FBI raids museum and seizes Basquiat paintings

NEW YORK • The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida last Friday, taking all 25 works that had been part of an exhibition on the life and work of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the museum said.

The New York Times had previously reported that the FBI's Art Crime Team had been investigating the authenticity of 25 paintings that the museum had said were created by Basquiat and were on exhibit there for months.

A spokesman for the museum said last Friday that it had complied with a request from the FBI for access to its Heroes & Monsters exhibit and that the exhibit was now in the FBI's possession.

The Basquiat exhibit had been set to close on Thursday, and the works were scheduled to be exhibited next in Italy.

A spokesman for the FBI confirmed that a federal search warrant had been executed last Friday at the museum and said the investigation by the Art Crime Team was ongoing.

The paintings in the Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition were said by the museum and their owners to have been recovered from a Los Angeles storage unit in 2012. The works were largely unseen before the show's February opening.

A Times report published that month raised questions about their authenticity.

It noted that one of the artworks was painted on the back of a cardboard shipping box bearing an instruction to "Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here", in a typeface that a designer who worked for FedEx said was not used until 1994 - six years after Basquiat's death. The artist died at age 27 in 1988 from a drug overdose.

The owners of the paintings, and the Orlando museum's director and chief executive, Dr Aaron De Groft, have all maintained that the works are genuine.

Dr De Groft and the owners have said the works, done on pieces of scavenged cardboard, were done by Basquiat in late 1982, when he was living and working out of a studio beneath the Los Angeles home of art dealer Larry Gagosian and preparing for a show at Mr Gagosian's gallery.

They said Basquiat sold the works for US$5,000 to a now-deceased television screenwriter, Mr Thad Mumford, who put them into a storage unit and apparently forgot about them for 30 years - until the unit's contents were seized for non-payment of rent and auctioned off in 2012.

In the affidavit for the search warrant, FBI special agent Elizabeth Rivas stated that she interviewed Mr Mumford in 2014 and learnt that "Mr Mumford never purchased Basquiat artwork and was unaware of any Basquiat artwork being in his storage locker".

Mr Mumford, who died in 2018, also told Ms Rivas that one of the artworks' owners had "pressured him to sign documents" saying he had owned the collection, which would help establish the paintings' authenticity.

If authentic, the Basquiat paintings would be worth about US$100 million (S$139 million), according to Putnam Fine Art and Antique Appraisals, which assessed them for the owners. The owners have said in previous interviews that they were trying to sell the works.

NYTIMES