Lisa Schiff sat at her kitchen table, trying to explain how she went from being one of the world’s most celebrated art advisers to a high-society pariah and a felon.
It was her first time speaking openly about her crimes. But the setting for this unburdening wasn’t her old $25,000-a-month TriBeCa loft, or the V. I.P. lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach where she once brokered art deals for the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio; rather, it was a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s unfussy Stuyvesant Town, where, she said, she needs her parents to pay her rent. Ms. Schiff, 55, has lost her money, all her friends and every shred of influence.
“You become the lie,” Ms. Schiff said, fidgeting with a light-up Lego Christmas tree in her hands. Where once she collected artworks by Nan Goldin and Damien Hirst, today snapshots of her 12-year-old son decorate the apartment. “And I didn’t have anyone to talk to because everyone around me was either paid to be there or was family.”
While her clients and friends saw a successful woman at the top of her career, she hid a secret. She was stealing from them. To conceal her theft, she would do things like pay one client with another’s money, or leverage their friendships to keep them believing that late payments were always almost on their way.
By the time it all came crashing down in 2023, she had stolen some $6.4 million, from at least a dozen people.
But out of all her transgressions, she seemed most ashamed of the glamour that gilded her crimes. Darting around in chartered helicopters and regularly burning through tens of thousands of dollars in shopping sprees at luxury stores, she said, like Loewe in Paris, wasn’t even fun.
“I was miserable in that helicopter. I was miserable in Loewe in my fancy outfit,” she said, bitter with herself about her own choices. “At the end, I thought that I was going to have a stroke.”
Today, clients who once jetted around the world with her buying art will speak of her only through a lawyer, Wendy Lindstrom, who represents seven of the people now suing her.
“Any attempt by Lisa Schiff to portray herself as remorseful is disingenuous at best,” Ms. Lindstrom said in an email.
An Art-World Ponzi Scheme
As an art adviser, Ms. Schiff was matchmaker between famous clients and the pricey paintings they wanted above their sofas. Behind the velvet ropes of art fairs, celebrities and art-world insiders alike sought her guidance on which pieces of art to buy with their millions. She was paid a commission for successful transactions.
They had good reason: Over her decades-long career, Ms. Schiff helped advance the field of advising from the vanity project of bored socialites into a respected profession, more akin to an asset management firm. Schmoozing at cocktail parties and lecturing clients as an ethics authority, she seemed like the ideal art guru: getting access to hot artists before their paintings jumped in value; discreetly brokering sales with the major auction houses; and warding off predatory dealers looking to upsell and overcharge novice collectors. She was everywhere, quoted in newspaper pages and speaking at museums. But all last year, she was missing from the cocktail circuit, and absent from the auction floors, except in the fine print: Listed atop three lots in a November auction at Phillips were the words, “Property to be sold to benefit the creditors of Lisa Schiff.”
That was because in October, Ms. Schiff had pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to defrauding the very clients she called friends. The proceeds of the sale would all go to pay back what she stole not just from clients but from an artist, a gallery and others.
The crime, which federal prosecutors have described in essence as an art-world Ponzi scheme, began in 2018 and involved some 55 artworks. Sometimes Ms. Schiff would directly siphon money to herself from the sale of her clients’ art; other times, as a go-between for a seller and client, she pocketed the money they gave her to make new purchases on their behalf, and never bought the art at all.
Ms. Schiff is scheduled to be sentenced March 19 and faces up to 20 years in prison.
“Lisa Schiff attempted to paint a picture of a successful fine art advisory business,” James E. Dennehy, assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office, said at her guilty plea. “It was actually a multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme. After half a decade of deceit, Ms. Schiff will now be held accountable for her lies.”
Her scheme ensnared clients who were far from art-world rookies. Under her direction, the real-estate heir Candace Barasch had become one of the art world’s top collectors, according to the magazine ARTnews. Another client was the veteran dealer Adam Sheffer, who once worked at top galleries like Mary Boone and Pace. He was a leader in the art market, even serving as an expert witness in another art fraud case, where he criticized the industry’s lack of due diligence.
For clients like them, she negotiated multimillion-dollar art purchases with noted dealers such as Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner as well as the major auction houses.
Today, Ms. Schiff is bankrupt, and her own art collection is being liquidated. Some of those who are suing her say they treated her like a member of the family, only to find they had been robbed.
