BROKEN ARTED

Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher were, until recently, grandes dames of the art market, outfitting the most powerful people in the world with killer portfolios. Then, in a flurry of mutual allegations ranging from sexual favors to fraud, the two women parted ways. As their battle heads to court

- EVGENIA PERETZ reports

Sitting with Barbara Guggenheim in the stately, well-appointed living room of the Park Avenue apartment that she shares with her second husband, the wealthy venture capitalist Alan Patricof, one feels as if in the presence of a Sargent portrait, if he were painting in sunblasted, minimalist 2025. Guggenheim is dressed beautifully in a crisp midi-length white skirt, white sweater (both by Attersee, a brand founded by her niece Isabel Wilkinson Schor), and white Loewe sneakers. The look matches her sleek white-blond hair pulled back in a clip. At 78, her face is as unlined as that of a 40-year-old, her jawline exquisitely sharp. From the viewer's position, Guggenheim—the pioneer and grande dame of the rarefied field of art advising—looks every inch the woman who has achieved it all and wants for nothing.

She didn’t have children, but she had a younger woman in her life: her business partner Abigail Asher, who may as well have been a daughter. Together, over the course of more than three decades, they filled the homes of billionaires and celebrities (Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg) with work of blue-chip artists while elevating the hallways of megacorporations like Coca-Cola and Sony. “I considered her almost a part of my family,” Guggenheim says. “I even personally paid for a part of her son’s school tuition. That was not a loan—it was my gift to them.”