Stone's Stash

In a film made by one of his daughters, the dealer and collector Allan Stone confessed, "I was totally an art junkie. When you get a kind of an experience, or a high from something, there's a tendency to want to repeat that and go after it and find more of it. It is an addiction. The artistry for me is like a narcotic, and I don't get it from everything, but I keep looking for it." (Titled The Collector, it was screened in various cities this spring and summer and comes out on DVD this month.)

He was not overstating the situation. Watching the trailer, you see the house in which Stone stashed his acquisitions, and it's packed with a disorienting amount of art. Paintings hung salon style in a hallway. Tribal art filling the entire surface of a large table. The man's taste ranged from Abstract Expressionism to folk art to design pieces by Antoni Gaudí and Carlo Bugatti.

Christie's is getting first crack at it.

Stone passed away last year, and part of his collection is being sold at the auction house on November 12th. Highlights include Wayne Thiebaud's Seven Suckers, Willem de Kooning's Man, John Chamberlain's Hatband, an Urhobo male figure, and a pair of Native American trade signs.

The irony here is that Stone was averse to the idea of making money off of art. In a review of her film, Olympia Stone said, "I do think the emphasis on money and the acquisition of art was so depressing for my father." But, obviously, he could have been good at that. The story goes that he bought his first piece, a de Kooning drawing, for $250 as an undergrad at Harvard. It would be worth that many, many times over today. And the piece of his collection headed to Christie's is expected to bring in $43 million to $63 million, according to the New York Times' Carol Vogel.