While Olympia Stone was working on “The Collector,” her documentary about her father, the art dealer and collector Allan Stone, she had an image of herself and her dad taking it to film festivals together. They would show the film, and he would talk about his career and his relationships with artists like Willem de Kooning, John Chamberlain, and Joseph Cornell.

The film screened on Wednesday evening at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville to a packed audience, but Allan Stone wasn’t there. He died on December 15, shortly after Ms. Stone finished editing. His unexpected death has transformed “The Collector” from a daughter’s tribute into something bigger and more final: a summing up of Stone’s life. And what a rich life it was.

Stone opened a gallery in the late 1950s, after having gone to Harvard and worked as a lawyer. He had started collecting in college, at one point, as he recalls in the film, spending all his savings on a drawing by de Kooning. “One of your friends paints?” his father said when he saw it. When Stone announced that he was going into the art business, his father said: “I always knew you were a bum.” They didn’t speak for six years.

The Allan Stone Gallery soon became a success — although making money was never Stone’s highest aim, and he frequently purchased more of his artists’ works for himself than he sold to others. He showed artists like Cesar, Chamberlain, Cornell, Barnett Newman, and de Kooning. (De Kooning’s wife Elaine originally sought Stone out for legal advice about getting a divorce, and later became a close friend and mentor.) His longest-term client was Wayne Thibaud, whom he found one day resting on his stoop on 86th St., after a long afternoon of rejections.

But the film focuses on Stone’s obsession with collecting, and his daughter’s attempt to understand it. He collected everything from Abstract Expressionist paintings to cigar store Indians, from Bugatti furniture (and cars) to African fetish objects, from old trade signs to shrunken heads.

A visit to Stone’s house in Westchester County is like a journey to an alternate universe or, more to the point, a tour of a brilliant and eccentric mind. The house is huge — it was, in the early part of the century, the summer “cottage” of Whitelaw Reid, the editor and owner of the New York Herald Tribune — but it is packed with the fruits of his collecting. Some things are beautiful, others disturbing, and others — like a jar full of what look like pickled penises — just plain strange.

The density is overwhelming. Objects are piled on top of other objects, and there are only narrow paths for people to walk through the jungle of art.

“My husband did not treat art like something precious,” Stone’s second wife, Clare, explained. “He loved it, but he wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to isolate this beautiful thing so people can look at it.’ He hated museums. He believed in living with art.”

To an outsider, the arrangement of objects seems random and chaotic, but Mrs. Stone said her husband knew where everything was and immediately noticed if something was missing. And, in fact, there is an internal order, within which the objects are meant to converse with each other. An African fetish statue, covered with nails that each represent someone’s prayer, sits behind a similarly bristling assemblage of pistols by the artist Arman, which is itself called “Nail Fetish,” in French.

At one point in the film, Ms. Stone asks her father about his large collection of African statues. “I love them,” he says. “And I think this is what’s keeping me alive. I’m not kidding.” Before his death, Stone had survived both prostate cancer and a heart attack, and he took copious amounts of various herbal medicines.

Stone compared collecting both to an addiction, like heroin, and to a spiritual experience. In the film, he recalls periods when he went a long time without getting the “buzz” from a work of art, when he wondered if the buzz equipment had gone dead. But it hadn’t: He’d eventually see something he loved and think, “Thank god, it’s still alive.” Ms. Stone is the youngest of six daughters from his two marriages. Two of her older sisters are in the art business, including Claudia, who now manages the gallery her father owned on E. 90th St. Claudia recalls seeing many of the artists’ work first as a child. “Because my father and mother were divorced when we were very young, when we had time with my father, he just brought us along on studio visits,” she said. “We had tremendous adventures.”

A few days before the screening, Olympia said she was filled with conflicting feelings about it. “It’s painful, and it’s great, and it’s bizarre “Now, more than ever, I want it to be as good as it could possibly be,” she said. “I want people to understand why he was an important guy — not important like big, powerful, but an important human being.”

Fortunately, her father saw the film about three weeks before he died, and liked it. “I don’t want to imagine what it would have felt like if, after all this, he hadn’t seen it,” she said.

Stone wrote many catalog essays, but he didn’t write a memoir; “The Collector” has become the closest thing to a record of his life in the art world.

“Allan was one in a million,” Clare Stone said. “He was brilliant. He was witty. And he was totally uninterested in being famous or making money. It was just living his life.”

She continued, “People would say: ‘But you’ve never been to Africa!’ He had no interest in going to Africa! Africa came to him. Everything came to him. It was like he had it all within.”