‘I Can’t Be a Criminal’
The art Ms. Schiff grew up around in the early ’70s was limited to renditions of Depression-era photographs painted by her mother, which hung in their home in Kendall, Fla. The daughter of a prominent professor of medicine, with a center in his name at the University of Miami, Ms. Schiff said she considered her background privileged — not in terms of money, but gravitas.
“We grew up middle class, but rich in prestige and rich in education,” she said.
To illustrate her point, she said that the painful moment of her bankruptcy was when her library of costly art books was confiscated and sold to pay back her creditors. “I was enamored by the idea of knowledge,” she said — before revealing that she had not read most of them.
Ms. Schiff said she earned art history degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Miami before embarking on, but not completing, her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Instead, she joined the circus of the art market, energized by a front-row seat to the deals that shaped the next chapter of art history.
She assisted at Phillips auction house in the 1990s and later became a director at an Upper East Side gallery, Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art. She started her own advisory firm in 2002 and gradually became known as an early admirer of artists who would become market darlings, among them Christopher Wool, Glenn Ligon and Matthew Wong. She frequently trumpeted her efforts to secure a Basquiat for Mr. DiCaprio. She said she also hired a P.R. firm to get her into “serious” publications that would raise her profile further.
In 2013, she helped found the VIA Art Fund, which has raised millions of dollars toward artist grants and projects. Today, there is no trace of Ms. Schiff on the organization’s website; according to court filings, Ms. Schiff owes the nonprofit’s first director, Jeanne Hagerty, and her husband, Thomas, nearly $2 million, including $925,000 they claim she never gave them after selling their Georgia O’Keeffe painting “Blue and White Abstraction.” In her interview with The Times, Ms. Schiff described the Hagertys as her dearest friends and godparents to her son. They did not respond to several calls for comment.
She was still jetting between art fairs in 2020, when things began to truly fall apart. Ms. Schiff checked herself into a San Francisco rehab center to combat what she said was an addiction to alcohol and reckless behavior. It was, she said, an attempt to stop stealing and figure out how to make her clients whole. But as soon as she was discharged, she said, with the mid-pandemic art market heating up, she went right back to living large off her clients’ money.
“I was a fake, a fraud every day,” Ms. Schiff said. “I hated when people would say nice things about me; when young people would say: ‘Oh my God, you are Lisa Schiff, you’re such a good art adviser!’” She added: “I felt like a walking corpse.”
As the threat of incarceration bore down, she fretted about the impact on her young son, whom she raises alone.
And still, she never stopped. “It just got so big and I got so scared. I have a kid and I was just like, ‘I can’t be a criminal,’” she said. “I didn’t allow myself to even think that I was doing criminal behavior.”
Coming Undone
Over the years, Ms. Schiff blurred professional lines, something her accusers now claim was deliberate. After Ms. Barasch, the real-estate heir, built a collection of nearly 600 artworks with her help, she described Ms. Schiff in chummy terms, referring to her as her “partner in crime” in a 2019 article in The New York Times.
Ms. Schiff, however, may have had another view of such collaborations: “I feel like advising is just my way to buy things that I wish I could buy myself,” she confided in a 2015 interview in Cultured magazine.
The two women spoke multiple times a day, according to a complaint Ms. Barasch and her husband, Michael, filed in New York State Supreme Court in 2023. They accused Ms. Schiff of making off with nearly $2 million of the $2.5 million from the sale of a painting owned by the couple and their friend Mr. Sheffer, by the Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie. Schiff Fine Art Advisory, her company, would directly handle her clients’ money in art transactions rather than letting buyers and sellers settle up themselves. She took advantage of the access to their cash.
Clients were unaware of her schemes for years, though Ms. Barasch noted in court documents that Ms. Schiff’s spending on herself sometimes took her aback; she was struck when Ms. Schiff ran up a bill of $32,000 at Loewe in Paris, for things like $573 leggings and $953 jeans.
Ms. Schiff said the spending was an effort to keep up with her high-rolling clients. “Did I need to stay in the same hotel as them or fly business?” she said. “No, but I felt like I had more mojo and confidence waking up in the same place as they did.” She said she now understands she was “misguided.”
Ms. Schiff’s career imploded on a morning in May 2023 on a TriBeCa sidewalk, in a meeting with Mr. Sheffer. The two friends had met to preview the season’s contemporary art auctions. Mr. Sheffer and Ms. Barasch were still waiting for the rest of the money from the Ghenie painting she had sold. Ms. Schiff told him point blank: Their $1.8 million was gone.
