Arnold (Arne) Horlin Ekstrom

Arne Ekstrom, director of the Cordier & Ekstrom art gallery in Manhattan for 35 years, died on Monday at his home. He was 87 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Ekstrom opened his gallery in 1959 at 980 Madison Avenue, operating under a reciprocal agreement with Daniel Cordier, a gallery owner in Paris. He soon became known for idiosyncratic and far-ranging installations in which art and literature went hand in hand. In 1970, he staged an exhibition called "She," devoted to depictions of women in art over many centuries. The show had a catalogue essay by Donald Barthelme. Three years later, Margaret Mead wrote a preface for the catalogue for an exhibition called "Him." In 1972, Octavio Paz wrote the text for a show titled "Bestiary," in which the theme was animals.

In his early years, Mr. Ekstrom showed work by many senior artists, among them Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Lindner and Romare Bearden. But he had a keen eye for the new, and what he liked most was to foster the talents of younger people. Among the artists he nurtured were Anton van Dalen, Leonard Stokes and Robert Ohnigian.

After 20 years on Madison Avenue, Mr. Ekstrom lost his lease and moved to loftlike quarters at 417 East 75th Street, Manhattan, where he remained a watchful and well-spoken presence until his early 80's.

Arne Horlin Ekstrom was born in Stockholm on May 22, 1908. He moved to Manhattan in the 1930's and in 1933 married Parmenia Migel, who was to become well known as a ballet historian, the founder of the Stravinsky-Diaghilev Foundation and an insatiable collector of ballet material.

Early in World War II, Mr. Ekstrom enlisted in the Army. Only recently, with the release of classified documents, did his family learn that when he was sent to North Africa he became the American liaison officer to a British unit that specialized in strategic deception. In that capacity, he ran agents in North Africa and later in Italy.

In 1944, he became intelligence officer for the deception unit of the American Sixth Army. Fifty years later, in the Quarterly Journal of Military History, he was praised as "the ablest of all the American deceivers."

His awards for military service included the Legion of Merit and, from the French Government, the Croix de Guerre. After the war, Mr. Ekstrom entered Government service and was attached to the United States Embassy in Paris from 1946 to 1955. After some years in Washington, he returned to Manhattan and turned to the world of art.

He is survived by a son, Nicolas, of Manhattan, a landscape designer and a director of the Horticultural Society of New York.

New York Times, The (NY)

Date: May 19, 1996