before Rothko died; Theodoros Stamos, a friend and fellow artist represented by Marlborough New York starting in 1971; and Morton Levine, an anthropology professor, unconnected with Marlborough but who had been Rothko's son Christopher's guardian for a short time. Shortly before his death in 1970, Rothko made gifts to his children of certain key paintings in his possession in an effort to provide his children with financial security, since he believed that key patrons would pay higher prices for the works following his death. However, after Rothko died, his children were notified by the Marlborough's founder, Francis Kenneth Lloyd, that under the terms of the agreement made with the gallery in 1966 and renewed in 1969, the gallery owned all of Rothko's paintings. Following Rothko's death the three executors for the estate agreed to sell 100 works to Marlborough for a total of $1,800,000 while a further 698 works were consigned to the gallery for sale at a fixed commission of 50%, however, the executors paid only $200,000 upfront to the estate. In the year after Rothko's death, the value of his work more than doubled while early works were selling at auction for over $80,000. In 1971 Kate Rothko sued to release the estate from the sale agreement and have the paintings returned to the family. The legal proceedings revealed that when still a struggling artist with a young family, Rothko agreed to a deal with the gallery in which all of his paintings would be sold through the gallery in exchange for a set monthly fee. Such terms were not unheard of, as Pablo Picasso had had a similar deal with his gallery in the 1920s. It emerged from the proceedings that the estate executors and the gallery defrauded Rothko and his estate through various methods of self-dealing. Among other wrongful acts, the gallery had been filtering payments for Rothko's works through accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein as part of an effort to ensure the paintings were undervalued during Rothko's lifetime — in the 1960s this led the artist to vastly underestimate the value of his works, directly resulting in his agreement to consignments of dozens of paintings to the gallery and collectors without appreciating his works' full value. The trial record revealed that the gallery had been stockpiling the undervalued works instead of selling them in order to ensure both a low market saturation and a high