The verdict, which was first published in the Los Angeles Times, marks the end of a tumultuous career for the 80-year-old contemporary art dealer, who now faces a statutory maximum sentence of 15 years in federal prison.

Allegations of fraud and dirty dealing have followed Chrismas since the 1970s. But the dealer, who was once considered among the most powerful in the US, with a roster that held names as influential as Richard Serra and Ed Ruscha, was long able to avoid prosecution, despite accusations of fabricating works, withholding payments to his artists, and refusing to return works that hadn’t sold.

The first major lawsuit came in the mid-1970s when artist Robert Motherwell sued him for the disappearance of nine works. A decade later, Chrismas was accused of losing $1.2 million worth of art that collector Frederick Stimpson had given Ace Gallery for safekeeping; he spent three days in jail on felony grand theft charges.

His current situation stems from the latest in a string of bankruptcy filings. In 2013, unable to pay rent on his 30,000-square-foot flagship gallery on LA’s Miracle Mile, Chrismas filed for Chapter 11. During the bankruptcy proceedings, which took place between 2013 and 2016, Chrismas remained Ace Gallery’s president, trustee, and custodian.

It was during this time that prosecutors said Chrismas embezzled $264,595 from the bankruptcy estate by writing checks to the Ace Museum, a nonprofit corporation that Chrismas owned and controlled, and securing funds owed the gallery from previous sales, some of which was given to Ace Museum’s landlord for the space’s $225,000 monthly rent.

According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors said during the trial that Ace Museum was meant to be “the culmination of [Chrismas’s] life’s work.”

“He wanted a legacy and he was willing to use other people’s money to buy that legacy,” David Williams, an assistant US attorney, said during the trial. “You can’t chase your dreams with somebody else’s money. That’s called stealing.”

Chrismas’s attorney, Jennifer Williams, disputed these claims during trial, saying “There’s no evidence, zero evidence that Mr. Chrismas as the owner of the gallery couldn’t make loans himself to other companies within his gallery universe.”

Chrismas was arrested by the FBI in July 2021 on three federal counts of embezzlement, and released the following day on $50,000 bail. In 2022, a federal court ordered Chrismas to pay $14.2 million in a bankruptcy case that dated back to 2013.

A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for September 9.

Online bidding has been open since August 12 for roughly 300 artworks that represent the last inventory of Ace Gallery, whose roster included sought-after artists for decades. The auction is being hosted on LiveAuctioneers, and it is being managed by ThreeSixty Asset Advisors, a firm whose specialities include the liquidation of insolvent businesses. The auction was first reported in the Art Newspaper.

Proceeds from the sale will be used to settle debts outstanding since Chrismas filed for bankruptcy in 2013. Bidding closes on September 13.

Chrismas founded Ace Gallery in 1967 and, over 50 years, built a formidable profile on its early promotion of marque talents in Minimalism, Light and Space Art, and Land art, including Richard Serra, Michael Heizer, and Ed Ruscha. A 2022 ARTnews exposé detailed decades of allegations of disappearing unsold artworks, withheld payments, financial mismanagement, and the fabrication of certain works. (The sculptor Donald Judd famously took out an ad in Artforum accusing the gallery of staging an exhibition “wrongly attributed” to the artist.)

Ace Gallery filed for bankruptcy in 2013 amid what Chrismas claimed was a real-estate spat with the gallery’s landlord. Three years later, after failing to post a court-ordered payment of $17.5 million, Chrismas was fired from Ace Gallery by Sam Leslie, the forensic accountant assigned to the gallery’s bankruptcy proceedings. According to the report Leslie filed with the court in May 2016, Chrismas also had some 60 artworks that had not been accounted for in his bankruptcy trial in a private storage facility.

In July 2021, Chrismas was charged with three federal counts of embezzlement. The following May, a federal court ordered him to pay $14.2 million in a bankruptcy case that began in 2013. By 2022, he was the subject of 55 lawsuits filed under his own name and various business names and had declared several bankruptcies.

The artworks and objects—described on the LiveAuctioneers website as “the final works in the ACE Collection and the end of an era”—are a paltry monument to Ace’s former holdings. Lots range from vintage Issey Miyake couture to a Chuck Close daguerreotype and several Chris Taggart sculptures.

The most highly priced work is a 1977 aluminum bench by Robert Wilson, the visual artist and theater director who founded New York’s Watermill Center. The bench (which has a broken leg, according to LiveAuctioneers) was created for Wilson’s play I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. The high estimate is $29,200; the current bid is $2,900.

Laddie John Dill, “Contained Radiance: Miracle Mile,” 2015, installation view.

COURTESY ACE GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

Laddie John Dill is best known today for his weighty abstract slabs that seem to have been painted with—not just on—stone. But Dill emerged some 45 years ago, on both coasts, with a series of works fabricated out of light and sand. It turns out these were merely the tip of a neon iceberg.

In the late 1960s Dill produced and exhibited a hefty number of delicate and eccentric “lines of light” made out of forged glass and agitated gas. He did not show them again until 2011, when the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative came along and valorized Southern California art of the postwar years. Indeed, these precocious early works of Dill’s proved to be one of the major “finds” of the Getty initiative. Dill has since updated a few of them and fabricated more, but those that remain from 1969 dominate the gathering.

Laddie John Dill, ‘Contained Radiance: Miracle Mile,’ 2015, installation view.

COURTESY ACE GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

This is not to imply that the 1969 works are more effective—more beguiling, that is, in their luminescence, more playful in their sequencing of elements, more mysterious in the way they hug the shadows—than are those realized or completed in the last year. Several of the later pieces are among the most moving of the works in the exhibition, including one handsome multipartite piece apparently fabricated to “activate” work within the site of certain gallery windows.

Dill calls his reed-thin, ramrod-straight objects “Light Sentences.” They are composed of discrete colored segments arranged in sequences, as if they were words comprising distinct phrases. They play with our tendency to “read” such alignments, whether or not we take them in as whole entities. We scan them left to right when horizontal, top to bottom when vertical. When hung on walls near one another, they assume the configuration of paragraphs.

Ultimately, the “Light Sentences” reach a level of poetic self-containment when isolated in dark, recessed spaces, hovering like disembodied hands, or when paired with other multicolored glow-sticks that somehow match or “answer” them symmetrically. In such cases, Dill’s lines of luminescence take over our optical perception and reveal themselves not merely as neon art in the wake of Lucio Fontana, Dan Flavin, and Stephen Antonakos, but as Light and Space art in the spirit of Robert Irwin and James Turrell.