![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/c452b962b97d2fae9b530a953c19a8815d-sized-FinalBoone.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Dina Litovsky for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
In the elevator of the uptown gallery L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan, which is cramped with staff, an art handler issues a sheepish but firm warning to the art dealer Mary Boone: \u201cThere\u2019s a Warhol behind you.\u201d He motions everyone to move gingerly to protect the painting. British New Wave plays from a speaker in the corner, intended to transport visitors to the era of the retrospective opening here in just 48 hours: \u201cDowntown\/Uptown,\u201d a show about the spark of the New York art scene in the \u201980s, with pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Warhol \u2014 plenty of Warhol \u2014 and more across two floors of L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan\u2019s Beaux-Arts townhouse.<\/p>\n
\u201cI seldom did installations that have so many works,\u201d Boone says. \u201cIt\u2019s so full. It\u2019s over the top.\u201d Boone, 73, at just about five feet tall with pin-straight black hair, is both physically unassuming and striking \u2014 an elegant pairing that has served her well. She ruled the \u201980s as a gallerist, elevating artists to a cultural status they\u2019d never before enjoyed, and \u201cDowntown\/Uptown\u201d is an implicit celebration of her work. Boone ran her own eponymous spaces both uptown and downtown for a combined 40 years but closed her galleries in 2019 after being sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for tax fraud<\/a>. The exhibition is her first formal curation since she was released five years ago. \u201cDifferent galleries have approached me about doing work with them, but it didn\u2019t feel organic or necessary,\u201d she says, taking a seat on the grand marble staircase that ascends the space. She\u2019s wearing a leopard-print Norma Kamali dress she bought in 1981 \u2014 a classic bodycon. (She wore it for a shoot with New York in 1982<\/a> in an issue that referred to her as both the \u201cnew queen of the art scene\u201d and the \u201cqueen of the art jungle.\u201d) It still fits perfectly. When the gallery asked her to put this show together in 2023, it felt natural to say \u201cyes.\u201d The explosion of artistic talent and commercial success of the \u201980s, Boone tells me, is \u201csomething I know.\u201d<\/p>\n In an airy second-floor room featuring one of Warhol\u2019s massive dollar-sign paintings and a double-decker Koons made of vacuum cleaners encased in acrylic, Boone runs into LGD gallerist Brett Gorvy. She listens patiently as he describes the concept. \u201cThe notion of \u2018Downtown\/Uptown,\u2019 for me, was the idea that the scene was downtown. Creativity was there,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd, actually, the aspiration is to become an uptown person, to go to Warhol\u2019s Factory, hang out there and go to Mr Chow\u201d \u2014 the 57th Street restaurant.<\/p>\n \u201cDid we invite Michael Chow to the show?\u201d Boone asks, a bit alarmed that a key player in the scene might have been overlooked. \u201cI would have,\u201d Gorvy says, \u201cbut Chow is in L.A.\u201d<\/p>\n Boone came of age in a cohort that worshipped the \u201960s \u2014 the Pop Art of Warhol and Lichtenstein, the abstractions of Frank Stella. But the \u201970s were fallow; observers at the time declared painting was dead. Financially shrewd and willing to nurture the talent of chaotic young personalities, Boone spearheaded the next decade\u2019s revival and was integral in fine art\u2019s transformation into a true commodity.<\/p>\n The task of representing this sublime moment from her past, Boone says, was \u201csomething simple.\u201d But \u201cDowntown\/Uptown\u201d required serious persuasion and Boone\u2019s connections; she sold many of the displayed works three or four decades ago. Though she describes her memory as \u201ca little slippery,\u201d her instincts remain sharp. On the wall at the top of the gallery\u2019s stairwell hangs an imposing Kruger silkscreen from 1987 with giant red text reading WHAT ME WORRY? Boone originally sold the piece to a billionaire car dealer, who later sold it to a collector in Aspen. When Boone asked to borrow the silkscreen in 2022 for a retrospective of the artist, the collector claimed she had lost it. \u201cHow do you lose an eight-by-ten-foot work?\u201d Boone asks. \u201cYou don\u2019t.\u201d Boone called around: \u201cShe\u2019d sold it to another dealer, and she didn\u2019t want to tell me.