Mask for Janus:
Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
– W.S. Merwin
Allan Stone, Noted Art Dealer and Collector, Dies at 74
That was the headline in today’s The New York TImes Dec 18th, 2006.
I had the great privilege to know and be collected by Allan Stone. I think I learned more about painting by having his eyes in my studio and having his hands hang my work beside my heroes at both his home and gallery, than I could have learned in ten years of universty graduate art studies. Being a part of his gallery from the old 86th street location to its present fire house, was like grad school and seminary rolled into one. Over the last few years, Allan’s health and my intinearant studio status meant that we didn’t get to do the studio visits I had so loved in younger years. I had sincerely hoped that I would settle down somewhere and that he would be of sound health and we would get to spend a few more years visiting again like we did in the nineties. I’m so very sad that I won’t have that priviledge again, but I realized today that over the last six or seven years, I would drop little paintings and drawings that I liked by the gallery so that he could see them when he came in from Purchase (an ironic place name, considering he was such a great shopper). It was always an honor and an education to visit Claudia and look at “the old man’s desk” (a truly gorgeous piece of furniture by the way) and see some little tsotchke of mine propped against an African feitish, or below a Franz Kline, or deKooning, or Thiebaud. I always tried to take the position behind his desk and see what the context was… how he was looking at it?… what were the site lines? And then spend the week figuring out what it all meant – what did he see? What was he saying? What should I look at? It was like being taught by Hansel’s trail of bread crumbs method in the dark forest of New York art… but what exquisite and wise and nutritious crumbs they were. You can’t always see people in person, but through art, you can communicate beyond the limits of time and space. I will always value the correspondence of objects that we shared these last few years and I have every reason to believe it will go on and on, because objects keep talking long after the maker and the owner of the object has stopped talking. There is a kind of immortality in things; a way of talking to the future. Allan Stone’s collection, if kept together, will speak to countless future generations.
A few years back Allan did an amazing retrospective of Willem deKooning’s career. A couple of months before, he visited my then studio in Stamford and we had a long talk about the new Gallery on 90th, the present state of the Art world, the new dealers, the old dealers. He said he was planning to do a show during the Metropolitan’s deKooning Retrospective. He was going to call it: School of deKooning, or deKooning and friends, or something. It was going to be Kline, Gorky and deKooning. Being young and opinionated and probably a bit cocky and arrogant, I told him: “Look Allan, half the people in the New York art world think you’re dead. I go into galleries and say that you collect my work and they say, “Didn’t the gallery close? I thought he was dead.”
He laughed.
“Seriously,” I said. “This is your opportunity to ride the publicity wave and announce to the world that the new Allan Stone Gallery is open and that you are alive and well, etc. Don’t dilute the moment… Do deKooning alone. Your personal collection would probably be more interesting than anything anyone else could currate. You have the real shit, Allan. Fuck Gorky and Kline. Show me all those funky little deKoonings I haven’t seen yet. Show the world too… sure… , but more importantly… show ME!.”
Sometimes you get what you ask for. I don’t think I’m the only guy who told him this, but anyway it is what he did: The best little deKooning show anyone is ever likely to hang.
Allan liked to tell the story of how the British currator of the Met’s show came to the gallery one morning and spent about four or five hours just looking. He finally came upstairs to see Allan and said, “Mr. Stone, you have said more about the painting of Willem deKooning on these four walls, than I have managed to say in the entirity of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My hat’s off to you, sir. I salute you.” I like to think he gave him a hug and a kiss, but anyway… You get the idea. The show was a masterpiece, a joy to behold, a love letter in art.
During that show, at the top of the stairs to his offices, he hung a large painting of mine that was made of three or four years worth of paint tubes glued and painted into a sort of cross armmed funerial fetish figure (quasi german/egyptian/New Guinea). It was a painting I obsessed on for years (started out on an 8 foot hunk of plywood that I litterally started trimming with a saw). He hung it next to a DK trasparent vellum paper pull from a larger work (a technique Willem used, to save gestures he liked, but which he was going to paint over). The pull probably took seconds, but it glowed like a stained glass window… etherial, witty, sly, charming, serious, and magical… a sort of giggle in paint. It was the total opposite of my piece… like a Janus face. I still dream of that picture… and think about the pairing often. It is a touchstone moment in my life (pun intended).
I remember talking to him during that show and thanking him for the prominant position he’d put my painting (after all, all the heavy hitters in the art world would be in town to see that show and would be invited upstairs to talk and maybe buy art…though nothing in that show itself was for sale).
I said, “Thanks Allan. It’s just an amazing honor to have my painting next to DeKooning’s.”
“Well kid,” he said. He always called me KID… even last month he called me KID…. “Kid,” he said. “It holds up.”
Nicer words were never spoken.
I will truly miss him. I think anyone serious in the art world will miss him too. He was a force of nature that rolled and rolled and still gathered much moss. The Stone is dead. Long Live the Stone.
Top is mine then a start from Brian Raszka of The Library Project and then a Raszka solo book.
