For more than 40 years Ms. Boone, 67, has been a fixture in the ever-changing art world, rising from secretary to gallery owner, showing the work of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, sometimes courting controversy and occasionally becoming embroiled in high-profile disputes. She is one of the most prominent art world figures to face prison since 2002, when the former chairman of Sotheby’s, A. Alfred Taubman, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison and fined $7.5 million for leading a price-fixing scheme with Christie’s that swindled customers out of more than $100 million.

Prosecutors with the United States attorney’s office had asked that Ms. Boone be sentenced to as much as three years in prison for the crimes she had pleaded guilty to — two counts of filing false tax returns. They said Ms. Boone had reported false business losses, used business funds to pay for more than $1.6 million in personal expenses, like renovations to her home, and then falsely claimed those personal expenses as business deductions.

But her lawyers had asked for a sentence of home confinement, probation and community service. They also submitted more than 100 letters attesting to her good works from friends, artists and collectors including the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, whom she once represented.

Ms. Boone was born in Erie, Penn. and had a childhood that her lawyers described as “marked by tragedy and poverty.” Her father died at an early age, they said, and her mother struggled daily to survive. But after opening her own gallery in 1977 in SoHo, she quickly gained attention while selling works by Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Ross Bleckner. In 1982, when she was 30, New York magazine published a story about her titled, “The New Queen of the Art Scene.”

Her gallery was considered by many to be at, or near, the white hot center of the ’80s art boom. The works she displayed there, the critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, were “seen as slanting heavily toward an overtly macho form of Neo-Expressionist painting.”