The Collector

Affectionate and slight, Olympia Stone's tribute to her late father, art collector and dealer Allan Stone, suggests that serious collecting is an addiction.

Actually, Stone himself cheerfully characterizes his eccentric acquisitiveness as a sickness: He got sucked into collecting "kind of like a junkie would get sucked into a heroin parlor." Stone appeared destined for more conventional things: A Harvard-trained lawyer, he married young and quickly became a father. But Stone didn't like practicing law. He liked art, especially contemporary American art. He bought his first drawing, a small Willem de Kooning, while he was still a student. Stone started advisi...