LA–based auctioneer Michael Barzman as admitted to playing a major role in the forgery of 25 works falsely credited to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The Orlando Museum of Art had supposedly lucked into a storage unit full of previously unseen paintings by Basquiat, which it was showing to the public for the first time.
The truth is that the paintings were NOT the work of Basquiat, but a series of forgeries by LA auctioneer Barzman and his accomplice identified only as J.F.
Barzman, who previously denied any involvement in the forgery effort, yesterday pleaded guilty to charges of making false statements to the FBI, acknowledging that he enlisted an accomplice, known only as J.F., to create the works, in 2012, with the intention of selling them on eBay as authentic Basquiat paintings.
The plea agreement, according to a statement issued by the Central District of California U.S. Attorney’s Office reads,
J.F. spent a maximum of 30 minutes on each image and as little as five minutes on others, and then gave them to [Barzman] to sell on eBay.
[Barzman] and J.F. agreed to split the money that they made from selling the fraudulent paintings.”
Barzman had been earning a living auctioning off the contents of abandoned storage spaces in the LA area when he created a backstory for the fake Basquiats. He said that the paintings were made in 1982 and sold to the now-deceased screenwriter, Thad Mumford for $5,000.
According to Barzman, he accidentally stumbled across the works while emptying Mumford’s storage locker in 2012, after the writer fell behind on his payments for the space.
Barzman sold the paintings, all made on cardboard, to storage hunter William Force and a backer, Lee Mangin, for $15,000. (25 Basquiat’s for $15K? They HAD to know they were fake!)
After Aaron de Groff, then former director of the Orlando Museum of Art (who was fired over this episode) had them “authenticated“, the 25 previously unseen works were shown in the OMA exhibit.
The show was raided by the FBI’s Art Crime Team on June 24, 2022, a week before its June 30 closing before the show traveled to Italy.
Mumford told the FBI that he had never purchased or stored any works by Basquiat, whom he said he had never met.
One of the works had been painted on a flattened box fragment with the printed instruction,
Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here
That packaging featured a typeface not in use by FedEx until 1994 —six years after Basquiat died.
Prior to his confession, the FBI pointed out that one of the works had been painted over an address label –with own Barzman’s name on it.
Barzman is now facing up to 5 years in prison.
A former auctioneer has admitted he helped create and verify 25 fake Basquiat paintings that were seized from the Orlando Museum of Art last year https://t.co/s8HmEkC5vy
— CNN (@CNN) April 14, 2023
