The Orlando Museum of Art’s Basquiat Fiasco – The Atlantic

The paintings that appeared on eBay in the fall of 2012 featured skeletal figures with frenzied eyes, blocky crowns, and gnashing rows of teeth. They were done in brilliant blues and electric reds, mostly on scraps of cardboard that ranged from notebook-size to as big as a kitchen table. According to the man who was selling them—a professional auctioneer named Michael Barzman—he’d found them in a storage unit whose contents he’d bought after its renter had fallen behind on his bills. Barzman claimed he’d tossed the art in the trash. Then he’d fished it out and put it online.

Various deal-hunters who saw Barzman’s pieces were impressed by their resemblance to work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist known for his energetic paintings of skull-like faces and expressionistic figures whose art grew only more celebrated after he died from a drug overdose in 1988, at age 27. Within a few months, the cardboards were snapped up by collectors who, intrigued by what they had, threw themselves into establishing who’d made them.

Discovering a trove of unknown paintings by Basquiat—whose art has sold for as much as $110.5 million and hangs in museums around the world—sounds way too good to be true. But the new owners gradually amassed evidence to suggest that the works were authentic: a forensic analysis by a handwriting expert, an in-depth report by a Basquiat scholar, and a statement of authenticity signed by a founding member of a committee that the Basquiat estate had established to vet potential forgeries. A few experts asserted that these paintings weren’t just by Basquiat, but were some of the best he’d ever made—“better conceived, drawn, colored and executed than works in the Catalogue Raisonné,” the forensic examiner wrote, referring to an authoritative compendium of Basquiat’s work. An appraiser valued a group of six of the paintings at $25 million.

In early 2022, 25 of the pieces, all attributed to Basquiat, made their public debut at the Orlando Museum of Art, or OMA, a 100-year-old institution whose past shows have included works by Rembrandt and Robert Rauschenberg. The museum hailed the exhibition as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see “extraordinary” paintings that offered an intimate view into Basquiat’s soul. “The fact that these masterpieces even exist untouched for thirty years is a marvelous miracle for all of us,” the museum’s then-director, Aaron De Groft, declared in a lushly illustrated catalog. The exhibit was thronged from the start; OMA ticket and gift-shop sales more than doubled.

The celebration ended when, four months into the show’s run, FBI agents seized all 25 artworks on the grounds that they were evidence of conspiracy and fraud. De Groft was promptly fired. Then, last spring, the FBI announced that Barzman had confessed to forging “most of” the works in the museum’s show: According to the bureau, he and a friend, identified only as “J.F.,” had spent “a maximum of 30 minutes on each image and as little as five minutes on others.”

But De Groft and others argue that’s simply not possible: Neither Barzman nor J.F. has the sophistication or technical skills to create works that so closely resemble Basquiat’s, they say. Along with the paintings’ owners and a handful of other art professionals, De Groft maintains that the works are genuine. “Barzman and J.F. are the least likely Basquiat art forgers imaginable,” one of the owners wrote in a court filing. OMA is now suing De Groft, who has launched a countersuit of his own.

The dispute has highlighted a fundamental predicament: The art world is crawling with counterfeits—estimates of the proportion of art on the secondary market that isn’t what it claims to be range from 40 to 70 percent—and it can be maddeningly difficult to distinguish a forgery from the real thing. Attributions can flip repeatedly during the life of an artwork, a phenomenon that has become even more common as experts reassess collections with help from new scientific techniques. The result is that the question of authenticity, which seems like it should be cut-and-dried, has come to seem quite fluid. That can create confusion, but also opportunities.

In 2012, the year he started selling the alleged Basquiats, Michael Barzman was 34, living in Los Angeles, and working every angle he could think of to make a buck. Over the span of only a few months, he released an app for making drumbeats; hunted for voice-over work; co-founded a company, Invisiplug, that sold wood-grain-patterned power strips (which he later pitched on Shark Tank); and, according to public records, set up Mike Barzman Auctions, which bought and resold the contents of unpaid-for storage units. He had a reputation as a treasure hunter who, a former colleague of his told me, “could hustle a snake into buying pants.”

That May, Barzman paid $1,050 for the contents of a storage locker that had belonged to Thaddeus Mumford Jr., a screenwriter and producer. Mumford owed thousands in rental fees to the storage company, but he’d enjoyed a distinguished career working on TV shows such as NYPD Blue and M*A*S*H. According to Barzman’s inventory of the locker, he found not only a stash of paintings done on cardboard, but also an Emmy statuette and some Lucite-encased M*A*S*H dog tags that bore Mumford’s name. He sold those over the summer. In September, he posted the alleged Basquiat paintings on eBay.

