Harrow, Gustave

Gustave Harrow, a lawyer and Assistant New York State Attorney General, taught legal ethics and art law at New York University, where he also served as adjunct professor in the Arts Administration program in the School of Education. Mark Rothko was an Abstract Expressisonist painter who committed suicide in 1970. Rothko's heirs, represented by Harrow, accused the executors not only of mismanaging the estate but also of conspiring with the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan to defraud it. The case, presided over by Judge Millard Midonick, New York State Surrogate Court in 1975, and followed by appeals to the State Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, New York State, resulted in a $9.2 million judgement against the gallery and the three executors. In 1979, Harrow published a book on the trial, Art, the Artists, and the Consequences of Rothko : Lasting Legal Impressions From the Estate of a Great Artist.

Assistant District Attorney; New York City.

In 1979, the General Services Administration offices at Federal Plaza in New York City commissioned Richard Serra to provide a public sculpture. Almost immediately after its installation in 1981, there was a huge public outcry that "Tilted Arc", a curving wall of rusting steel, be removed. A hearing was held in 1985, and a decision handed down by Dwight Ink of the GSA, establishing a panel to investigate its removal. In 1986, Serra sued, the case went to trial in 1987, and through appeal in 1988. The sculpture was removed on March 15, 1989.