Infamous art dealer Douglas Chrismas is facing up to fifteen years in prison after being convicted of embezzling more than $260,000 from the bankruptcy estate of his Los Angeles gallery in 2016. Following a four-day trial, the jury in the case deliberated for less than an hour on May 31 before finding Chrismas guilty of three counts of embezzlement related to the Ace Gallery estate. In the first instance, he wrote and signed a $50,000 check from the gallery to Ace Museum, a nonprofit corporation that he owned; in the second, he funneled to Ace Museum $100,000 owed to the gallery by a third party for an artwork; and in the third, he shifted roughly $114,595 paid to the gallery by a third party for an artwork to the Ace Museum’s landlord, in an effort to keep current with the rent.
The Canada-born Chrismas, who is eighty, opened his first gallery at the age of seventeen. He moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and opened Ace Gallery there in 1986. An early proponent of Minimalism, Light and Space, and Land art, he played a crucial role in introducing West Coast audiences to the work of such now-celebrated artists as Sam Francis, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and James Turrell. A seemingly incorrigible scoundrel, he wore a path between the frying pan and the fire and back again during the decades he ran Ace Gallery, for example pleading no contest, the same year he opened it, to stealing $1.3 million in artwork by Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.
By the time he filed for bankruptcy in 2013, he had already done so numerous times. After that filing, he retained control of the gallery as it underwent Chapter 11 restructuring proceedings aimed at allowing it to continue to operate. However, in May 2016, forensic accountant Sam Leslie, who had recently been appointed to oversee the business following a missed bankruptcy payment, fired Chrismas and filed a report documenting millions of dollars diverted from Ace Gallery to various accounts and dozens of artworks moved to private storage.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the defense had sought to portray the long-nascent Ace Museum, the repository for the embezzled funds, as an intended gift to Los Angeles from Chrismas. The prosecution cast the museum as a monument to Chrismas’s greed and ego. Sentencing has been set for September 9.