Then she turned and fled down White Street.
“I am sorry and have every intention to make things right,” Ms. Schiff texted Mr. Sheffer later, according to a lawsuit. “I know you will never speak to me again but I will try to make it right regardless.”
Then she texted Ms. Barasch, who days later would add another suit, accusing her of similar thefts. They included siphoning away $390,000 Ms. Barasch had wired her to pay for a Sarah Lucas sculpture and shorting the same gallery a quarter of a million dollars for a sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, whose work was exhibited on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Know that I love you,” Ms. Schiff wrote.
But by then Ms. Schiff had already begun the process of turning herself in, according to her lawyer, Randy Zelin. A few days later, she voluntarily turned over dossiers she compiled outlining her theft to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. On Oct. 17 of the next year, Mr. Zelin dropped her off in a taxi at 100 Centre Street, where she surrendered herself for arrest.
None of the dozens of entities and people listed as creditors of Ms. Schiff in court filings responded personally to requests for comment. Calls to their lawyers were either not returned, or were declined on their behalf.
Today the art world is reeling over not just her deception, but also the stain Ms. Schiff has left on the largely unregulated business of art advising.
“She spoke at great lengths about the importance of transparency, about ethical conduct, about mitigating conflicts of interest, which are all the right things to say,” said Alex Glauber, the president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. “But as the curtain has been pulled back we have seen the reality was as far from her story as one could imagine.”
In the interview, Ms. Schiff acknowledged how convincing she was at playing the moral art adviser.
It’s exactly why, she said, “I’m the worst one.”
‘A Case Study in What’s Problematic’
Ms. Schiff’s actions continue to reverberate in a relationship-based business where credibility is everything. “The art world is a small group of people that keep socializing with one another in different parts of the world,” said Adam Green, an art adviser, “and that can help you get access to galleries and artworks.”
The $63 billion art industry is built partly on trust — sometimes to its detriment. There are advisers like Mr. Green, for example, who refuse to manage payment between collectors and galleries. “I found it odd that money was going through Lisa,” he said.
Ms. Schiff was never asked to join the invitation-only Association of Professional Art Advisors, Mr. Glauber, the president, who is also an adviser himself, said. She did not qualify for membership because she was also a nascent art dealer, which is against the group’s bylaws given the potential conflict of interest it poses.
“Unfortunately her situation is a case study in what’s problematic with an industry like ours,” he said.
But even her critics had to admire Ms. Schiff’s aesthetic taste. Her recognition helped lift the careers of major artists like Richard Prince and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Indeed, on a brisk day in November, Mr. Glauber was at Phillips auction house in Manhattan, bidding for a client on a photograph of a Fire Island beach by Tillmans — a piece of Ms. Schiff’s collection, on the block to pay back the people she cheated. The criminal connection did not mean a bargain; it went for nearly $36,000 — almost double its presale estimate. Mr. Glauber put down his paddle, outbid.
But her 1988 painting by Richard Prince went unsold. The people she stole from are still not whole.
The title of the work: “Are You Kidding?”
Legos and a Sentencing Date
In her nondescript Stuyvesant Town apartment, awaiting sentencing, Ms. Schiff has spent her days constructing a replica Hogwarts from Legos. Evenings at gallery openings have been replaced by meetings at Alcoholics and Debtors Anonymous.
She said she writes and rewrites apology letters to her victims but that her lawyer has advised her to hold off on sending them. When she feels the urge to go on a spending spree, she heads to Blick Art Materials for a handful of stickers and pens. She is focused, she said, on setting a better example for her son and making plans for his care should she be imprisoned.
“I feel so guilty to my victims, so guilty,” she said. “But I am shocked that I didn’t think through what I was potentially doing to my son.” If she does end up serving a prison sentence, she said, her brother will care for him.
Ms. Schiff continues to believe that in some ways she was a good art adviser. She listed her tireless efforts to help her clients amass their collections, and claimed she often eschewed making money to steer clients toward art in which she truly believed.
Then she caught herself.
“I am the worst kind of perpetrator, because I seem so good,” Ms. Schiff said. “I’m a good person, I’m a good friend, I am loving and generous, I work hard — and I stole your money.”
