That was years ago, before Guggenheim and Asher’s professional love story exploded in the worst kind of divorce—with dueling legal complaints, personal attacks, and scandalous claims about sex and corruption. Guggenheim is alleging that Asher stole from their company to fund her lifestyle and that she launched her own competing advisory in secret. Asher is countering that it’s Guggenheim who dipped into the business, and that she had been “bullying, threatening, and gaslighting” Asher for the better part of her career. Both women are aghast at the other’s claims. Art world colleagues, still reeling from the conviction of top art advisor Lisa Schiff for defrauding clients out of millions, are in fresh states of shock. After all, the two women were a bedrock of the industry and seemed to be the perfect match. Guggenheim was the high-flying, glamorous face of the firm, giving lectures around the country, pairing masterpieces with masters of the universe. Asher was the younger, serious Brit working out of New York, bringing in a new generation of moneyed clients and nurturing them with care and fastidiousness. “It really did seem at the time like a match made in heaven,” says LA art adviser Patricia Peyser, who has worked closely with them for 20 years, and admires them both.
Now, big-league names on both sides are jumping to each woman’s defense. “Abigail’s as honest as the day is long, an absolute stickler for form,” says longtime friend Adam Chinn, former COO of Sotheby’s, who’s done multiple deals with her. “She’s professional to the point of being beyond meticulous.” As for Guggenheim, her close friend Michael Ovitz, CAA cofounder and a major collector, says, “She’s one of the most trustworthy people that I know. I’ve never ever in 45 years caught her in anything duplicitous, any fibs, any storytelling, any lack of integrity. And Abigail’s trying to destroy her at this time is just crazy.”
Indeed, Asher’s complaint is the more personal of the two. And today Guggenheim is stung. It was filled, Guggenheim says, “with vindictive, crazy lies, and exaggerations that were very dismaying to see, very upsetting from someone I had had a relationship with for three decades…. There’s only personal allegations and character assassination.” As Guggenheim continues talking back in the Park Avenue apartment, the iciness melts—her voice shakes at times and her blue eyes evince vulnerability. The impression of her shifts to lioness in winter, doing her best to keep her head high and hold on to her name and reputation as the woman who put her industry on the map.
Guggenheim is not related to the Guggenheim museum family—though having that name couldn’t have hurt. She didn’t come from wealth. Her father was the owner of dress shops in Woodbury, New Jersey. In 1968, when she moved to New York to start on her master’s in art history at Columbia, there was just one major gallery in SoHo, the Paula Cooper Gallery. She worked her way through graduate school by giving talks at the Whitney Museum every Saturday and Sunday about whatever art was up. One day in the mid-1970s, one of the women in the group asked if Guggenheim would take her to SoHo to visit some galleries; by now more were popping up in the increasingly exotic neighborhood, filled with the world’s most avant-garde characters—think SoHo circa Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. As uptown’s guide through this exciting demimonde, Guggenheim could see that she was on to something. In 1975 she started her own business, Art Tours of Manhattan, taking locals and tourists to museums, galleries, and artists’ studios, like those of Bernar Venet and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. “I had to really understand what that artist was doing, and be able to explain it to people who didn’t have an art vocabulary but had the sensitivity and wanted to learn,” she says. There were plenty of rich people among the crowd. As Guggenheim tells it, a certain woman had just bought an apartment in UN Plaza, hired Angelo Donghia, the famous designer of the day, to decorate it, and now she wanted paintings—could Guggenheim help her? “I advised them to buy a Lichtenstein painting, a Donald Judd sculpture, and several other things. And at the end of the year, I looked at my balance sheet and I saw I had made a lot more money helping this woman buy art for her apartment than I did on many, many, many tours. But I’d never met anyone who could afford to have a painting before.”
When she turned this into a business in 1981—Barbara Guggenheim Associates (BGA)—she was the only one doing work of that kind; there were other advisers out there, but they worked for museums. New galleries were exploding—“the Lower East Side became the hot spot,” recalls Guggenheim, who’d feed their business with a growing stream of clients. “Dealers, gallerists, and auction houses were delighted to see me bringing new clients to their businesses.” Uptown meanwhile, Impressionism was all the rage. “If you went into an apartment on Fifth Avenue, it would have French 18th-century furniture, puddling drapery, and French Impressionist paintings.” She recalls the couple trying to replicate the look, telling her, “‘We like Renoir, but we can’t afford it. What do we do?’ So I introduced them to American Impressionism, and they went on and created one of the best collections of American Impressionism in the world.”
