Tag: life-in-parties

Born in Pennsylvania to Egyptian parents, Boone moved to Los Angeles as a child after her father died. In Los Angeles, she says, “it was like every day was Saturday. We lived by the beach; you were always in the sand.” Growing up, she discovered she had a talent for drawing. “Everyone encouraged me to become an artist.”

Boone married the German art dealer Michael Werner in 1986. Their honeymoon, in Venice, overlapped with a professional commitment: One of Werner’s artists, Sigmar Polke, was included in the city’s Biennale. “It always seemed like the art world and our lives intermixed,” says Boone. Like her, Werner had emerged from a working-class background, and had earned a reputation for nurturing young talent. Though they divorced in the 1990s, the two remain close friends.

Boone studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. As a student, she caught the attention of the artist Lynda Benglis, who also lectured at universities. Benglis told her, “You can’t be in Providence—you have to be in New York.” Boone moved to the city in 1970 and hung out in the Max’s Kansas City scene, which was populated with the likes of John Chamberlain, David Bowie, and Patti Smith. Mostly, though, she found herself at the Odeon and the Ocean Club. “You’d go in, and there would be a table with Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Sarah Charlesworth. Then there’d be another group with David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and Ross Bleckner. It was just fun.”

Boone’s first gallery was at 420 West Broadway, which also housed the influential galleries run by divorced art world giants Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend. “I used to joke that when the elevator was broken, which was a lot of the time, people would come into my gallery instead of going up to see theirs.” Both became important mentors and friends of hers. Here, Sonnabend and Boone celebrate their joint birthday in October 1981. “I was turning 30, and she was not turning 30.”

Castelli joined forces with Boone to usher in the neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s. “Leo didn’t race to show my artists. I had to persuade him to do a show with me,” says Boone.

Boone met Werner in 1981 at the opening party for Norman Rosenthal’s landmark show “A New Spirit in Painting” at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Many of Werner’s artists, including Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, were on display, and Boone wanted to exhibit them in New York. “I was too young of a dealer to show them, but slowly we started working together.”

In 1987, Boone and Werner had their only child, a son named Max. After giving birth, “I just got a whim to have my hair cut off,” says Boone. “It was a lot of change becoming a parent. I was really lucky—I have a great kid.” Max has worked with both Boone and Werner, and recently struck out on his own as a gallerist.

“Jean-Michel found out where Andy Warhol would go to lunch, and he went there and started selling drawings to everybody,” says Boone, who staged a Basquiat show in 1984. “I made it my business to meet him.” At top, Basquiat and Boone are pictured at that exhibition in Boone’s gallery. “He had a thing with his mother. I think I became a substitute for his mother, and Andy became a substitute for his father.” Warhol took the bottom photo in 1985, as Basquiat prepared for an opening. “He didn’t let the packers pack up his paintings. He rolled them up and dragged them.”

“I always liked artists who did something I had never seen before,” says Boone. She originally turned down the chance to represent Eric Fischl, known as the “bad boy of painting” for his voyeuristic style, but she eventually relented and worked with him for 30 years. The two are seen here at the opening of his show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1986.

Boone attends the 1990 launch party for Bob Colacello’s Andy Warhol biography, Holy Terror. She showed numerous Warhol works throughout her career, and he eagerly embraced her stable of young artists. “I think he really loved being the head figure,” says Boone. Warhol was the first person to show up to Boone’s inaugural Basquiat exhibition, together with “this man who was smaller than he was, and it turned out to be Manolo Blahnik. Andy tried to get him to buy a Basquiat painting, which was, like, $10,000 at the time. Maybe $5,000. Manolo said he was saving up his money to open a shoe store.”

“Nicole Miller and I have been friends since our days at RISD. We moved to New York together.” While Boone rose to the top ranks of the art scene, Miller’s fashion brand established her as a household name in the 1980s. “I’m very loyal, and so is she.”