To his customers, Barzman did not come across as someone who knew what he was doing. He emailed one buyer in Norway photos of his wares (subject line: “cardboards”) that showed the paintings laid out on rust-colored shag carpeting and a mangy Tempur-Pedic pillow. And although authenticated Basquiat works could command eight-figure prices, Barzman was charging no more than a few hundred dollars apiece, even though he referred to the cardboards as “Basquiats.” “It was very obvious to me that he had absolutely no idea what these paintings could be worth,” the buyer told me.

Despite Barzman’s apparent naivete—or perhaps because of it—people hoping to score a good deal snatched up the cardboards. “This is not a print or a lithograph,” reads a bill of sale from Mike Barzman Auctions. “This is an actual painting with signature that reads ‘Jean Michele [sic] Basquiat’ and Samo on some.” (“SAMO,” short for “same old shit,” was a tag Basquiat created with the artist Al Díaz.) One of Barzman’s earliest sales, in mid-September, was to the collector in Norway, who bought five paintings for $450 each. A month later, news of Barzman’s cardboards reached Leo Mangan, a retired entrepreneur who’d made a hobby out of speculating on unauthenticated art. On the hunch that Barzman’s stash could be real, Mangan and a friend hopped in a car with about $15,000 in cash and came home with some two dozen paintings from Barzman, all of which would wind up at OMA.

Barzman made clear that he couldn’t swear the artworks were genuine—“Legally I must sell this painting as ‘in the manor of’ Jean Michele Basquiat [sic],” one bill of sale reads—and Mangan knew that nailing down the works’ provenance would be key to establishing their authenticity and thus their value.

Before the fall of 2012, anyone lucky enough to stumble upon a pile of Basquiat-ish paintings could have had them vetted by the Basquiat estate’s authentication committee, a group of dealers, relatives, and curators who’d review work and deliver their verdict. But as such committees faced more and more lawsuits over contested rulings, the Basquiat estate quit the authentication business in September 2012—the same month that Barzman began selling the paintings. (Other artists’ estates, including those of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, also disbanded their authentication committees around this time.) Mangan and his partners thus had to do their own research to establish whether their pieces were legit. For Mangan, this was part of the fun. He’d recently gotten involved in trying to sell some purported Jackson Pollocks, and he told me that what drew him to art was the prospect of unraveling mysteries. “It’s more like Indiana Jones,” he said of his involvement in the art world.

Mangan told me that early in his hunt, he took Mumford to breakfast, where Mumford described the origins of the cardboards. As Mangan recounts Mumford’s story—which I couldn’t verify, because Mumford died of cancer in 2018—Mumford and Basquiat became friends in 1982, when both were living in Southern California. Mumford, who was Black, and Basquiat, whose parents were Haitian and Puerto Rican, supposedly hit it off, bonding over the difficulties they’d experienced in their respective white-dominated fields. Basquiat had a drug habit (Madonna, who dated him in 1982, once recalled that he “wouldn’t stop doing heroin”), and he allegedly turned to Mumford for help when he was short on funds. In exchange for $5,000 cash, the story goes, Basquiat gave Mumford the pieces. Mumford wasn’t crazy about them, so he stuck them in a storage locker, then forgot they existed.

On its face, the narrative doesn’t seem totally implausible. Basquiat was known to do informal trades, such as paying a doctor in drawings. But around the same time that Mumford met Mangan, Mumford told the Los Angeles Police Department that Mangan and his partners were pressuring him to sign documents falsely claiming that he’d owned artwork by Basquiat. Soon the FBI got involved too, though its investigation didn’t really take off until OMA began preparing to debut the “Mumford collection,” as the cache of alleged Basquiats had come to be known. Through the spring of 2022, while OMA was throwing a Basquiat-themed gala and welcoming the public to its show, FBI agents were questioning Barzman and asking museum staff to hand over emails. The bureau concluded that the works hailed by OMA as “autobiographical” and “breathtaking” were forged.

In an affidavit filed in June 2022, an FBI agent says Mumford told her years earlier that he’d never met Basquiat, never bought any pieces from Basquiat, and never saw any art by Basquiat when he visited his storage locker. The FBI affidavit further suggests that the Basquiat experts who authenticated the pieces for Mangan and his fellow owners were unreliable: One of them had, on a previous occasion, “sought payment for writing a favorable report” authenticating Basquiats. It proceeds to note that none of the experts whom FBI agents interviewed thought the Mumford collection was legit. (“They were all fake. It was obvious,” says Annina Nosei, a former dealer of Basquiat’s who told me she discussed the Mumford collection with the FBI.) To the FBI, it seemed fishy that Mangan’s supposed Pollock paintings had come from a man later convicted of defrauding art collectors, and that the Mumford collection bore many hallmarks of forgery, such as relying on testimonials of individuals who were now dead.

