I’ve been reading a new book on abstract expressionism that I’m planning to review in an upcoming post. That and a second viewing of a television program episode about Mark Rothko’s last paintings has me thinking a lot about that great painter and his suicide. In 1983 the PBS series American Playhouse dramatized Rothko’s bloody end, and the sordid art world shenanigans that slithered through its aftermath. Here’s a bit from a contemporaneous New York Times review of The Rothko Conspiracy:

WOULDN’T it make a marvelous script? Beset by paranoia and depression in the last years of his life, and estranged from his wife and children, a celebrated painter is found dead in his studio, presumably a suicide, his arms slashed in the crooks of the elbows.

His will names three friends as executors of his estate. But less than two years later, his daughter files a suit, charging the three with attempting to ”defraud” the estate and ”waste its assets.” They had conspired with a prestigious gallery, the suit holds, selling and consigning to the gallery many hundreds of paintings on terms hugely disadvantageous to the estate. In the end, justice triumphs, with a judgment of millions levied against the offenders, and the dauntless daughter named as the estate’s sole administrator.

The story is true, of course: the painter was Mark Rothko, the three executors the late Bernard Reis, accountant to star artists; the late Morton Levine, an anthropology professor, and Theodoros Stamos, a painter. The gallery was Marlborough, headed by Frank Lloyd. And the suit, filed by Rothko’s daughter, Kate, in 1971, became a cause celebre, taking six years of litigation, dividing the art world into partisan camps and providing a field day for those inclined to see the art market as a vast conspiracy in which the innocent artist’s creativity is exploited for the profit of others.

As evidence of the heat the Rothko case still generates, nearly 13 years after the artist’s death and seven years after the original trial ended, we now have ”The Rothko Conspiracy,” a 90-minute film to be shown tonight at 9 o’clock on Channel 13′s American Playhouse series. Written by Michael Baker and directed by Paul Watson, it is a co-production of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Lionheart Television. The film is heavily based on Lee Seldes’s 1978 book, ”The Legacy of Mark Rothko,” and also on trial transcripts and interviews with Gustave Harrow, then Assistant Attorney General for New York State, who prosecuted the case on behalf of the public.

The review goes on to deride the production as lurid and sensationalizing, and that’s true, and that’s also one of the things that makes this flick worth watching. The 30-year-old production aesthetics and VHS presentation are charming here and the sweaty-faced acting and art world cliche’s push this piece right up and over the top in a manner that I find thoroughly entertaining in 2015.

Here’s The Rothko Conspiracy…

As a bonus for those interested in more about how Rothko became Rothko, check out The Case for Mark Rothko from PBS Digital Studios…

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