The Executor's Burden
- Diamond Zhou
- 4 days ago
- 23 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
November 29th, 2025
Legacies are rarely the serene, orderly things artists imagine. They are not elegant bequests drifting into the future on beams of light, sustained by gratitude, scholarship, and the supposed self-evidence of great work. They are, more often, a vast painting of disorder: the studios that resemble archaeological sites, heirs who disagree, and markets with no appetite for experimental works. And then, always, there is a single person standing in the midst of this, someone who said yes out of love, respect, or loyalty, and now must carry the weight of an entire life’s production.
It is for this reason that the most honest voices often come not from the artist, but from the executor, the one who must live inside the consequences of every decision made and unmade during the artist’s lifetime. Few people speak openly about what this duty entails. Fewer still speak with the clarity, courage, and historical memory of Christopher Varley, whose weekly letters have become something of a community education project for those of us working in the Canadian art world. His experience spans decades, and his intelligence is matched by a surprising tenderness, the kind of tenderness that only comes from someone who has witnessed the best and the worst of how we care for artists after they are gone.
Recently he wrote a reflection that deserves a readership far beyond the quiet circle to whom he sends these dispatches. Before expanding on his principles, which will form the architecture of today’s discussion, it is important to begin with his original words in full. They are spare, candid, and illuminating, and they cut through the fog that usually surrounds the subject of artist estates.
"I felt honoured when Marian Dale Scott, an elderly Montreal painter of note, asked if I would act as executor for the art in her estate.
After Marian’s death in 1993, several of her young friends photographed the art in her home and prepared an elementary inventory, then everything was shipped to Toronto and put into storage for me to sort out. Estate stamps with inventory numbers were not affixed to the versos of drawings, watercolours, or canvases.
Most of the material was late, and a lot of it was minor. Many of the canvases were unstretched. Others needed cleaning, having been stored adjacent to the oil burning furnace in the basement, some for decades.
Marian’s family asked what I needed to take care of conservation and storage. I asked a modest amount. Much too modest as it turned out, for I was soon scrambling to make sales to pay bills.
While Marian was well known for her stylized figures and urban scenes of the late 1930s and early 1940s, almost everything in her estate was painted much later, had never been exhibited, and, at that time, there was no demand. I therefore sold what, when, and where I could, and at modest prices.
The sales got the work ‘out there’, and helped to establish Marian as a painter of interest later in life. They weren’t of significant financial benefit to the artist’s heirs or myself.
Much of the remaining work was of marginal quality, condition, and interest. As a photographic record and elementary inventory existed, I asked Esther Trépanier to go through it with me, with a view to culling. By the end of the day, we’d filled a large bin with ripped up works on paper and slashed canvases.
The Canadian art market is too small to absorb everything; and the culled material would not have served Marian well, so was better destroyed than released. I believe that L.L. FitzGerald would look stronger today if his estate had been properly culled. The same can be said of others.
This is all past tense for me, but I know several executors who are currently attempting to manage artists’ estates. It’s a struggle for nearly all of them.
I’m therefore writing to recommend the following guidelines to other ‘honoured’ executors:
Make sure you know the terms and conditions in the artist’s will before agreeing to act as an executor.
Insist on enough money to cover the costs of cataloguing, shipping, storage, and conservation. For large estates, estimate the costs, then multiply by three. I’m not kidding about this.
Make a complete photographic catalogue of estate material. Ideally, post it online, as an aid to surety and scholarship.
Cull where required, with the aid of another set of eyes
Donate to public galleries, consign or sell to sympathetic dealers, or offer generous discounts to the artist’s admirers and friends. Although some auctioneers now represent estates, management and sustained promotion are not their primary functions.
Avoid arbitrary closer dates. A small estate might be cleared in a couple of years. A large one might take decades.
In the case of large estates requiring decades to clear, think seriously about succession.
It’s better to say NO to this ‘honour’ if artists aren’t realistic and you’re worried about hurting their feelings by stating basic terms and conditions before accepting. With the best intentions in the world, you might destroy the very name you have always loved."