According to the FBI, whoever had made the artworks had also committed the forger’s cardinal sin of relying on age-inappropriate materials. One of the purported Basquiat works was painted on a flattened FedEx box with text printed in a typeface that, per a graphic designer who’d worked with the shipping company, wasn’t in use until 1994—six years after Basquiat’s death.

What should have been the final blow to the works’ credibility came a few months later, when Barzman confessed to the FBI that he and J.F. had painted more than 20 “Basquiats,” put them outside to artificially age them, then sold them and split the cash.

Yet multiple individuals who have inspected the Mumford collection maintain that the FBI has it wrong. “They look fine to me,” Michael Klein, a curator who knew Basquiat and examined the cardboards around 2016, told me—drawing essentially the inverse of Nosei’s conclusion after reviewing the same works. “They don’t look like they’re fakes or frauds.”

The Orlando Museum of Art is in good company when it comes to exhibiting artworks of dubious authenticity. In the past few years alone, the Terrus Museum, in France, discovered that more than half of the works in its collection were forgeries; the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, Italy, closed its Amedeo Modigliani retrospective after learning that a third of the pieces were suspected to be phony; and the Getty Museum, in L.A., removed an ancient Greek statue that was actually quite new. What’s real today could be deemed counterfeit tomorrow, then genuine the day after that: The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a portrait of Philip IV that spent 60 years as a Diego Velázquez painting before being reattributed to the artist’s workshop and then—whoops—being determined to be a Velázquez after all.

Art aficionados have struggled to identify knockoffs since at least the fifth century C.E., when a connoisseur in China noted that “genuine works and forgeries were freely mingled, and people could not tell them apart.” (Definitions vary and not everyone draws a distinction, but a fake is usually considered to be a copy of an existing work, whereas a forgery will aim to imitate an artist’s style to create a new composition.) There’s nothing illegal about making or selling a painting in the style of Basquiat; what is illegal is trying to sell the piece as a genuine Basquiat when you know it’s not.

Experts refer to the process of authenticating artwork as a “three-legged stool” that relies on provenance, connoisseurship, and science to establish attribution. Provenance—which can include invoices, museum catalogs, and guest books from artists’ homes—traces a piece’s chain of custody. Connoisseurship relies on a quasi-instinctual feel for the mark of a specific artist’s hand, built up through close study of their work. The scientific analysis of artworks can employ infrared imaging, dendrochronology, and numerous other technologies borrowed from fields such as astronomy and medicine to identify whether, say, a canvas’s colors shimmer in keeping with Modigliani’s penchant for mixing blues into his blacks.

Yet each of the three stool legs has its limits. Provenance can be faked: John Myatt and John Drewe, a duo of British art forgers who sold about 200 forgeries in the style of Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, and others, sneaked altered documents into British archives to create a false paper trail. Artists’ own recordkeeping can also be a mess, and some frequently forged artists, such as Andy Warhol, have made a point of playing with ideas of “originality.”

That’s where critics’ experienced eyes come in, though connoisseurship is ultimately an eloquent way of saying “opinion.” Two experts can look at the same part of the same artwork and reach entirely contradictory conclusions, and the money at stake only muddies the picture further. Lawsuits have made art connoisseurs wary of venturing opinions—some have even reported receiving death threats from unhappy customers. People who have closely followed the decisions of authentication committees told me that some artists’ estates also have a reputation for playing favorites, exercising personal vendettas, and trying to control the supply of an artist’s work on the market—which, true or not, contributes to a lack of faith in the process.

Even with the best intentions, humans can simply get it wrong. Alfredo Martinez, a convicted Basquiat forger, told me that while brokering a deal to sell his forgeries, an art dealer called over one of Basquiat’s former assistants to review the works. “They turn to me and say, ‘I remember these from the studio,’ ” Martinez recalled. “One drawing was 45 minutes old—still warm from the hair dryer I was using to dry the oil stick.”

Science promises to be a neutral and exacting judge, though in reality forensics aren’t always much help either. Technical analysis can rule out an artwork—pieces from the trove of purported Pollocks with which Mangan was involved were exposed as forgeries after researchers found pigments that postdated the artist’s life—but it can’t rule it in as definitively by the artist in question. Some forgers will submit their handiwork for forensic testing so they can see what flags their pieces as counterfeit, then adjust their methods accordingly. Scientific techniques are also far less useful for contemporary artists like Basquiat, who relied on materials that are still available and for which the margin of error on many tests is wide. When the collector in Norway sent a painting he’d purchased from Barzman to be carbon-dated, the test revealed that the cardboard could be from either the 1950s or the 1990s.

