Tuesday, November 20, 2007
An Hour with an Obsessive Collector
The Collector: Allan Stone's Life in Art is another documentary by an offspring about a famous or notable parent. What is satisfying this time is (versus, for instance, "My Architect" or "The Ballad of Rambin' Jack") is that the filmmaker, Olympia Stone, doesn't seem to have an agenda or a score to settle with her father, Allan Stone, a noted art dealer and art collector, she seems just to want to show her father's story and personality.
Stone admits that he is addicted to collecting and addicted to art. He started out as a young Harvard-trained attorney who bought a De Kooning when in school and later did legal work for the art community, including a draft of divorce papers for De Kooning's wife. Gradually he became very well known in what fellow art dealer Ivan Karp jokes as one of the same 348 people who were at every Tuesday opening and every art event in late fifties NYC. These connections and love of art and the scene lead his bliss and obsession to the opening of his gallery on December 7 1960, a date he refers to as his "real birthday."
The Allan Stone Gallery's first big break was a show of Wayne Thiebaud, whose regimented depictions of rows of pastries helped transition the trends of American Art in the early sixties from Abstract Expressionism to the lightness of Pop Art. Stone's gallery helped the art scene turn that and other corners, continuing to be a force through the eighties. But things changed in the eighties when emphasis in the NY contemporary art scene turned into one to high prices, investment collectors, and auction houses. Throughout these decades, Stone collected and then collected some more. It is pretty clear that when he would buy one of his entire shows, it was all or mostly for the love of the way the things made him feel.
The way his unwieldy collection overstuffs large home is a kind of work of art in itself. A hand held shot early in the film chaotically moves among the chaos: all kinds of native fetish statues, paintings, masks and weird junk. Stone says he believes in the magic associated with these items. "It energizes me." In the film, some of his six daughters weigh in on how it was a scary place to grow up in. Olympia talks about how there were monsters openly in their house, not just under the bed as was the case with other kids.
There are comments from friends, wives, and children of how Stone was no model father or family man, but his family was not dismissed from his own private life either. Olympia does not uncover another life and family in her subjects life, as Nathaniel Kahn found Louis to have in My Architect. Instead, his children have fond memories of being dragged along to the galleries her father visited.
Olympia and Alan also visit a gallery in the film. Here, we get to see Stone interact and assess with the work of an artist. His body almost dances with the work. some he likes, but stands still in front of others clutching chin at times repeating that some of it "just doesn't cut the mustard."
Dealers, patrons, collectors, and fans fuel and drive commercial aspects of the world of art. Getting closer to one of the players of this world for an hour in a portrait of someone's dad isn't likely to change a viewer's perspective in a major way. But it is refreshing to see a record of purity in the obsession of someone in this aspect of the art community who obviously is not participating in that world primarily for financial gain and investment.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:30 AM
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