Art: Aggressive Giant

"In at 11, have lunch, fiddle around for another hour, then take off to play golf." Such, in the words of one of them, has traditionally been the workday of a London art gallery owner, reflecting a leisurely love of art and a commensurate distaste for commerce. Into this gentle world has come a pair of dealers whose hard work and hard sell have swiftly made their gallery, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., the most formidable giant in the modern field. Almost without realizing it, half a dozen old-line houses have lost their best artists to Marlborough, and soon the gallery will start a big branch in Manhattan.

Marlborough opened in 1946 in three cramped basement rooms at 17 Old Bond Street, London, and now occupies those rooms plus the top three floors of a dignified new building across the street. There is a Marlborough Galleria d'Arte in Rome, and next year there will be a branch of Marlborough in Cologne. In New York carpenters and plasterers are busy converting one entire floor—all 11,000 sq. ft. of it—of an office building on 57th Street and Madison Avenue into what will be known as the Marlborough-Gerson* Gallery.

They Met on K.P. The new gallery's founders are Austrian refugees who met one day in 1940 while doing K.P. in the British army. Frank Lloyd, 52, comes from a family of antique dealers, and Harry Fischer, a few years older, once sold rare books in Vienna. They have not only built up a vast trade in modern old masters, but have also captured some of the biggest stars of the English art world. Sculptor Henry Moore has joined them. Francis Bacon left the Hanover Gallery; Sidney Nolan quit Matthiesen; Ben Nicholson, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick came from Gimpel Fils. Marlborough takes on almost nobody not already famous, and it guarantees fat annual income plus fringe benefits—for example, a free secretarial service.

Marlborough's first break came in 1948 when a young art buff named David Somerset, the son of the heir presumptive to the Duke of Beaufort, joined the staff. "He's related to half of the English aristocracy, and they entrusted him to sell their masterpieces, all blue chips," says Harry Fischer. On their own behalf, the founders landed some handsome commissions from sales of major collections on the Continent, and they have used their capital with devastating shrewdness.

To advertise, they have put on some admirable prestige shows, such as an exhibition of Van Gogh self-portraits and a show of the works of the Bauhaus. They send out the glossiest catalogues, give the flossiest cocktail parties. What bothers their competitors is the brash commercialism with which they do all this. "I'm sorry to have to admit it," says Lloyd's son Gilbert, who is now on the staff, "but Marlborough is the most hated gallery in London."