To the Editors:
John Bernard Myers, who contributed so much to our appreciation of contemporary art in the 1950s and 1960s, adds to our further understanding of those years in the “notes” and “memories” paragraphs of his recent article, “Mark Rothko and the Rothko Case.” His portraits of Rothko, Theodore Stamos, Bernard Reis, and the New York art scene are perceptive and sensitive. But, when he turns to his “observations” of the Rothko case and the role played by Kate Rothko and the Rothko Foundation, Myers allows a scrim of sentimentality to come between him and the outcome. He has gotten a fundamental fact wrong; and even when his memory is accurate, his inferences, to put it kindly, are in many instances irresponsible.

There is no need here to rehash the Rothko trial; that ground has been covered often enough. But it may be helpful in clearing up Myers’s doubts if we compare the position of the Rothko Foundation and Rothko’s legacy—his paintings —today with the situation that prevailed before Kate Rothko brought her 1971 suit. For Myers either to question Kate Rothko’s temerity in bringing the suit or to suggest that the subsequent pain suffered by the executors and the Marlborough Gallery somehow negated the benefit to the Foundation and, I believe, the public, is to permit his friendships to mask the realities and the equities, then and now.

What was the Foundation’s position then and now? Myers is factually wrong in stating that the Rothko Foundation