The simplicity of his words belies the enormity of what he describes. His seven recommendations are not a tidy checklist; they are the distillation of years of labour, compromise, heartbreak, financial improvisation, and the quiet terror that every executor eventually faces: that with one wrong call, one sale too soon, one work kept that ought to have been destroyed, one neglected box of papers, the executor may not preserve the legacy, but distort it.
The principles laid out by Varley is the knowledge most people encounter only by accident, often under duress. It is time we laid it out clearly, not only for executors, but for the artists themselves, because the greatest gift an artist can give is not fame or beauty, but clarity for those who must care for the work when they no longer can.
Principle 1: Know the terms and conditions in the artist’s will before agreeing to act as an executor.
Varley's first point sounds deceptively modest, almost administrative in tone, yet it contains the core truth on which every estate rises or collapses: no executor can honour a legacy they do not understand, and no estate can be managed with dignity if its basic terms were never articulated by the artist in life. Most wills are minimalist, if there are any at all, very often drafted by lawyers who are unfamiliar with the specificities of art. “I leave my artworks to my children” is an instruction destined to ignite conflict. “I appoint X as executor of my artistic estate” is a sentence without direction, a ship without a map. What the artist must spell out, and rarely does, is the shape of the future they imagined: who holds the rights, how decisions are made, which works should be destroyed, who can access the archive, how disputes are resolved.
The executor needs clarity not to restrict but to protect. They need a will that specifies copyright transfer, because copyright is the longest shadow of any estate, often more valuable, over time, than the physical works themselves. They need direction on how to handle catalogues raisonnés, because without guidance, the entire burden of authentication, documentation, and record-keeping falls to one person, who may or may not have the time or scholarly background. They need instructions regarding the studio archive too: notebooks, letters, digital files, photographs, because these materials are both personal and public, simultaneously intimate and essential.
A will that does not address the archive creates moral dilemmas that no executor should face alone: should the artist’s private letters be read? Should early, unfinished, or embarrassing works survive? Should personal journals be sealed for a certain period? Should the papers be offered to a museum, or should they remain in family hands? And, critically, who may edit, publish, or restrict these materials?
In the absence of clear instructions, executors must improvise. They must interpret the artist’s life through fragments and guesswork. They must make decisions that cannot be undone. And they must live with the consequences, privately, for decades.
This is why Varley’s warning is not about legal compliance, but about emotional and ethical viability. The executor must not merely read the will; they must evaluate whether the will is sufficient to support decades of stewardship. They must also ask themselves whether they are able, emotionally, financially, and intellectually, to bear the responsibilities it demands.
The greatest mistake is accepting an estate out of sentiment, assuming that the burden will be light. Once accepted, the role is not reversible. It becomes a kind of guardianship of the dead, and the dead, as we know, leave complicated legacies.
Principle 2: Insist on enough money to cover cataloguing, shipping, storage, and conservation. And for large estates, multiply by three.
If Varley's first principle is ethical, his second is financial, and this is where most estates unravel. The costs of maintaining an artist’s body of work are invisible to outsiders: storage alone, if climate-controlled, can devour an estate’s resources. Conservation, even at its most basic, is expensive. Crating, shipping, reframing, photography, insurance, and climate management can consume tens of thousands of dollars per year. Multiply this over decades and the sum becomes staggering.
Varley’s wry aside, “multiply by three”, is a joke only in form; in substance, it is a grim mathematical truth. Artists often assume that their legacy will generate money, not consume it. But estates that begin without adequate funding immediately force the executor into an untenable position: they must sell works prematurely, often below market, simply to pay bills. These early sales are hurried, pressured, and mis-timed, distort pricing structures, undermine market confidence, and set precedents that take years to correct.
A responsible estate must begin with a budget large enough to stabilize the archive for at least several years without sales. This buffer allows the executor to act strategically rather than reactively. It allows for careful placement, museum conversations, scholarly engagement, and the slow, deliberate shaping of a legacy. It prevents the estate from becoming a fire sale. It shields the executor from the indignity of having to liquidate a late, minor, or compromised work simply to pay for issues such as mould remediation in a storage unit.
