for his feud with the Metropolitan Museum’s hard-charging modern curator Henry Geldzahler; for maintaining (and allegedly manipulating) “waiting lists” for certain painters’ workContinue Reading

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