All of this leaves room for plenty of unscrupulous dealings. Annina Nosei, the former Basquiat dealer, told me that within a year or two of the artist’s death, she discovered that a well-known gallerist—who’d worked closely with him—had sold a Basquiat forgery to one of his clients, claiming it was real. “We didn’t do anything—didn’t call the police or anything,” Nosei said. “He just gave the money back.” Galleries can also operate in the gray area between lie and insinuation, and Martinez told me certain art dealers kept working with him even after discovering that he was peddling forgeries. “I realized after I got arrested: I’m just part of the ecosystem,” he said. (Martinez died last year, soon after we spoke.)

Greed can lubricate a forgery’s path into collections and museums. But so can ego, convenience, and ambition. Sometimes the story is so good, the desire to be a part of history so strong, that people can’t help but go with it and hope for the best.

Not until the spring of 2017, nearly five years after Barzman sold the cardboards, did a trial lawyer named Pierce O’Donnell first lay eyes on the alleged Basquiat paintings. O’Donnell was captivated.

A garrulous and assertive septuagenarian, O’Donnell was then a relative newcomer to the art world. He’d spent his law career representing high-profile clients such as Angelina Jolie and victims of Hurricane Katrina, yet his interests had lately expanded to attempting to authenticate what may be a lost Jackson Pollock painting (no relation to the paintings that Leo Mangan had attempted to prove were real, and whether O’Donnell’s alleged Pollock is genuine is a story for another day).

When a friend of Mangan’s heard about O’Donnell’s purported Pollock, he decided to pay the lawyer a visit. This friend—the same one who’d accompanied Mangan to buy work from Barzman back in 2012—owned six alleged Basquiats from Barzman’s inventory. He arrived at O’Donnell’s office with his paintings and a proposition: Help me authenticate these pieces, and I’ll give you a cut from their sale. O’Donnell agreed. He approached the paintings as he would a client’s case, and the more he reviewed the evidence and read up on Basquiat’s work, the more confident he became that the paintings were real.

O’Donnell started to piece together documents that he says offer unimpeachable proof that Basquiat made the six works, which he now co-owns. He reconstructed a paper trail showing that Mumford, the TV writer and producer, had rented a storage locker in L.A. and had received a notice in April 2012 that the contents would be auctioned off for failure to pay outstanding fees, and that Barzman not only had a receipt confirming his purchase of the lot, but had signed a notarized document itemizing its contents, which included the painted cardboards. (Barzman would later tell the FBI that the list wasn’t accurate, but O’Donnell argues that Barzman is lying about this point—a falsehood that, he suggests, may have served the FBI’s interests by allowing the agency to get closure on a 10-year-old investigation.)

O’Donnell also asked Mangan and others about conversations they say they had with Mumford before he died, and he became convinced that Mumford’s statements to the FBI couldn’t be believed either. Four people have attested in writing that Mumford told them he knew Basquiat and owned his artwork. (O’Donnell says that in 2017, he tried contacting Mumford via his attorney and drafted a statement for Mumford to sign declaring that he had owned work by Basquiat; Mumford never signed.) There’s also a typewritten poem that O’Donnell says proves the two men were friends.

O’Donnell says he first saw the poem—which he calls “an incredible breakthrough in our case”—during a 2018 visit to meet Mangan. At this point, Mangan owned 19 alleged Basquiats. A few years earlier, Mangan says, he had asked an art dealer to help him sell the work. The dealer, hoping to find proof that Mumford had owned the pieces, reached out to her old college friend Adriana Trigiani, who knew Mumford from working with him on the TV series A Different World. According to a written statement, Trigiani, now a best-selling novelist, contacted Mumford as a favor to her friend and asked if he had “any documentation showing that he had a relationship with Basquiat and had purchased his paintings from him.” She says Mumford gave her what he called “a poem written by Jean and me.” The poem, which includes the lines “Brooklyn brothers hands creating / Drawing writing bridgong [sic] gaps,” also references “25 paintings bringing riches.”

The math seemed to add up perfectly: Between Mangan’s 19 pieces and O’Donnell’s six, they had exactly 25 paintings. O’Donnell hired a handwriting expert to analyze the three initials—JMB—written in block letters at the bottom of the poem. The expert concluded that they were by Basquiat’s hand, and a second forensic analyst, also hired by O’Donnell, agreed. Trigiani did not respond to multiple interview requests, but last year, she was filmed signing the written declaration that outlines how she got the poem. (According to Mangan and O’Donnell, Trigiani has no financial interest in the Mumford collection.) In several written communications that predate Trigiani’s statement, O’Donnell offered a different provenance for the poem, including that it had been located with help from a M*A*S*H actor; these were “mistakes,” he told me. “Nothing sinister.”