\u201d Boone is gleefully anticipating the collector\u2019s arrival at the show.<\/p>\n To gallerygoers, \u201cDowntown\/Uptown\u201d may seem like a homecoming for Boone after a catastrophe. But as she tells it, it\u2019s more as if she took a long vacation. According to her, the Feds began investigating her finances in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. They spent ten years, Boone says, \u201cjust going through my books and trying to find something on me.\u201d She wonders if she would have been treated differently were she a man. This was also the era of Occupy Wall Street. \u201cI was a woman selling unnecessary, glamorous things to rich people,\u201d Boone says wryly. \u201cWhat\u2019s not to hate?\u201d The new show would feature a large punching bag, painted by Basquiat decades before her legal troubles, with the name \u201cMARY BOONE.\u201d<\/p>\n At some point during the investigation, Martha Stewart, who served five months in federal prison for obstruction of justice related to an insider-trading case in 2004, caught wind of it. Boone says Stewart told her, \u201cThey have people they like to use as examples,\u201d and insisted, \u201cMary, get a criminal lawyer.\u201d Boone, who seems like a shark one moment and a na\u00eff the next, didn\u2019t listen: \u201cI figured I didn\u2019t do anything criminal. There were a lot of things I didn\u2019t really understand.\u201d She was accused of misrepresenting her personal spending (including $24,380 at beauty salons and nearly $14,000 at Herm\u00e8s) as business expenses, tallying about $3 million in tax evasion. Boone likes to emphasize that she pleaded guilty and wasn\u2019t convicted in a trial.<\/p>\n In May 2019, she entered a low-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut \u2014 where Lauryn Hill and Teresa Giudice have done time \u2014 and was released in June 2020, in the thick of COVID lockdowns. The picture the press painted was of a magnificent career gone bust. But in Boone\u2019s view, her scandal was only one piece of a greater changing of the guard: The Metro Pictures gallery closed, Barbara Gladstone died a few years later, and Boone heard rumors of a gallerist with dementia. \u201cIt\u2019s life,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s what everybody has to go through.\u201d<\/p>\n As for prison itself, Boone is blithe. \u201cTo tell you the truth,\u201d she says, \u201cI got to go to the gym every day. I read a book a day. It was very relaxing. I met some very interesting women that I probably wouldn\u2019t have met otherwise.\u201d It also didn\u2019t really impact her bottom line. She was back to dealmaking soon after and says 2022 was her best year to date, thanks to the pandemic: \u201cPeople were staying at home looking at their house and thinking, I need something for that wall.\u201d<\/p>\n Back on the second floor, Gorvy says he and Boone have often discussed, \u201cWhat is the point of doing a show like this? It\u2019s not about going backward in time.\u201d After all, the featured artists \u2014 save those who have died \u2014 are still showing and selling. \u201cWhat\u2019s been amazing about this is that the community still exists,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re not necessarily best friends; they\u2019re almost like siblings that come together in a reunion.\u201d What seems to unite them, beyond debut dates, is the fact that they\u2019ve prospered financially. They\u2019ve kept a seat uptown. Their work is so valuable, in fact, that at the opening, each room of the gallery would be manned by a security guard in a suit. Boone and Gorvy insisted that some of the pieces would be for sale. The transaction, they imply, is what shepherds these works into the future. Life will get you, but the art can move in the market.<\/p>\n Boone and Gorvy turn toward a display by Haim Steinbach, a shelf topped with ceramic figurines and a trio of black-and-white cornflakes boxes. It was on sale, likely for five figures. \u201cIt really came down to, How do we get an ultimate work?\u201d Gorvy says, \u201cNot something that would just be for exhibition but also that the owner would be willing to sell?\u201d<\/p>\n Boone nods. \u201cOtherwise,\u201d she says, \u201cit\u2019s just a vanity show.\u201d<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now<\/a>
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 22, 2025, issue of
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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 22, 2025, issue of
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