Douglas Chrismas, the Los Angeles art dealer who owned and operated Ace Gallery from 1961 to 2016, has been sentenced to two years in federal prison. Chrismas was convicted in May of three counts of embezzlement, for taking some $260,000 from Ace’s bankruptcy estate while he was acting as a trustee and custodian.
According to the New York Times, in a pre-sentencing statement, U.S. bankruptcy judge Robert Kwan, who oversaw Ace Gallery’s Chapter 11 proceedings, described the embezzlement conviction as “‘the tip of the iceberg,’ that is, only a part of a pervasive pattern and practice of wrongful diversion of funds,” and mentioned “losses of over $14 million to the bankruptcy estate.”
Bankruptcy trustee Sam Leslie said in a statement to the court that “the total amount of money he diverted, more than $14 million, would have been sufficient to pay all creditors in the Chapter 11 case. Instead, the remaining claims will never be paid.”
Chrismas founded Ace Gallery in 1961, when he was 17 years old, in his hometown of Vancouver, and moved to Los Angeles in 1966. From there, he expanded Ace to become one of the city’s preeminent blue-chip galleries, selling work by regional giants like Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Sam Francis, Robert Irwin, and Michael Heizer, among others.
Anjelica Huston and Douglas Chrismas at Ace Gallery in 2009. Photo: Chris Weeks/Getty Images
During his rise, he garnered a reputation for questionable business practices. Donald Judd famously took out an ad in Artforum to accuse Chrismas of selling re-fabricated versions of his work.
This was Chrismas’s first criminal conviction, but in 1986, he spent three days in jail after being arrested on grand theft charges after a collector accused him of losing $1.2 million worth of art he bought from Ace. There are also several stories of Chrismas sparring with artists (such as Irwin and Jannis Kounnellis) over allegedly misdirected funds.
When Chrismas was found guilty of embezzlement last year, assistant United States attorney Valerie Makarewicz told the jury that he had “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” Chrismas is scheduled to report to prison on February 17, and is currently out on bond.