NYC Art Advisor Lisa Schiff Sentenced to 2.5 Years in Prison

New York City art advisor Lisa Schiff has been sentenced to 30 months in prison today, March 19, for defrauding multiple clients out of approximately $6.5 million through business transactions in a years-long scheme. Schiff, who pled guilty last October to one count of wire fraud, was also ordered to pay forfeiture of over $6.4 million and over $9 million in restitution.

Schiff, who once helmed her namesake art advisory company Schiff Fine Art (SFA), was hit with her first lawsuit in May 2023, when three clients who were her long-time friends — real estate heiress and collector Candace Carmel Barasch, Richard Grossman, and Adam Sheffer (Grossman’s spouse, originally unnamed) — accused her of failing to fully compensate them for the $2.5 million sale of a jointly owned Adrian Ghenie painting.

Schiff had allegedly orchestrated the resale of the painting through Sotheby’s Hong Kong and paid out an initial amount to Barasch and Grossman before taking her agreed-upon 10% commission, but would not disburse the remaining $1.8 million between them. The three complainants accused Schiff of using the remaining funds to finance her “lavish lifestyle” of expensive apartment rentals, private school tuition for her son, first-class travel, and shopping sprees, and believed the incident was part of a “much larger Ponzi scheme”

After being contacted by several galleries about incomplete or never-initiated artwork purchases, Barasch and her husband subsequently filed a second suit against Schiff one week after the first, accusing Schiff of diverting around $2.5 to $3 million in funds wired from Barasch to pay off debts owed to other clients, maintain her lifestyle, and “consummate art purchases” of other clients. Additional documents yielded dozens of other claimants, ranging from galleries to collectors.

Upon Barasch’s second suit, Schiff executed an assignment for the benefit of creditors on behalf of SFA before ultimately filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in January 2024 — nine months before she pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in association with the $6.5 million defrauding scheme affecting at least 12 clients and 55 artworks by the likes of Sarah Lucas and Wangechi Mutu, among other artists.

Last month, Schiff gave an interview to the New York Times in which she said that the flashy lifestyle she built through her embezzlement “wasn’t even fun.”

“At the end, I thought that I was going to have a stroke,” she told the New York Times regarding her feelings of guilt.

Neither Schiff’s legal representation nor that of the Barasches, Grossman, and Sheffer immediately responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.

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