The present lot is among the powerful selection of works by women artists from the Allan Stone Collection. Not only was Allan Stone a pioneering supporter of Abstract Expressionism and emerging artists, he also celebrated works by women who were forging new ground in the world of art, often without the support or recognition of the larger art community. Driven by personal experience and the need for expression, these women created inventive works exploring politics, gender roles, storytelling, abstraction and art history.
He could make a visual decision very quickly. It was like love at first sight. He trusted his instincts.
Lorraine Shemesh
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.
Dalia Ramanauskas b. 1936
Dalia Ramanauskas was born in 1936 in Kaunas, Lithuania. She came to the United States in 1949, where she later graduated from Southern Connecticut College in 1958. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA; the Albright Knox Museum, NY; the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania; the Norfolk Museum of Art, CT and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA; among others. Ramanauskas is represented in several permanent collections such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Minnesota Museum of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, NY, the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, the Fine Arts Museums, CA, and the Yale University Art Gallery, CT.
A master of her medium, Dalia Ramanauskas brings heightened focus to the memorabilia of daily life through her meticulous drawings of paper cups, playing cards and other everyday curiosities. Combining the sensibility of the old masters with the subtle unrealities of Magical Realism, Ramanauskas’ still lifes are imbued with a formal tension, poetic atmosphere and whimsical sense of humor.