Moreover, the financial planning must address taxes, appraisals, insurance, conservation backlogs, digitization of the archive, and, increasingly in high demand, digital preservation. Hard drives degrade, file formats become obsolete, cloud storage must be maintained in perpetuity. The estate needs money not just for physical inventory but for the digital afterlife of the work.
Executors must also budget for cataloguing, perhaps a catalogue raisonné, the backbone of any serious legacy project, which can take years and require scholars, researchers, photographers, rights-clearance specialists, and database designers. Without funding, a raisonné remains a dream.
This is why Varley’s financial advice is more than practical; it is moral. An estate that cannot fund its afterlife is not an honour, it is a burden disguised as one. Executors are often reluctant to speak openly about money, fearing they appear mercenary. But to demand sufficient funds is not greed. It is the only way to ensure that the artist’s name survives intact.
Principle 3: Make a complete photographic catalogue of estate materials. Ideally post it online for surety and scholarship.
Documentation is the intellectual infrastructure of an estate. Without it, confusion creeps into every corner: works are misattributed, lost, forgotten, misplaced in storage, confused with variants, or mistakenly identified in museum catalogues decades later. Scholars attempting to write about the artist encounter obstacles that could easily have been prevented. Museums cannot verify provenance, collectors cannot confirm authenticity, and appraisers lose confidence, eventually the market cools and then dies.
This is why Christopher Varley emphasises not just a catalogue, but a complete photographic record, and ideally one placed online. The online aspect is not a matter of convenience; it is a matter of intellectual justice. An online catalogue democratizes access, supports scholarship across institutions and countries, allows collectors to verify holdings, and reduces the risk of fraudulent works entering circulation. It also stabilizes the market. A documented body resists distortion, it prevents the inflation of dubious works, it allows museums to plan acquisitions, it supports curators who wish to consider the artist for group exhibitions, and it provides a foundation for a future catalogue raisonné.
Documentation must also include verso images, details of labels, stamps, gallery stickers, handwritten notes, and any accompanying archival material. Signatures evolve over time, stamps change, handwriting shifts, materials differ. The executor who photographs only the front of a work preserves only half its identity.
But the photographic catalogue must extend beyond finished works. It must include: sketches and drawings, unfinished canvases, personal notebooks, studio materials, early student works, interesting failures and experiments, correspondence that clarifies dates or ideas. These materials, though not for sale, are essential for future scholars. The executor must decide which materials belong in a museum archive, which should remain in the family, and which, if any,should be destroyed.
This principle, if taken seriously, becomes the intellectual heart of the estate. It transforms an executor from a caretaker into an archivist, a steward of knowledge. It also prepares the ground for everything that follows: culling, placement, pricing, and succession.
Principle 4: Cull where required, with the aid of another set of eyes.
There are few actions in the stewardship of an artist’s estate that cause as much discomfort, or as much necessity, as culling. The word itself feels violent, almost surgical. It conjures the image Varley describes: a bin filled with ripped drawings and slashed canvases, the executor’s hand unsure, as they make the first incision into a work that once mattered to someone. But to refuse to cull is to refuse to protect. It is to allow an artist’s weakest work to overshadow their strongest, to allow volume to distort vision, and to allow the market to be flooded with pieces that dilute the name rather than refine it.
Francis Bacon’s London studio yielded not only his paints and tools but a remarkable cache of one hundred slashed canvases, spanning five decades from the mid-1940s onward, which reveal the raw, often unseen stages of his process. Many were small “postage stamp” works that Bacon destroyed himself, while larger canvases were cut up by his close friend John Edwards, who first volunteered to help tidy the studio in 1976 and ended up filling bags with discarded materials before slicing finished works at Bacon’s insistence to prevent theft. Ranging from paint-spattered test surfaces to partially realised portraits, these destroyed canvases testify to Bacon’s rigorous self-editing and fierce control over what entered the world as a finished work.
