Boone teamed up with respected young dealer Zach Feuer—who has a radar for his generation not unlike the one Boone had for hers but lacks her deep pockets—to produce a film and mount a show of multimedia artist Luis Gispert in both of their Chelsea galleries. Gispert says the experience was educational, and not just because Boone knows how to work a room. “She runs a very tight ship, and she’s definitely the captain there,” he says. “I tend to have a big personality and a big ego, and Mary does too, so we would clash, but in the end we’d figure it out.”
Gispert is far from the first artist to note a tendency for Boone to be controlling and overbearing. It’s not that she interferes with the creative process. Barbara Kruger, for example, says Boone has never pressured her to produce more, “because there’s no way I’m going to do a show a year and become a Santa’s workshop, and she understands that.” Fischl, though, recalls coming to loggerheads with Boone in 2003 when he was preparing for an exhibition. The paintings were markedly different for him, and shortly before the opening, he says, he grew anxious about finishing them. “I called her and asked if I could postpone it,” he says. “And she said no, the announcements were out, the advertisements were out. We got into a really ugly moment. But I thought we had kind of resolved it. Then it turned out that in fact we hadn’t resolved it, that she had decided she was going to open the show without anything being in the show.” Rather than giving in and rescheduling, Boone “just simply closed the gallery, and people came to the opening to find a gallery that was closed,” Fischl says. “It was vindictive.”
Boone has a different take on the incident, insisting it wasn’t a big deal. For most of the day of the opening, she says, “I sat at the front desk telling people it wasn’t happening.” But she can’t resist adding that Fischl held on to the canvases to show to a visiting museum director: “The work was in the studio, and it was finished. He just didn’t want to give it to me. Eric had known for two years what the dates of the show were.”
“She’s somebody who never used to be able to hear ‘no,’” Fischl says. “It did not register.” Now, though, “she gets it. She’s changed radically. Dramatically but slowly, if that’s possible. She’s really moved from a mono-focused, obsessive, driven character who could be bullying, infuriating, quick to argue and ultimately isolated to somebody who—through her spiritual development, her revelations—serves her community.”
