The Visionary Eye of Allan Stone

Allan Stone; Allan Stone Gallery, New York, c. 1975. Images courtesy of the Allan Stone Collection

Founded in 1960 by art dealer Allan Stone (1932–2006), the New York gallery known today as Allan Stone Projects has been admired for over half a century. Celebrated for its eclectic approach and early advocacy of pivotal artists of the 20th century, Allan Stone Gallery was a leading authority on Abstract Expressionism, the New York dealer for Wayne Thiebaud for over forty years, and showed the works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Joseph Cornell, John Graham and John Chamberlain. Stone also promoted the work of a younger generation of artists that were in conversation with other artists in his collection, working in the mediums of assemblage, collage and new modes of abstraction. In addition to modern masterworks and contemporary art, Allan Stone also collected and exhibited international folk art, Americana and important decorative arts and industrial design.

John Beardman b. 1937

John Beardman began painting at the age of nineteen and has been a devout practitioner of "action painting" for over six decades. Inspired by Abstract Expressionist artists such as Willem de Kooning, Beardman uses a linear framework to add structure to his painterly marks and often collages directly onto his canvases, pushing the compositions into a sculptural realm. For much of his career, Beardman’s subject has been the natural landscape, particularly that of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia where the artist had his studio from 1992 to 2016.

Beardman was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1937 and attended Oberlin College, Southern Illinois University and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at galleries throughout the United States and internationally. His work is represented in the collections of the Detroit Institue of Arts and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The artist continues to live and work in Pennsylvania.

Auction Results John Beardman