“What strikes the eye": this is the formula used by Garrick Stephenson to justify his acquisition of the extraordinary 20th century objects.
Gary, as his friends knew him, opened his gallery in 1959 on 57th Street in New York, when European furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries were highly popular. His avant-garde taste differs from the standards of good taste of that time. Naturally, the collectors and trend makers such as Babe Paley, Bunny Mellon, Michel David-Weill, and Jayne Wrightsman regularly visited his gallery.
In 1993, Gary left the art market and sent his inventory to an auction house for the dispersion of his collection. To confirm this break with the art market, Gary decides to sell his now empty apartment, and to buy another one on 5th Avenue, with a view on Central Park. This radical move, of course, surprised his former clients and colleagues and marked the beginning of a new adventure: the formation of his 20th century design collection.
Lot 12 - Jean Michel Frank (1895-1941)
Patelle
Suspension
Plâtre
Date de création : 1936
H 50 × Ø 50 cm
Sold 93 600€
From that day on and during more than twenty years, Gary became a passionate buyer, travelling all over the world including several times to Paris. In the French capital, he stays in the Bristol Hotel and has dinner at the Voltaire with his old friend and colleague Jean-Marie Rossi, the prominent antique dealer, with whom he bought furniture from the Ancien Régime as well as a painting by Roy Lichtenstein. For years, Gary has distributed his finds between his different houses, villas, refuges: on 5th Avenue, in Southampton, Palm Beach or Mendocino. These art purchases only ended on the day of his death in 2007, at the age of 80.
Like all great eyes, Gary’s defies biographical explanation. It is nevertheless instructive to know that he was born in 1927 and comes from Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother was not particularly attracted to the art world, unlike his father. But it was his grandfather, Proctor & Gamble's financial partner at the turn of the century, that put him in a position to put that eye to such exuberant use.
Tall, blond and blue-eyed, Gary arrived in 1949 in New York after serving in the Navy and studying at Yale. He enrolled at the prestigious Parson design school, then directed by Van Day Truex and one of the most famous teachers, Albert Hadley hired him to to decorate fame with Sister Parish at Parish-Hadley.
Lot 16 - Diego Giacometti (1902-1985)
Chat Maître d’Hôtel
Bronze à patine brune et verte
Signé ‘Diego’ sur la terrasse
Date de création : vers 1961
H 30 × L 10 × P 26 cm
Sold 182 000€
Gary will later become a decorator for McMillen, the company founded by Eleanor Brown in 1924. She assigned him the interior design of one his most important clients, Prince Ivan Obolensky and his wife Claire, an heiress from San Francisco. Claire and Gary immediately fell in love with each other and never left.
My history with Gary began in 1994 when I became an art dealer. He was introduced to me by his decorator, David Kleinberg, figure of the Parish-Hadley agency. It was pretty unusual for a decorator to hire one as Gary to work on his own interior. This anecdote reveals Gary's deep open-mindedness, his ability to listen, his desire to broaden his horizons.
Line Vautrin (1913-1997)
Aux Alouettes
Mirror
Sold : 32500 €
When we first met, Gary invited me to drink cocktails in his new apartment. I was dazzled by the decoration and his collection. His wife, Claire, on the cusp of seventy, was still of great beauty. His donation to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute of the creations of American fashion designers Charles James or Halston was recent. She now wore Armani, her dresses perfectly matching the strict lines of the furniture of Jean-Michel Frank, Jacques Quinet or Marc du Plantier, forming the new backdrop of her life. Together, they shared the same acuity, the same sensitivity. Gary often asked Claire to place the objects when they were delivered to them: thus, the pieces of Serge Roche, Alexandre Noll or Line Vautrin had become part of their daily lives. Some of these pieces were disposed in the room of their daughter, Christina, who later inherited their passion. Thus, the poetic "Miroir aux alouettes" created by Line Vautrin decorated one of the walls of her room, and then followed her everywhere as she moved.
Lot 17 - Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002)
La Belle réputation endormie
Epreuve aux sels d’argent
Date de prise de vue : 1939
Tirage postérieur : vers 1970
Epreuve : 26,5 × 35 cm
Cadre : 42,3 × 51 cm
Sold 5200€
In the years following these first cocktails, I often had dinner with the Stephensons in New York, or stayed with them often in their homes in Southampton and Palm Beach. Our conversations at the restaurant, by the pool and in each of their nine private clubs (yes, nine) always led us to a passionate reflection on the decorative arts, the history of taste or the sociology of objects. The meme mention of some famous characters from the design world and high style in the past would prompt a good memories, a caustic, funny story, revealing a great and beautiful spirit.
“What strikes the eye": a beautiful formula, Gary and Claire have, thanks to their affection, subtly, without even noticing, really opened my eyes!
Louis Bofferding, 2019