When Boone first moved to New York, she worked at Bykert Gallery, which was run by Lynda Benglis’s boyfriend, Klaus Kertess. “At around four or five, all the artists would start coming in, like Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and Agnes Martin. Hearing these artists talk about art really was educational,” she says. Kertess left the gallery in 1975 to become a writer, and Boone decided to strike out on her own. “For every artist I ended up showing, I went to a thousand studios. Slowly, I put together a group.” Here, she is pictured with Eric Fischl (center) and Werner at Fischl’s 1985 solo show at Kunsthalle Basel.

Boone’s first brush with the press had come in 1974, when a young Anna Wintour asked to include her in a Harpers & Queen story on stylish young New York women. “I told her, ‘Please don’t write about me, because I don’t want to be talked about in terms of my clothes. I want to open my gallery.’ ” Nonetheless, Boone paid attention to fashion. “It started with Armani. I, and a lot of other dealers, wore the low-key gray.” She developed a taste for Chanel when she found a trove of vintage couture suits in her size at auction. “I bought one or two. Tina Chow bought the rest of them, like, 30. Then Lagerfeld took over Chanel, and I wore that most of the time.”

Julian Schnabel’s first solo show in New York, at Boone’s gallery in 1979, was a breakthrough for both artist and gallerist. Previously, Schnabel had worked as a cook at the trendy Ocean Club restaurant. (David Salle, another of Boone’s artists, also cooked there.) Schnabel’s plate paintings—literally paintings on broken plates affixed to a canvas—marked a break from the minimalism of the 1970s. “It was just something completely different,” Boone says.

Schnabel’s defection from Boone’s gallery to Pace, in 1984, was her first major setback. “I was heartbroken,” she says. Here, she poses with Schnabel’s son Vito at his gallery show in 2008. “It shows you life is just a circle of events. Hopefully, the good outweighs the bad.”

A 1982 New York magazine cover on the booming art market named Boone “The New Queen of the Art Scene.” The city had emerged from bankruptcy, and suddenly money was flowing into the art world. The article painted Boone as a new type of gallerist, one always ready to pour a glass of champagne or make 10 phone calls to close a sale. “I kind of blocked it out,” she says. “I became a symbol. But, listen, a lot of young women, like Thelma Golden, came up to me and said, ‘I wanted to go into the arts because of seeing that cover.’ ” She credits Wintour, then working as New York’s fashion editor, for her inclusion.

In the 1980s, a magazine asked a selection of gallerists how they celebrated a big sale. Most said with champagne or food. Boone said she bought a new pair of shoes. Her reputation as a shoe lover has followed her ever since. “Someone told me Warhol read that. Then I got my first invitation to lunch at the Factory,” she says. “I do like shoes, because they’re about moving forward. And particularly being a woman in what was still a man’s world, it was like taking steps.”

Parker Posey with Boone, played a fictionalized version of the gallerist in Schnabel’s 1996 film, Basquiat (right). Boone likes to separate herself from the character: “Parker asked me some things, but she pretty much did her own thing.” Even so, Boone is a fan of both the actor (“I wish she could play me in real life”) and the film. “This is Julian’s story about what he thinks of me, Jean-Michel, and himself. It’s a good movie because he’s a painter. A lot of the problem with movies about artists is believability.”

Initially, Boone and her band of artists were dismissed as a fad. “I never really listened to that,” says Boone. “I just had to keep doing serious shows.” Her 2025 exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents the people she worked with as the definitive 1980s American artists.

The exhibition includes a Barbara Kruger silkscreen bearing the phrase: what me worry? “I’ve shown that work three different times, and it’s never looked as good as it does here.”

The VIPs who have shown up to Boone’s galleries on opening night include Steve Martin, Monica Lewinsky, Diane Sawyer, Bianca Jagger, Katie Couric, and David Bowie, among many more. Here, she poses with Pharrell Williams and the artist KAWS at the opening of a 2013 show she organized. Nonetheless, Boone never chases celebrities on opening night. “There should be a lot of energy focused on the art and the artists.”