A former Los Angeles auctioneer has agreed to plead guilty to cross-country racing Technical fraud scheme He created forgeries and falsely attributed the paintings to artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
The paintings ended up in the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida before they were seized by federal agents last year, in a scandal that rocked the museum and led to its CEO leaving after he threatened an art expert and told her to “shut up”.
Basquiat, a neo-expressionist painter who found his success during the 1980s, lived and worked in New York before his death in 1988 at the age of 27 from a drug overdose. The Orlando Museum of Art scandal came in 2022 when a federal raid ended with the confiscation of 25 paintings whose authenticity had been in doubt for a decade. The museum was the first to display the artwork, and its former director had previously insisted that the artwork was legitimate.
Willie J Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Defendant Michael Barzman, 45, was indicted on Tuesday in Los Angeles federal court for making a false statement to the FBI during an interview last year, the US Attorney’s office said in a news release. He has agreed to plead guilty and faces up to five years in prison.
A Barzman court date has not been set. Barzman admitted that he and another man, identified only as “JF” in court papers, created the fake paintings and agreed to split the proceeds from the sales.
“Mr. Barzman was drowning in medical debt after battling cancer decades ago,” his attorney, Joel Corey, said in a statement Tuesday. “In desperation, he took part in this scheme because he was afraid of losing his health insurance. From then on, he cooperated and did whatever was asked of him to make up for his miscalculation.”
Mark Elliott, chair of the Orlando Museum Board of Trustees, said in a statement that the museum had “recommitted to its mission to provide excellence in the visual arts with its exhibitions, collections, and educational programs” in the wake of the scandal. .
Barzman admitted to the FBI — after repeated denials in interviews with federal agents, which led to a felony charge Tuesday — that he provided a false provenance for the paintings by claiming in a notarized document that they were found in TV writer Thad Mumford’s storage locker.
Barzman previously ran an auction house where he bought and resold the contents of unpaid storage units. He bought Mumford Locker in 2012.
Mumford, who died in 2018, told investigators he didn’t own any of Basquiat’s artwork, and the paintings weren’t in the unit the last time it opened.
Experts noted that the cardboard used in at least one of the pieces included a FedEx typeface that wasn’t used until 1994, about six years after Basquiat’s death, according to a federal search warrant. The artwork was marketed as a sketch in 1982.
Barzman and “J.F.” would make the paintings on cardboard with various materials and then “live” them outdoors so that the artwork would look as if it had been painted in the 1980s, according to Barzman’s seam convention.
But on the back of one of the paintings seized from the Orlando Museum, an important clue remains: a postage label with Barzman’s name, scrawled over it.
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