Allan Stone; eccentric art dealer & collector
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
Roberta Smith
Allan Stone, Noted Art Dealer and Collector, Dies at 74
Allan Stone, a New York dealer who combined a broad
expertise in Abstract Expressionism with a zeal for junk
sculpture and realist painting and was perhaps as well known
for amassing art as for selling it, died on Friday at his
home in Purchase, N.Y. He was 74.
He died in his sleep, said his daughter Claudia.
Mr. Stone was considered an expert on the work of the
Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky,
Barnett Newman and Franz Kline as well as their
contemporaries John Graham and Joseph Cornell. His gallery
was especially known for imposing exhibitions of their work,
often accompanied by catalogs for which he wrote essays
filled with personal reminiscences and unusual insights.
But he was legendary in the New York art world for his
obsessive collecting. His gallery (like his home) teemed
with primitive and folk art, no matter what exhibition was
formally on view. At one point he owned untold numbers of de
Koonings and nearly 30 Bugatti automobiles. When the gallery
moved in 1991 from its longtime site at 86th and Madison to
a carriage house on East 90th Street, Ms. Stone said,
long-lost artworks resurfaced.
Sometimes jokingly referred to as Citizen Stone after Orson
Welles's outsize film character, Mr. Stone was attracted to
formal density and flamboyance. He was associated with the
rise of the junk aesthetic and with realist painters whose
canvases bristled with paint and details.
He gave first or early New York shows to the sculptors César
and Robert Mallory and to the painters Richard Estes and
Wayne Thiebaud. He owned numerous works by John Chamberlain,
whose crushed car sculptures he saw as a three-dimensional
equivalent of de Kooning's paintings.
A stocky man with an expansive personality and a booming
voice, he was born in Manhattan in 1932 and attended
Phillips Academy Andover and Harvard before earning his law
degree from Boston University. He studied painting at
Andover, where he saw his first de Kooning. He bought his
first artwork, a de Kooning drawing, while studying at
Harvard. His father, a lawyer, was so upset by the $250
expenditure that Mr. Stone found himself paying for his own
education for a while.
He became active in the art world in the late 1950s while
working as a lawyer on Wall Street. He dispensed free legal
advice to artists and became friendly with Ivan Karp,
director of the Leo Castelli Gallery (and now owner of the
OK Harris Gallery in SoHo). Mr. Stone joined Mr. Karp's and
Gil Shapiro's Anonymous Art Reclamation Society, which
staged nighttime raids on demolition sites, scavenging
carved sculptures and decorations from old buildings. Most
of their finds eventually ended up in the collection and the
courtyard of the Brooklyn Museum, and Mr. Shapiro went on to
form Urban Archeology, a high-end architectural salvage
business.
By 1960, Mr. Stone wanted to open a gallery, but was only
able to do so after about 30 of his co-workers at his law
firm raised a kitty of $5,000. During the gallery's first
year the law firm's head stenographer did its typing, while
her husband, a flower trucker, transported its art.
By 1965 Mr. Stone was paying for so many different artworks
that he suddenly found himself about $1.5 million in debt
and was saved from bankruptcy by the appearance of a
corporate client. Although many of his early purchases
eventually bought handsome returns, he maintained that he
only bought what he loved, and cautioned against investing
in artworks as if they were stocks that could be easily
liquefied. As he once told an audience in 1982, "If you are
into art, you ain't into money!"
In 1997 Mr. Stone was diagnosed with advanced prostate
cancer, which was cured through the use of alternative
medicines, and he was known to urge others with cancer
diagnoses to follow his lead. Regular tests confirmed that
he remained cancer-free.
In addition to his wife, Clare, Mr. Stone is survived by
their daughters, Jessie, of Purchase and Kyabirwa, Uganda,
and Olympia, of Chapel Hill, N.C.; by his daughters from his
first marriage, to Marguerite P. Cullman: Allison Stabile of
Mamaroneck, N.Y.; Claudia, of New York City; and Jeremy and
Heather, both of San Francisco; a brother, Richard, of Pound
Ridge, N.Y.; a sister, Marilyn Siegel of Harrison, N.Y.; and
eight grandchildren.
All of Mr. Stone's daughters grew up helping out at the
gallery, and most of them have since worked in the art
business at one time or another. Olympia Stone made a
documentary about her father called "The Collector" that
will be seen next year. In the early 90s, Claudia Stone
assumed the day-to-day operation of her father's gallery,
which she likened last week to "another sibling."