A Bitter battle has erupted over the $300 million estate of famed art dealer and collector Allan Stone. His widow, Clare Stone, has accused the executor of his estate, Lelia Wood-Smith, of improperly buying an $8.5 million Connecticut house with his money and moving $200 million of his art into it without court approval.
Stone, a leading collector who opened his gallery in 1960, owned works by Willem de Kooning, Wayne Thiebaud, sculptor John Chamberlain and Andy Warhol. He died in 2006, leaving his estate to his wife of 40 years in a trust. But Stone's children and other executors disagreed about how his art should be handled, so Wood-Smith, a family friend and lawyer, was appointed independent trustee and executor in 2007.
But now Clare is demanding Wood-Smith be removed. Her court papers claim that Wood-Smith bought an $8.5 million Greenwich property without court approval and moved "the bulk" of the artwork into the house, where she never lived. The papers also claim Wood-Smith entered Clare's upstate Purchase home in June 2010, "removing everything, including her dining-room table, her furniture and her rugs . . . on the pretense that the home had to be improved."