Culling is stewardship at its most intimate. It requires an executor to know the artist’s intention, aesthetic evolution, technical experiments, and late style. It requires an understanding of what scholars will one day need and what will only cause confusion. It requires the willingness to sacrifice the surplus so that the essential survives.
Yet no executor, however experienced, should cull alone. A second set of eyes brings perspective, distance, and courage. Varley chose Esther Trépanier, a scholar, curator, and historian whose knowledge of Marian Dale Scott’s work gave weight to every decision. This collaboration is essential, not to deflect responsibility but to anchor it. Another expert helps break the paralysis that often accompanies acts of destruction, reminding the executor that culling is not violence, but refinement.
Culling must also be understood in the context of the market, particularly in Canada. Our market is small, regional, and deeply susceptible to distortion. It cannot absorb hundreds of late or minor works without breaking the confidence of collectors. It cannot protect the reputation of an artist if the estate allows compromised pieces into circulation. American markets can, somewhat, absorb the excess of a Pollock or a Frankenthaler because their ecosystems are vast. Canada has no such luxury. Here, every stray work matters; every weak piece can become a millstone around the neck of a legacy.
Consider the cautionary tales: L. L. FitzGerald, as Varley notes, would likely appear more unified, more controlled, more canonically secure had his estate undergone rigorous culling. Several painters of the Prairie modernist generation likewise suffered reputational dilution because late or minor works were allowed into the market out of a misplaced sense of sentiment or optimism. Even in the international context, artists whose estates failed to filter: Chagall, Dalí, and even certain periods of Picasso’s late ceramics, face persistent doubts in secondary markets because of the sheer unevenness of posthumous sales.
Culling must also extend beyond the works on canvas. Sketchbooks filled with derivative exercises, notebooks containing unoriginal musings, digital files of discarded compositions, and boxes of early academic studies must all be evaluated. Not everything that passes through an artist’s hands belongs to posterity. Greatness emerges from process but process itself is not always worth preserving.
Most importantly, culling is an act of love. It says to the artist: I will protect only what reflects your intention, your strength, and your vision. It says to the future: here is the distilled essence of a life’s work. It says to the scholar: you may trust what remains. And it says to the market: we value quality over quantity, the only strategy that preserves integrity.
Principle 5: Donate to public galleries, consign or sell to sympathetic dealers, or offer generous discounts to admirers and friends.
Varley’s fifth principle is a masterclass in strategic placement disguised as friendly advice. The estate is not simply a warehouse; it is an ecosystem. Works move through it like nutrients, enriching or weakening the soil depending on how they are distributed. Placing work is not a matter of clearing inventory. It is a matter of shaping a public narrative: deciding who sees the work, who writes about it, who lives with it, who teaches with it, and who remembers it.
Public galleries, for instance, do not accept donations out of sentimental courtesy. They accept works that strengthen their collections, fit their curatorial priorities, and contribute to art-historical conversations. A donation that aligns with these priorities becomes a cornerstone: it secures the artist’s presence in future exhibitions, catalogues, research projects, and teaching. It increases visibility and stabilizes the market, because collectors trust artists whose works have institutional endorsement.
But a misguided donation, a late, minor, or redundant work, burdens the institution and cheapens the legacy. Museums are not storage units. They must consider long-term conservation costs and exhibition relevance. The executor must anticipate these considerations and place works judiciously, not merely generously.
Sympathetic dealers also play a crucial role. A dealer who understood the artist in life is often best positioned to interpret the estate. They know the collectors. They know the market history. They know the aesthetic nuances. And, most importantly, they have the patience to manage an estate over years, sometimes decades, in a way that auction houses, which focused on quick turnover, do not. A dealer can champion a resurrection, rebuild momentum, and place key works with collectors who will protect them.
Varley’s comment about auctioneers is both true and understated: auction houses are not legacy managers. They create moments of visibility, not sustained engagement. Estates treated primarily through auction dispersals often fracture, works scatter unpredictably, and the narrative becomes fragmented. Dealers, by contrast, can shape the flow of works, curate exhibitions, cultivate new collectors, and place pieces in thoughtful contexts.