Satisfied with the provenance, O’Donnell hired various connoisseurs to inspect the artworks. He was thrilled with their findings. The same handwriting expert who’d analyzed the poem’s initials also verified Basquiat’s signature on the paintings, two people who’d worked with Basquiat gave the pieces their stamp of approval, and an art-history professor who’d published acclaimed books on Basquiat wrote that O’Donnell’s six pieces were “consistent with the hand of Jean-Michel Basquiat and may be attributed to him.” (Several weeks after the FBI raided OMA’s show, the professor released a statement saying that O’Donnell had misrepresented himself and her report, which O’Donnell denies.)

What about the FedEx box? O’Donnell recruited one of his forensic analysts to examine the font. The expert found that it was “definitely not” the typeface that the former FedEx designer had claimed was used by the company only after 1994.

To O’Donnell and other champions of the Mumford collection, even Barzman’s confession is further proof of the paintings’ authenticity. Among other arguments, they note that Barzman never specified exactly how many—and which—pieces he claims to have faked. The plea agreement just broadly asserts that it was “approximately 20–30 artworks” and “most of” the works in the OMA show. Besides, they say, how could Barzman—a “bottom feeder,” O’Donnell calls him—have made such sophisticated artwork? “He said he and his buddy painted these paintings somewhere between five and 30 minutes each. I talked to other experts: There’s no way these paintings, some of which are masterpieces, could be painted in five or 30 minutes,” O’Donnell told me. “It’s impossible to paint them that fast. Okay?”

We haven’t always cared about the difference between “real” and “fake” art. Though specialists across numerous disciplines now work tirelessly to suss out the truth about artworks’ origins—with huge sums of money and our understanding of art history at stake—the reality is that the very concept of art forgery as a cause for concern is actually relatively recent in the West. For millennia, a work’s meaning and form—and the feelings it inspired in the viewer—mattered more than which artist had touched it and when. That started to change in the early 1500s. The premium placed on originals was already well established for Christian religious relics, because the faithful believed that Mary Magdalene’s molar, for example, could work miracles only if it was the genuine article. Gradually, a similar line of thinking spread to images and art.

Not everyone shares the West’s fixation on delineating fakes from originals. In Chinese culture, for example, fifth-century hand-wringing notwithstanding, a “copy” has long been considered equal to an “original”—a stance that can lead to misunderstandings, such as when a German museum closed an exhibition in 2007 after learning that the terra-cotta warriors on loan from China were recent reproductions, not ancient artifacts. The Kwoma people in Papua New Guinea embrace a similar mindset, and old artworks are regularly swapped out for new versions, with the decaying “original” then sold off to tourists. In the West, however, copies (which can be a more neutral way of saying “fakes”) tend to be viewed as taboo. Studies have found that viewers consider copies of artworks (or genuine artworks labeled as copies) less valuable, less likable, and less pleasing than the originals. Researchers at the City University of New York instructed study participants to imagine that the Mona Lisa had been destroyed in a fire and asked them whether they’d rather see its ashes or a copy that not even connoisseurs could distinguish from the original. Eighty percent picked the ashes.

Our obsession with artworks’ authenticity can in part be traced back to what’s known as the “law of contagion”: Pieces are thought to acquire a special essence when touched by the artist’s hand. Yet the intense distaste for forgeries reveals a dirty secret about our relationship with art, which is that we tend to fixate on genius and authorship more than the aesthetic qualities of the work we claim to value so highly. The writer Arthur Koestler, in an essay on snobbery, goes so far as to argue that when judging a work, who made it should be considered “entirely extraneous to the issue.” What matters more, he argues, is what meets the eye.

As I pored over the facts of the Basquiat case, I began to realize that a forgery scandal, like a great artwork, looks different the longer you stare at it. I’d comb through FBI filings that convinced me the Mumford collection was completely phony, then spend hours on the phone with O’Donnell and others while sifting through documents—like the poem—that made me wonder if maybe the works could be real. I decided I couldn’t trust either story on its face. I needed to try to retrace the cardboards’ origins for myself.

Rewind to the winter of 1982, when Basquiat was supposedly cavorting with Mumford and selling him paintings for a wad of cash. Basquiat was coming off a year of multiple sold-out solo shows and prestigious international exhibitions. Far from being hard up for money, as Mangan’s story purports, Basquiat regularly treated himself to elaborate meals at Los Angeles hot spots like Spago and Mr Chow, his then-assistant Stephen Torton told me. “In California, he was never broke when I worked with him,” recalled Torton, who assisted Basquiat from July 1982 through mid-1983.

Torton described Basquiat as a savvy businessperson who shrewdly stewarded his image and career, such as by refusing to sell some of his early works, because he anticipated they would appreciate in value. “The fakes are not only insulting because they’re talking about fake paintings,” Torton said; they also “count on a certain assumption that a Black man would run out of money, even though he was selling his paintings like hotcakes.” Nor was Torton aware of any relationship between Basquiat and Mumford, which presumably would have overlapped with Torton’s tenure in Basquiat’s studio.

