PROPERTY FROM THE CLAIRE AND GARRICK STEPHENSON COLLECTION“What strikes the eye” was Garrick Stephenson’s justification for acquiring the extraordinary 20th century objects found on the following pages. And what struck that eye of his warrants our attention today, since he possessed one of the finest of his generation. Gary, as his friends knew him, opened a gallery on 57th Street in 1959, back when European 18th and 19th century furniture was very much the thing. But the luxuriously severe pieces he favored couldn’t have been more different from the fussier fare that then passed for chic. No wonder important collectors and tastemakers of that day, including Babe Paley, Bunny Mellon, Michel David-Weill, and Jayne Wrightsman, flocked to his 57th Street door. Fast forward to 1993 when Gary retired from the trade and sent his inventory, along with the furnishings in his Carlyle apartment, to Christie’s for a single owner sale. In that general house cleaning he also threw in a Magritte painting, and a Vuillard or two. Making his break with the past all the more definitive, Gary put his now-empty apartment on the market, bought a Fifth Avenue perch overlooking Central Park, and embarked on an adventure that would raise the eyebrows of his former clients and colleagues: the formation of the 20th-century-design collection that is being dispersed in this sale. No wonder he had held back from his auction the pair of Gilbert Poillerat standing lamps found here, which had been purchased when brand-new in his long-since-vanished youth. From this modest point of departure, Gary went on a buying spree that would only conclude when he drew his last breath at the age of eighty in 2007. Over the space of the intervening years, he would distribute his finds among his many homes, including the Fifth Avenue aerie, a Southampton estate, a Palm Beach villa, and a Mendocino retreat. With the exception of the last, all were maintained by his wife as he had left them, until she in turn died last spring. Like all great eyes, Gary’s defies biographical explanation, although it would be instructive to know that he was born in 1927 and hailed from Cincinnati. Of course it didn’t hurt that his father had “quite a bit of taste” (although his mother’s was only “all right”), but had it not been for Gary’s grandfather, who had provided financing for Proctor & Gamble at the turn of the last century, he wouldn’t have been in a position to put that eye to such exuberant use. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Gary cut a dashing figure in 1949 when he arrived in New York after serving in the navy and attending Yale. He enrolled at the celebrated Parsons design school where Van Day Truex presided, and a young Albert Hadley taught, before he went on to decorating fame with Sister Parish at Parish-Hadley. Gary himself became a decorator at McMillen, the firm that was established by Eleanor Brown in 1924, which is still going strong today. One of the clients she assigned him was Prince Ivan Obolensky and his stunning wife Claire, an heiress from San Francisco. As fate would have it, Gary and Claire fell in love as the decoration progressed, and soon they would marry.My history with Gary began in 1994 when I became a private dealer. He was brought around by his then decorator David Kleinberg of Parish-Hadley, a former assistant of Albert’s, who has since achieved a great success on his own. It is unusual, to say the least, for someone who had been a decorator to hire one as Gary did, although it’s not unheard of. After all, Elsie de Wolfe and Nancy Lancaster had both hired Stephane Boudin of Jansen to assist in the decoration of their homes, just as Gary had previously hired Carlos Ortiz of Jansen, and Bob Denning of Denning & Fourcade, to do the same for him before David entered the picture. On that first visit Gary invited me over for drinks to the new apartment, where I was dazzled by the decoration, the collection, and by his wife. On the cusp of seventy, Claire was a beauty still. Having recently donated her Charles James and Halston dresses to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, she now wore Armani, which suited the rigorous lines of the Jean-Michel Frank, Jacques Quinet, and Marc du Plantier furniture that formed the new backdrop of her life. The high level of her own visual discrimination can be judged by this, and Gary’s charging her with placing the Serge Roche, Line Vautrin, and Alexandre Noll objects as they entered their collection. In the years that followed, I dined frequently with the Stephensons in New York, and stayed with them often in Southampton and Palm Beach. Our conversations in restaurants, at poolside, and in any one of the nine (yes, nine) private clubs to which they belonged, were an ongoing post-graduate-school seminar -- the one my alma mater never offered -- on the intersection of the decorative arts, the history of taste, and social history. The mere mention of some exalted personage from the world of design and high style in the past would prompt a fond memory, or a wickedly amusing story, that was revealing if not revelatory. And so, through the kind agency of Gary and Claire, the distance between those exalted figures of the past and me would collapse, from six degrees of separation to one. Louis Bofferding

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966)

AN 'ETOILE' TABLE LAMP, DESIGNED 1936

Details

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966)
AN 'ETOILE' TABLE LAMP, DESIGNED 1936
patinated bronze
26 ½ in. (67.3 cm.) high

Provenance

Galerie Vallois, Paris.

Lot Essay

cf. L.D. Sanchez, Jean-Michel Frank, Paris, 1980, p. 200 for an illustration of another cast;
F. Francisci, Diego Giacometti, Paris, 1986, vol. I, p. 115 for an illustration of another cast;
C. Boutonnet and R. Ortiz, Diego Giacometti, Paris, 2003, p. 42 for an illustration of another cast.

This lot is registered under the number AGD 3492 in the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Database.

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