Christie’s Marcus Fox put it bluntly: “We’re in the moving business, not the storage business.” In the auction world this means momentum is everything, and even taking a loss on certain works is preferable to letting them sit unsold. For executors, however, this philosophy can be a double-edged sword. When settling an artist’s or collector’s estate, the fiduciary duty runs in the opposite direction: art cannot simply be “moved” for the sake of movement. Executors must resist the auction house’s structural impatience, ensuring that sales decisions protect value, tax position, and legacy rather than serving the market’s desire to clear inventory.
Offering discounts to admirers and friends is another quietly brilliant tactic. These individuals often hold the artist in a kind of emotional devotion. They live with the work, speak about it lovingly, lend it willingly, and support the narrative of the artist. This is not charity; it is strategic cultural placement. The most beloved works often do not live in vaults but in homes where they are cherished, tended, and shared.
This principle of donation, consignment, strategic discounting shapes the sociological afterlife of the work. It determines where the art lives, who sees it, who writes about it, and how it moves into the future. It is the most human of Varley’s principles, because it acknowledges that legacy is not built through hoarding, but through circulation.
Principle 6: Avoid arbitrary closure dates. A small estate might be cleared in a couple of years. A large one might take decades.
The temptation to “finish” an estate is strong, psychologically, emotionally, administratively. People want closure. Families want clarity. Lawyers want files resolved. But art does not operate on administrative timelines. It unfolds slowly, in unpredictable waves, responding to scholarly interest, market cycles, museum priorities, and cultural shifts. An estate, managed properly, is not a finite project but a generational one.
Arbitrary deadlines undermine the very function of stewardship. They pressure executors into premature sales, hasty donations, or destructive culling. They force decisions that should have been made with deliberation. They flatten the complexity of an artist’s career into a schedule more appropriate for the settlement of furniture and household goods.
This is especially true in the Canadian context, where market recognition often arrives decades after an artist’s productive years. Our national narrative is slow. Our institutions take time to reassess. Our collectors evolve generationally. Varley understands that an estate that rushes to clear itself risks misreading the future. What appears minor today might prove crucial tomorrow. What appears unimportant may be vital for a retrospective in twenty years. What cannot be placed today may find the perfect institutional home after a shift in curatorial focus.
Arbitrary timelines also ignore the psychological burden on the executor. The work is not simple bookkeeping; it is long-term, emotional labour. Executors are stewards of meaning, not executors of inventory. They must feel free to let the estate unfold organically, resisting external pressure, trusting their judgment, waiting for the right moment to place a work or release a group of drawings.
A rushed estate is a damaged estate. A patient estate is a durable one.
Principle 7: In the case of large estates requiring decades to clear, think seriously about succession.
Varley’s final point is the quiet hinge on which the entire subject turns. If the executor’s job were short, finite, and contained, succession would be unnecessary. But estates of significance, those containing hundreds of works, or complex archives, or decades of uneven production, simply do not resolve within a single human attention span. They outlive the executor’s energy, and, not infrequently, the executor’s lifespan. Legacy is not a sprint, it is a relay.
Succession planning is therefore not an afterthought but a central pillar. It is the recognition that stewardship must extend beyond the executor’s hands, beyond their memory, and beyond their intentions. The executor must identify a successor who understands not only the artist, but the logic of the estate so far: how decisions were made, how the catalogue is structured, how rights are administered, which collectors hold key works, what institutional relationships are active, and what still lies unresolved in storage or in correspondence.
This successor must be named in legal documents, informed in life, consulted during the executor’s tenure, and provided with a roadmap detailed enough that they do not inherit confusion. Far too many estates age into chaos because the executor leaves behind boxes of half-finished catalogues, unindexed digital folders, unclear invoices, unsigned loan letters, and email chains that held decisions but were never formalised. A successor must inherit clarity, not enigmas.