The portrait of Barzman that emerges from FBI documents and from customers who bought his cardboards is also incomplete. They depict him as a bumbling rube—the kind of person who would toss masterpieces in the trash. But I learned that by the time he bought Mumford’s locker, Barzman had spent years working in creative fields while hobnobbing with musicians, artists, and well-connected Angelenos who told me they admired his excellent taste. As a 20-something, Barzman had managed up-and-coming indie bands, such as Ima Robot, that had devoted followings and enviable record deals. He started a record label alongside a seasoned music-industry executive and, through a close friend who was involved with street art, commissioned visual artists to do projects for the label. The son of a voice-over artist and the proprietor of an interior-design store, Barzman owned a condo hung with what one friend remembers as “actual art on the walls”: African statues, little sculptures made of spray-paint nozzles, Andy Warhol–style prints. (Unable to afford an authentic Warhol, Barzman once happily settled for a $500 knockoff he found on eBay and knew to be fake.) “He is a big fan and big lover of art and music,” Jake Bercovici, a musician who worked with Barzman, told me. “And he was just a hustler. From day one.”

Barzman’s career in the music business started to crumble around 2009, according to colleagues and friends who knew him at the time. They say he became known for flying into vicious rages: making threats, screaming obscenities. (In 2016, Barzman was charged with threatening a man smoking a cigarette near his apartment with a gun; he pleaded guilty, but the charge was ultimately dismissed.) Several artists stopped working with him. The record label closed. So Barzman moved on. (Barzman did not respond to multiple interview requests, but later, in an email, he denied these characterizations of his behavior and the circumstances of his label’s dissolution.) One colleague, who declined to be named because he feared Barzman’s temper, recalled that around 2010, Barzman saw an opportunity to sell video installations to Miami hotels that wanted to fill their spaces with fine art. That March, Barzman released an art film featuring Stephen Hawking’s computer-generated voice over slow-motion footage of a man in a ski mask lighting things on fire. The video-art piece was shown a few months later at a prestigious exhibit in Portugal, where it earned praise from one critic for offering “a beautifully concise history of the medium—and an idea of its future.”

In 2012, Barzman was launching his iPhone app while starting Invisiplug and running Mike Barzman Auctions. He was also, according to his lawyer Joel Koury, frantic about money.

Barzman had been diagnosed with bone cancer when he was 12 years old, and had spent months at various points throughout his teens recovering from surgeries. As Barzman’s treatment stretched into his 20s, his bills piled up, and he struggled to keep his health insurance. In Koury’s telling, Barzman began to panic about how he’d cover his medical costs. “While I know this is not an excuse for my actions, my life was in a terrible place at the time I created these fake paintings,” Barzman would later write to a judge in a sentencing letter. “My medical situation had caused me PTSD and medical debt and bills had fueled a fear of me becoming homeless and financially broken. I made these bad decisions out of a place being scared and desperation [sic].”

Though the plea agreement states that Barzman and J.F. made “most of” the works that appeared at OMA, Koury insists that they in fact created them all.

Yet exactly how many works make up the Mumford collection is curiously hazy. The JMB poem references “25 paintings bringing riches,” and OMA exhibited 25 pieces supposedly by Basquiat. But Pierce O’Donnell and others sometimes reference 28 works and sometimes 26. I tracked down a painting of a toothy skeleton—among those Barzman offered for sale in the fall of 2012—that was auctioned off for more than $20,000 in 2015, attributed to Basquiat. This painting was not included in the OMA show. The five pieces that Barzman sold to the collector in Norway—which O’Donnell and Aaron De Groft say they didn’t know about before planning the OMA exhibit—especially complicate the math. Between the works featured in Florida and the pieces sold in Norway, not to mention the work auctioned for more than $20,000, there are at least 31 alleged Basquiats purported to have emerged from Mumford’s locker.

O’Donnell and De Groft say they can explain that: The paintings in Norway are the ones Barzman faked. “The forgeries are like night and day,” De Groft told me. “You could be a blind person and tell they’re not the same.” He argues that the simplest explanation is the right one: Barzman discovered authentic Basquiat paintings in Mumford’s locker, then padded the pile with some fakes after realizing there was a market for the work.

For that to be true, though, the collector in Norway would have had the outstandingly bad luck (or bad eye) to have selected precisely the artworks that were fake, because several of the paintings he saw but didn’t buy were later shown at OMA. (A representative for the collector in Norway theorized that Barzman offered his client the real pieces, then subsequently came up with the idea of producing forgeries.) It’s also hard not to wonder whether Barzman, who knew Basquiat’s work and says he badly needed cash, would really part with potentially genuine paintings for so little money—most for a few hundred dollars a pop. At the time, far from being the newbie he made himself out to be in early conversations with the FBI, Barzman had been working in the auction business for five years.

