Living With Art, Even After Death
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of the ironies of the art world is that auctions, which these days are usually triumphal affairs, often result from unhappiness. People at auction houses refer to the source of their business as “the three Ds”: death, debt, and divorce. The irony is particularly sharp when the deceased was as well loved in the art community as was the late dealer Allan Stone. Stone, who died in December at age 74, was a famously passionate collector, whose taste ran from tribal art to Bugatti cars to Abstract Expressionist masterpieces. The 72 works being offered on Monday evening in Christie’s sale, “Selections from the Allan Stone Collection,” represent a tiny fraction of Stone’s collection, which so completely filled his home in Purchase, N.Y., as well as houses in San Francisco and Maine, that there was hardly room left over for the human inhabitants. After Stone died, representatives of both Christie’s and Sotheby’s visited his homes to do an inventory and an appraisal of the collection. They counted some 15,000 objects, Christie’s co-director of postwar and contemporary art, Laura Paulson, said. The 72 works in the sale are valued at between $40 million and $60 million. In the end, Christie’s won the right to do the sale, Ms. Paulson said, because “we understood what Allan was about. We were confident we could do a sale that represented all the various categories and make it work.” (Christie’s spokeswoman, Bendetta Roux, said that Christie’s did not offer the family a guarantee.) The pieces in the auction represent, with the exception of the cars, the full range of Stone’s collecting. They include a pair of tobacco store Indians, a carved and painted barber pole dated 1870–1900, a nail fetish figure from the Congo, furniture designed by Carlo Bugatti (father of the car designer Ettore) and Antoni Gaudí, Joseph Cornell boxes, as well as sculptures by John Chamberlain and paintings by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, and Wayne Thiebaud. Putting together such a wide-ranging sale was a logistical challenge, requiring the collaboration of four different departments at Christie’s. But part of the job of selling an estate collection is evoking for potential buyers the power of the collector’s charisma and eye. Last month, the auction house took a group of works from the sale to San Francisco and held a dinner for Stone’s friends and former clients there. “It was incredible, the outpouring of affection,” Ms. Paulson said.
At the same time, she acknowledged, “[t]here’s this feeling of finality that hits people when they see the exhibition: This man who was larger than life is no longer here. It’s been very bittersweet in that way.”
Stone opened his gallery in 1965, after working as a lawyer on Wall Street. He showed artists including Messrs. Chamberlain and Thiebaud, as well as Cornell, Barnett Newman, Richard Estes, and the French sculptor and assemblage artist César — who is represented in the auction by a bronze platter in the form of a ring of erect penises. Claudia Stone, one of Allan’s six daughters, now runs the gallery, which is on East 90th Street.
The Chamberlains in the sale include an early work, “Ballantine,” from 1957, as well as several very small works. One of Mr. Chamberlain’s monumental sculptures, “Hatband,” from 1960, carries an estimate of between $2.5 million and $3.5 million. “This piece is a tour de force,” Ms. Paulson said. “It should define Chamberlain’s market at a new level.”
Ms. Paulson said that Mr. Chamberlain’s work has not yet seen the dramatic increase in price level that other artists of the period have, such as Donald Judd, Carl André, and Richard Serra, simply because there haven’t been major Chamberlain pieces coming on the market.
The Stone sale includes five works by Kline and seven by de Kooning. The latter group includes an untitled oil-on-board painting from 1942, with biomorphic forms, estimated at $6 million to $10 million; “Study for Marshes,” from 1945–1946, estimated at $4 million to $6 million; “Man,” from 1967, estimated at $5 million to $7 million, and “Figures in a Landscape #2,” from 1976, estimated at $2.5 million to $3.5 million.
Stone also championed lesser-known members of Abstract Expressionism’s second generation, such as Michael Goldberg and Alfred Leslie. The sale includes Mr. Leslie’s “Nix on Nixon” from 1960, a large abstract painting that took its title from a political slogan used by the Kennedy campaign.
Ms. Paulson said that the sale would attract tribal art dealers and collectors from as far away as Paris. Among the most important pieces of tribal art in the sale is an Urobho male figure, first documented in 1967 in a shrine on the Warri River in Nigeria. The figure is dated circa 1875 and carries an estimate of between $300,000 and $500,000.
Stone had a long relationship with Mr. Thiebaud and kept many of the latter’s paintings in his home. Among the pieces in the sale are classic paintings such as “Seven Suckers” and the brilliantly colored “Tie Rack,” as well as the 1967 “Blue Hill.” A dramatic bluff, with trees sticking out almost horizontally from its slope, “Blue Hill” looks like an imagined landscape — but Mr. Thiebaud explains in the catalog that it is in fact a realistic depiction of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Sacramento.
Stone had a taste for the offbeat. He liked presentation models, and the sale includes a 19th-century model of a locomotive engine that looks like an oversize (and somewhat dusty) toy train. There is also a life-size molded copper steer, apparently produced for the display booth of the Swift meatpacking plant in the agricultural building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair Exhibition.
Stone gave the first New York exhibition to Robert Arneson, a sculptor and a leader of the 1960s Bay Area “Funk” movement. The sale includes two works by Arneson, including a giant ceramic trophy with a surface that looks like it survived Pompeii, crowned by a raised middle finger.
There is a wide range of price levels in the sale. The barber pole, for example, is estimated at between $8,000 and $12,000. Young buyers will be disappointed to find, though, that the beautiful Gaudí screen from Casa Milà, which looks like a perfect way to turn a studio apartment into a one-bedroom, is unfortunately priced like a two-bedroom apartment (estimated at between $1.5 million and $2.5 million).
In Stone’s house, African sculpture, Bugatti furniture, and odd objects of design and folk art were piled chockablock. Stone believed in living with art, not isolating it, and he liked drawing connections and juxtapositions among seemingly disparate works. Ms. Paulson said that the drama of Stone’s passion and his relationship to the work he owned would inspire potential bidders.
“People are coming to the sale because they want a part of this,” she said.