Joe Plaskett Foundation supports emerging Canadian painters. It was founded in 2004 by the Canadian painter Joseph Plaskett to replicate the formative European-sojourn opportunity he once received. Its flagship Plaskett Award enables a selected young artist to live, travel and make art in Europe (or elsewhere abroad) for a year. The foundation is governed by a board of directors including practising artists, academics and professionals.
The Joan Mitchell Foundation, established by the American abstract painter Joan Mitchell in 1993, is a major nonprofit dedicated to supporting contemporary artists through grants, residencies, and rigorous professional development. It administers some of the most respected awards in the United States, including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, which offers multi-year financial support to working painters and sculptors, as well as emergency grants and community-centered programs that foster artistic advancement across diverse backgrounds. Guided by a board of artists, scholars, and arts professionals, the foundation also stewards Mitchell’s legacy, maintains her archives, and oversees scholarly initiatives that deepen public understanding of her life and work.
The principle of succession also reflects the nature of contemporary archives. A 20th-century artist might leave behind canvases, notebooks, sketchpads, personal letters, and the occasional super-8 reel. A 21st-century artist leaves all these plus tens of thousands of digital files, hard drives, cloud libraries, social media archives, PDFs, scanned negatives, and digital correspondence. The digital afterlife of the work may require active maintenance, software updates, password renewals, and migrations to new platforms.
Without a successor, digital materials die the quickest. Hard drives fail. Cloud payments lapse. Websites vanish when a credit card expires. Social media becomes inaccessible. The beautiful chaos of a studio, which a careful executor can eventually order, becomes, in digital form, an unreadable language after only a few years of neglect.
Succession also demands the courage to ask a difficult question: should the estate eventually be transformed into a foundation? Should it be institutionalized? Should decision-making move from a single person to a board structured for long-term governance? Some estates thrive this way, look at the Agnes Martin Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Cy Twombly Foundation, each protecting the artist through a network of scholars, conservators, lawyers, and curators. These bodies can manage copyright, oversee catalogues raisonnés, supervise authentication, champion museum exhibitions, and monitor market representation.
Most artists will never have estates on such a scale. But even smaller estates can benefit from the logic of institutional thinking: shared responsibility, multi-generational memory, consistent documentation, and a governance structure that outlives personal relationships. Succession is, in essence, the executor’s acknowledgment that legacy is larger than the living.
Beyond Varley’s Principles
The Intellectual Afterlife: Copyright, Scholarship, and the Catalogue Raisonné
Once the initial chaos of sorting and storage settles, the executor enters the long arc of intellectual stewardship. Copyright becomes the currency of the estate. It governs permissions for exhibitions, catalogues, monographs, educational use, documentaries, and digital reproductions. It shapes the public visibility of the artist’s work and determines how easily scholars can engage with the body of work. Executors must develop a consistent policy: when to charge, when to waive fees, how to prioritise scholarship over commercial use, and how to encourage academic attention without devaluing the estate’s rights.
The catalogue raisonné is the crown jewel of an artist’s intellectual afterlife, the most difficult, costly, and essential undertaking an estate can assume. And if the estate cannot shoulder it, then it must at least support the endeavour wholeheartedly, not by adding fees or obstacles, but by easing the path for those willing to devote their own time and resources. A raisonné is not a revenue opportunity; it is an act of stewardship. It is the biography of the work rather than the artist. It requires documentation so thorough, so meticulous, and so empirical that future generations can trust it as the foundation of truth. Without a raisonné, the estate remains fragile. A raisonné stabilises everything: market, scholarship, curatorial interest, and public memory. It is, quite simply, the only structure that fully protects a name.
The Jack Bush Catalogue Raisonné is the definitive scholarly record of the artist’s work, documenting every known painting with full provenance, exhibition history, and literature. Overseen by art historian Sarah Stanners, the project drew primarily on Bush’s own extensive papers, including his diaries, record books, scrapbooks, and photographs, which are now housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The catalogue would not have been possible without the long-term commitment of David Mirvish, who represented Bush from 1967 until the artist’s death in 1977 and became the project’s essential financial and emotional backbone, championing the research and ensuring the artist’s legacy received the rigorous scholarly treatment it deserved.