While sorting through each side’s account of the alleged Basquiats, I picked up a copy of Thierry Lenain’s book Art Forgery, an exploration of our fascination with fakes and the psychology of those who get taken in. According to Lenain, when fraud victims are told their pieces are counterfeit, a typical reaction is to offer elaborate explanations for why this is impossible. “It should be stressed,” Lenain writes, “that there appears to be almost no limits to the scope of denial.”

Still, one bit of evidence is hard for the owners of the Mumford collection to explain. Among art authenticators, there’s an old saw that when hunting for the truth about a painting, the front is less telling than the back, as labels affixed there over the years can often trace its journey through different hands. Flip over one of the pieces in the Orlando show—a painting featuring a manic Felix the Cat figure—and you will find, painted over in black and partially torn off, a shipping label bearing Barzman’s name and former address.

In the spring of 2021, after years spent unsuccessfully trying to sell his six alleged Basquiat paintings, O’Donnell got a call from the Orlando Museum of Art. De Groft, who had a history of reattributing “lost” artworks to famous artists such as Titian and Paul Cézanne, was then only a few months into his tenure as OMA’s director and in the midst of spearheading what the museum described as an “aggressive relaunch” meant to turn it into an attraction on par with the city’s theme parks. While hunting for attention-grabbing exhibitions, De Groft learned about O’Donnell’s purported Pollock. He emailed the lawyer to find out more about it. On a subsequent call, O’Donnell mentioned his six newly discovered “Basquiats,” then followed up by sending De Groft the research he’d done. Less than 24 hours later, before ever seeing the paintings in person, De Groft replied to say that the museum would “absolutely love” to show the Basquiats.

The Mumford collection’s owners quickly agreed to loan 25 pieces; showing the cardboards at OMA promised to legitimize the works and increase their value. But according to the lawsuit that OMA filed against De Groft this past summer, the owners weren’t the only ones who stood to profit: De Groft, too, had a stake in establishing the paintings’ legitimacy. The lawsuit alleges that the former museum director used OMA to launder the reputation of forged Basquiat paintings in return for being promised what OMA calls “a significant cut of the proceeds” in the event the works sold. (De Groft, O’Donnell, and Mangan all deny any such arrangement; De Groft’s countersuit claims that the museum’s lawsuit is a “public relations stunt intended to save face” and alleges that OMA’s board ratified the Mumford-collection show.) OMA’s lawsuit also asserts that De Groft not only failed to do his own due diligence on the works, but made staff members fear they could lose their job if they aired doubts. (De Groft denies this.) OMA’s lawyers have flagged emails in which he disparages several individuals not directly affiliated with the museum who raised concerns about the Mumford collection.

Whatever his reasons, the museum director was nothing if not ambitious. The week before the Mumford-collection show opened at OMA, he emailed the owner of a Titian, a work De Groft had helped attribute and aimed to exhibit, instructing the individual to come to his Basquiat show. “This is all part of the plan of exhibiting and selling masterpieces,” De Groft wrote, according to the lawsuit. “Let me sell these Basquiats and Pollock and then Titian is up next with a track record. Then I will retire with mazeratis and Ferraris. Fuck the world shenanigans we when [sic] you have money.” (When I asked De Groft about the email, he dismissed it as “late-night foolishness that I apologize for”; he has since told The New York Times that he doesn’t recall writing it.)

The OMA lawsuit casts further doubt on the alleged Basquiats by noting that a significant proportion of the people who have touched the Mumford collection have, at various points, had brushes with the law. My own reporting confirmed this. Mangan went to prison for cocaine trafficking in 1979 and 1991. O’Donnell, suspended twice from practicing law in connection with violating campaign-finance regulations and once more for misrepresenting himself, went to prison in 2012 for illegal contributions to John Edwards’s presidential campaign. Another co-owner went to prison on drug charges to which he pleaded no contest in the 1970s, and another, who no longer owns a share in the work but helped bring it to Mangan’s attention, went to prison in 2015 for peddling black-rhinoceros horn. In selling the alleged Basquiats, Barzman teamed up with a car dealer who, in 2021, pleaded guilty to 12 felonies that included racketeering and forgery in the first degree.

De Groft maintains that the sparring over the alleged Basquiats’ legitimacy is part of the normal course of business in the art world, where authenticity is fuzzy and attributions change all the time. And yet it’s hard not to wonder whether there’s a point where the debate over a work shifts from being a symptom of the ambiguity to an attempt to capitalize on it.

As O’Donnell and others rebutted each attack on their paintings’ authenticity, I began to think that the only closure could come from finding out more about the enigmatic J.F. who’d helped create the cardboards.

