Alpha 137 Gallery is drawing attention to a scarce 1968 lithograph by Theodoros Stamos that was issued by Andre Emmerich Gallery and advertised an exhibition there years before the artist’s career became entangled in the Rothko estate scandal. The work is pencil signed and numbered, and the gallery describes it as a limited edition of 100. According to the material supplied by Alpha 137 Gallery, the print is one of the artist’s exhibition ephemera from the period when his name was still associated with the established New York gallery world rather than the legal turmoil that later shadowed him.
The listing comes from Alpha 137 Gallery, a New York gallery that says it specializes in prints, multiples, works on paper, sculpture, design objects and art historical ephemera, with many works sold online. In this case, the gallery presents the lithograph not as a conventional fine-art print alone, but as a compact record of a moment in Stamos’s career when Andre Emmerich Gallery was an important part of his professional life. The gallery’s own description frames the piece as a nostalgic and collectible artifact from before the rupture that would define much of the artist’s later reputation.
Stamos is identified in the gallery’s email as one of the youngest members of the abstract expressionist circle known as “The Irascibles,” alongside artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. The same source says Stamos became a close friend of Rothko and was later appointed one of three executors of Rothko’s estate, a role that eventually became central to the legal dispute surrounding the estate. The gallery’s newsletter also notes that Stamos began his association with Andre Emmerich Gallery in 1958 and that the two worked together through the 1960s.
The broader historical frame is the Rothko estate case, a dispute that the gallery describes as a major art-world scandal. In the gallery text, the case is said to have followed Rothko’s death in 1970 and to have involved contracts for the sale and consignment of the artist’s paintings through Marlborough Gallery. The emailed text states that Stamos later left Andre Emmerich to join Marlborough, and that this shift became significant in the legal proceedings. The source further says that the 1975 verdict stripped Stamos of his executorship, canceled the Marlborough contracts, and imposed major financial penalties.
A separate source on Marlborough Fine Art confirms the gallery’s role in that history, stating that before being stopped by a court ruling, Marlborough sold more than 100 Rothko paintings that it had acquired at fraudulently undervalued prices and split the profits with one of the executors, Theodoros Stamos. The same source says that in 1975 a New York State court removed the executors, canceled the estate contracts with Marlborough and fined them and the gallery $9.2 million. That institutional backdrop explains why even a modest printed advertisement from Stamos’s earlier years now carries unusual historical weight.
The object offered by Alpha 137 Gallery is identified as a 1968 lithograph with offset lettering, pencil signed and numbered 74/100 on the front and published by Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York. The gallery says it is unframed and available as a scarce collectible print and exhibition-related ephemera item. It is presented on the gallery’s website among a group of recent acquisitions and print-based works, including other posters, artist-designed works and exhibition materials.