The Emotional Afterlife: Family Politics and Executor Psychology
Every executor discovers, sooner or later, that the most volatile forces in an estate are emotional. Families often enter the process already burdened by grief, unresolved dynamics, perceived hierarchies, and competing visions of the artist’s intention. These tensions can erupt over the most unexpected issues: who receives which painting, why a work must be culled, why a particular gallery cannot be trusted, why an auction result seemed too low, why the executor seems slow or overly cautious.
The decades-long struggle between Maria Altmann and the Austrian state is one of the most enduring examples of how family, grief, legality, and national identity can converge around a single artwork, and how emotionally charged an artist’s posthumous legacy can become.
Executors are placed in the uncomfortable position of mediating disputes that predate the estate by decades. They become confidants, referees, counsellors, and occasionally the target of familial resentment. They carry the psychological weight of every decision, knowing that each choice will be scrutinised, resented, or second-guessed.
This emotional labour is almost never compensated, yet it is often the most taxing part of the job. Executors must cultivate patience, neutrality, and clarity, and they must learn to separate fidelity to the artist from a desire to appease the family.
The Material Afterlife: Archives, Studios, and the Burden of Stuff
A studio is not merely a place of production, it is a living biography. Executors must unravel it like a narrative: early works, late experiments, fragments of paintings, test colour swatches, rolls of unstretched canvas, letters from dealers, receipts from suppliers, photographs of exhibitions, notebooks filled with half-finished thoughts.
This material is thrilling for scholars but frightening for an executor. What belongs in a museum? What belongs in the family? What should be digitised? What is too personal? What must be preserved to prevent future misreadings of the body?
A good executor learns to read the studio the way an archaeologist reads a site: paying attention to strata, chronology, material evidence, and the residue of ideas. They learn that not all things can be saved, but some must be saved with care.
The Philosophical Afterlife: Legacy as an Act of Intention
Behind every practical decision lies a philosophical one. What is legacy? What is worth preserving? What constitutes the true oeuvre of an artist? What belongs to history, and what belongs to oblivion? Legacy is not built by accident. It is cultivated through intention, the artist’s intention in life, the executor’s intention in stewardship, the curator’s intention in interpretation, the collector’s intention in care. The executor must navigate this ecosystem with humility and resolve, knowing that they are shaping not only the material afterlife of the work but the metaphysical one.
“[Roden Crater] has knowledge in it, and it does something with that knowledge.”
— James Turrell
Christopher Varley’s wisdom and experience reminds us that legacy is not sentimental; it is structural. It is physical and intellectual, emotional and legal, historical and future-oriented. To accept the “honour” of an estate without understanding its demands is to inherit a lifetime of labour disguised as a gesture of trust.
And yet, for those who approach it with clarity, it is a profound act of devotion. To steward an artist’s estate is to become the custodian of their second life, the one that unfolds after death, in the hands and minds of others, through exhibitions and publications, in the quiet of archives and the brightness of museum walls.
Executors are not merely managers. They are interpreters. They are guardians. They are the ones who stand watch over the fragile boundary between what survives and what vanishes.
Their work is invisible, but its consequences last for generations.
For artists, the lesson is simple: prepare now. Document your intentions. Fund your legacy. Clarify your will. Identify your successor. Protect your archive. Do not burden your executor with decisions you refused to face.
For executors: ask for what you need, financially and structurally. Seek help. Collaborate. Document everything. Be patient. Have courage. And above all, remember that your task is not to carry everything forward, but to carry the essential forward.
For collectors and institutions, the lesson is one of partnership: support executors, respect estates, prioritize scholarship, and participate in the long, slow act of preserving cultural memory.
And for all of us who care about art, there is a deeper truth: the afterlife of an artwork is as intricate as the life that created it. It requires attention, intelligence, and love. Christopher Varley has given us the clearest map we have. The rest is up to us.
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