Allan Stone, Noted Art Dealer
and Collector, Dies at 74

Photo by
Dina Maxwell Smith, 1988

Allan Stone

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 [Dec. 15, 2006] at his home in Purchase, N.Y. He was 74.

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.”