For months, J.F.’s identity had been a mystery. But then, during one of our many phone calls, O’Donnell told me he’d uncovered who it was. The discovery seemed to strengthen his conviction that no one but Basquiat could have made the paintings that appeared at OMA. It was infeasible to churn out those works in half an hour, O’Donnell reminded me (a claim that the Basquiat forger Alfredo Martinez disputed). On top of which, O’Donnell contended, the pieces were totally beyond the capabilities of amateurs like Barzman and J.F.—neither of whom “has any known education, training, or experience as artists,” O’Donnell wrote in a court filing. Per O’Donnell, J.F. had a reputation for working the doors at Los Angeles nightclubs, not making paintings.

But I’d been doing my own research on J.F. At first, the trail had been cold: FBI documents were devoid of clues, and Koury, Barzman’s lawyer, told me that Barzman was determined to protect J.F.’s identity, because he was a childhood friend. Yet as I spoke with Barzman’s acquaintances, I kept hearing the name of an individual whose initials were J.F. I looked him up. It was the same J.F., I’d come to find out, that O’Donnell had identified, but art wasn’t as alien to him as O’Donnell made it out to be. On J.F.’s Instagram, after I scrolled past various memes and a black-and-white snapshot of Basquiat, I found photos of detailed line drawings, elaborate painted murals, and hyper-exact pencil sketches—as well as a post promoting J.F.’s work in a show at an art gallery.

I was impressed by J.F.’s technique. He did masterful shadowing in his pencil rendering of a metallic bucket, and drew eagle feathers so fluffy, I felt I could pluck them. He wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci, but, to my eye, nor was he someone who couldn’t wield a paintbrush. (I said as much to O’Donnell. He hadn’t seen the works, but told me, “I’m not shaken at all by the existence of J.F.”) I scrolled further through J.F.’s feed and sat straight up in my chair: There, in a photo posted in the fall of 2012, was Barzman. More digging led me to a high-school yearbook, where I discovered that Barzman and J.F. had been classmates. They were, in other words, childhood friends.

When I reached him by phone, J.F. confirmed that he and Barzman had once been close friends, but he refused to comment on whether he’d helped make the paintings. According to Koury’s account of their creation, however, Barzman and his collaborator extensively researched Basquiat, then painstakingly experimented with different prototypes until they figured out how to mimic the artist’s style. Despite O’Donnell’s claims to the contrary, it seemed plausible to me, given what I knew of Barzman’s and J.F.’s skills, that they could have pulled it off.

The paintings at the Orlando Museum of Art’s exhibit vibrated with an energy that evoked Basquiat’s best-known work, albeit less restrained and more berserk. They were mounted in black frames that made the frenetic whites of the figures’ eyes and jagged edges of their colorful crowns—a Basquiat signature—leap off the walls. Though The New York Times published an article questioning the Mumford collection’s authenticity within a week of the exhibit’s opening, visitors immediately praised the show. “A very moving exhibit of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” one OMA visitor wrote on Instagram. A writer for Forbes hailed it as “a presentation to be enjoyed by the entire nation, if not the world.”

All 25 paintings are now being held by the FBI, whose investigation is ongoing. Yet in the nearly two years since the agents raided OMA’s show—and in the decade since authorities first grew suspicious of the Mumford collection—only Barzman has faced charges: He pleaded guilty not to art forgery but to the relatively low-level offense of lying to the FBI, for which, in August, he received probation, 500 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.

In the meantime, OMA has scrubbed its website and social media of virtually all traces of the Mumford collection. It appears determined to bury the memory of the alleged Basquiats. Yet whether they’re real or not, the pieces are arresting artworks—both in their own right, and for what they reveal about our relationship with art.

The difficulty of distinguishing original artwork from fakes and forgeries is a useful reminder that knockoffs can sometimes deliver just as much pleasure and insight as “real” artworks. As the philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats has argued, art forgeries can prod us to question our assumptions and reconsider how much of our looking we outsource to experts, and can destabilize our relationship with art and the world—all of which are things that the best artwork can do.

There may yet be copies of the alleged Basquiat works out there somewhere. Patrick Painter, a Los Angeles–based gallerist whom J.F. refers to on Instagram as “my old art dealer,” had planned to show six pieces from the Mumford collection in 2020. Painter told Los Angeles Magazine that, rather than risk the originals getting stolen, he made duplicates. “I had some reproductions done for the L.A. Art Show,” he said. “And no one could tell the difference.”

This article appears in the March 2024 print edition with the headline “The Curious Case of the Contested Basquiats.” It has been updated to reflect the fact that, after the article went to press, the Orlando Museum of Art dropped its legal claims against the Mumford-collection owners; the museum is still suing Aaron De Groft.

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