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 the celebrated artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The United States attorney’s office for the Central District of California filed court papers on Tuesday announcing the plea by Michael Barzman, nine months after the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the museum and seized 25 paintings that had been hanging in its Basquiat exhibit, which was called “Heroes and Monsters.”
In court documents, prosecutors said Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Barzman told investigators, according to court records.
Court documents also say that Mr. Barzman created false provenance for the fraudulent paintings. They say he made up a false story about the paintings having been found in a storage unit, and created false documents to bolster that narrative.
He told investigators that he had sold the works to several buyers. They eventually ended up on exhibit at the Orlando museum. And although the exhibit purported to feature 25 paintings by Basquiat, “most of the featured works had, in fact, been created by defendant and J.F.,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Mr. Barzman admitted that he had lied to investigators in October 2022, according to court papers. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Mr. Barzman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Aaron De Groft, the former director and chief executive of the Orlando museum, who mounted the exhibition and defended the works even after their authenticity was questioned, was removed from his post shortly after the raid. Though the exhibition became an embarrassment to the museum, De Groft has not been implicated in any wrongdoing.
A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the investigation was ongoing.
The owners, and the museum, had claimed that Basquiat created the artworks in the “Heroes & Monsters” show in 1982 but that they had disappeared from view for decades, resurfacing in 2012 among the contents of a Los Angeles storage unit. But the plea agreement claims that Mr. Barzman, an auctioneer who ran a business called Mike Barzman Auctions that focused on purchasing and reselling the contents of unpaid storage units, bought the contents of Mr. Mumford’s storage unit and “used the acquisition of Mumford’s stored items to create a false provenance for the fraudulent paintings.”
The charges represent the latest twist in a bizarre case of alleged high-stakes art crime.
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 New York 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,” in a typeface that a designer who worked for Federal Express said had not been used until 1994 — six years after Basquiat’s death.
Last May, The Times reported that the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team was investigating the authenticity of the 25 paintings. Both De Groft and the owners of the artworks had said that the works were made by Basquiat 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.
In an affidavit for the search warrant, Elizabeth Rivas, a special agent for the F.B.I. who for years led its Los Angeles-based art crime unit, wrote that she had interviewed Mumford in 2014, and was told that he “never purchased Basquiat artwork and was unaware of any Basquiat artwork being in his storage locker.”
She said that Mumford also told her that one of the artworks’ owners had “pressured him to sign documents” claiming that he had owned the collection, and offered to give him a cut of the proceeds from any sale. The affidavit stated that before Mumford died, he signed a declaration in 2017 in the presence of federal agents stating that “at no time in the 1980s or at any other time did I meet with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and at no time did I acquire or purchase any paintings by him.” He added that “at no time did I store any Basquiat paintings.”
The F.B.I. raid occurred on June 24, just days before the planned June 30 closing of the Basquiat exhibit, after which the works were scheduled to be exhibited in Italy. In the 41-page affidavit for the search warrant, the F.B.I. said it was investigating the exhibition and attempted sale of 25 paintings, and said its investigation had revealed, among other things, “false information related to the alleged prior ownership of the paintings.”
The search affidavit stated that “forensic information indicates that the cardboard on which one painting was made contains a typeface that was created in 1994, after Basquiat had passed, thereby calling into question the authenticity of at least one piece.” And the authorities also said that their investigation had revealed “attempts to sell the paintings using false provenance, and bank records show possible solicitation of investment in artwork that is not authentic.”