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A Los Angeles auctioneer has agreed to plead guilty to making false statements to federal investigators and has admitted to helping create fake artworks that were displayed last year at the Orlando Museum of Art as previously unknown works of celebrated artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California filed court papers on Tuesday announcing the plea by Michael Barzman, nine months after the FBI raided the museum and seized 25 paintings that had been hanging in its Basquiat exhibit, “Heroes & Monsters.”
In court documents, prosecutors said Barzman, 45, of North Hollywood, had admitted to helping create between 20 and 30 fake artworks and then marketing them for sale as if they were authentic Basquiats.
Prosecutors said Barzman had worked closely with another man, identified only by the initials J.F., who took the lead in creating the works. The associate spent as little as five minutes and no more than 30 minutes in creating each piece, according to the plea agreement.
The pair then placed the works outside to weather them so they would look as if they had been created decades ago, according to court records. Barzman sold the works and gave half the profits to his associate, prosecutors said.
Court documents also say that Barzman created false provenance for the fraudulent paintings, including a bogus story that they had been found in a storage unit, and then also created false documents to bolster that narrative.
He told investigators that he had sold the works to several buyers. They eventually ended up on view at the Orlando, Florida, museum where, prosecutors wrote in court papers, in an exhibit purported to feature 25 paintings by Basquiat, “most of the featured works had, in fact, been created by defendant and J.F.”
Barzman’s initial accounts to investigators told a far different story, according to the court records. He said during several interviews with investigators that he had no role in making the paintings, even when confronted with a cardboard canvas that had been seized from the museum. On the back of the artwork was a shipping label with Barzman’s name and former address, according to court records, but Barzman claimed he had never seen the work before.
Finally, in October 2022 Barzman admitted to agents that he “lied about the entire thing.” He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Barzman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the FBI said the investigation was ongoing.
For the Orlando museum, which did not comment on Tuesday’s announcement, the exhibition went from being a showcase of rarely seen Basquiats to an embarrassment.
Aaron De Groft, a former director and CEO of the Orlando museum, had mounted the “Heroes & Monsters” exhibition and defended the works even after their authenticity was questioned. But he was removed from his post shortly after the raid on June 24. The FBI showed up just days before the planned June 30 closing of the exhibit, after which the works were scheduled to be exhibited in Italy.
De Groft, who has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, did not respond to a request for comment. Previously, he told The New York Times that he had “absolutely no doubt” the works he put on display were Basquiats. “My reputation is at stake,” he said. (De Groft previously was director of William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art, through 2018, and joined the Orlando museum in 2021.)
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Basquiats have become hugely valuable in the decades since the artist’s death. One 1982 painting sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2017. Appraisals found that the works shown in Orlando would be worth tens of millions of dollars if they were authentic. (The Basquiat estate’s authentication committee disbanded in 2012, at a time when many artists’ estates had stopped trying to authenticate works because of the costly litigation that could ensue when their decisions were challenged.)
Soon after the “Heroes & Monsters” exhibition opened in February 2022 at the Orlando museum, a report in the Times raised doubts about whether the works were in fact by Basquiat. The article noted that one of the artworks being shown was painted on the back of a cardboard shipping box bearing an imprinted instruction to “Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here.” A designer who worked for Federal Express said the typeface on the cardboard had not been used until 1994 — six years after Basquiat’s death.
In May, when it had became clear that the FBI’s Art Crime Team was investigating the authenticity of the paintings, their owners insisted they were authentic Basquiats, created in 1982 and sold for $5,000 to a now-deceased television screenwriter, Thad Mumford, who they said had put them into a storage unit and forgotten about them.
Barzman, who for years ran an auction business that bought and resold the contents of unpaid storage units, said he had discovered the paintings among the contents of Mumford’s storage unit, according to the plea agreement. But later he acknowledged to investigators that he had “used the acquisition of Mumford’s stored items to create a false provenance for the fraudulent paintings,” court documents said.
For his part, Mumford denied ever purchasing any Basquiats in a 2014 interview he did with Elizabeth Rivas, a special agent for the FBI who for years led its Los Angeles-based art crime unit. The interview was referenced in an affidavit she filed last year as part of the effort to secure a search warrant for the museum.
The owners who brought the artworks to the Orlando museum for the exhibit have said in earlier interviews that they bought the paintings from either Barzman or from individuals who had purchased them on eBay from Barzman. Leo Mangan, one of the owners, said he and several others had spent about $15,000 for a total of 25 paintings, and then sold an interest in six of them to Los Angeles trial attorney Pierce O’Donnell, who worked closely with them to establish and market them as genuine Basquiats.
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Barzman told agents that the buyers repeatedly contacted him over the years, asking him to sign paperwork saying that the works did, in fact, come from the Mumford storage unit, according to court documents. He admitted to eventually having signed a notarized document stating that the works had come from the unit after being offered between $10,000 or $15,000 to do so, according to the court documents, but said he never got paid.
Later, according to court documents, he said he acknowledged to one of the owners in either 2017 or 2018 that he could not actually prove that the paintings had come from the Mumford storage unit. He said the owner “reacted with anger.”
On Tuesday, both Mangan and O’Donnell insisted they still believe the paintings are authentic Basquiats.
O’Donnell promised further evidence would emerge.
“This is not the final chapter of the Mumford-Basquiat story,” he said.