Their Warhols Are at the Whitney. Their Ugly Divorce Is on Display, Too.

“It was way over even what I wanted,” she said. “I knew about 30 people at my wedding. It had about 500 or 600.”

Guests included a who’s who of art-world machers, including Peter Brant, the paper magnate, and his wife, Stephanie Seymour; Aby Rosen, the real estate developer; Larry Gagosian, the high-powered gallery owner; and Steven A. Cohen, the financier who last year bought a prized Roy Lichtenstein painting from Agnes Gund for $165 million.

The newly wed Ms. Mugrabi quickly learned her role in the family empire.

“I just copied his mother, and she told me what to do,” she said. “She’s like, ‘Well, you just do the home part with the entertaining. The way we run our business is mostly through the home, because we don’t have a gallery.’”

For more than a decade, the couple enjoyed the perks of a billionaire lifestyle.

“Every summer we went to Sardinia, to Italy, to Portofino,” Ms. Mugrabi said. “We went on lots of different yachts. Aspen. Miami. We went to St. Barts three times minimum, a year.”

The couple sometimes flew commercial, other times on her father-in-law’s private jet, a Gulfstream V acquired from the casino magnate Steve Wynn. On the global art-fair circuit — a blur of FIACs, Friezes and Art Basels — they favored suites at Claridges in London and the Plaza Athénée in Paris.

Ms. Mugrabi recalled one gathering at the Venice Biennale, early in the relationship.

“We went on Paul Allen’s yacht, and everybody was wearing big ball gowns,” she said, referring to Mr. Allen’s 414-foot-long yacht, Octopus. “I was a young girl and I remember thinking, ‘This is intense.’”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/style/david-libbie-mugrabi-divorce-art.html?partner=rss&emc=rss