Temps Soar in Orlando as Museum Sues Over Fake Basquiats

A legal complaint exposes threats, lies, and greed — and a poem sent by Hot Lips Houlihan.

W e don’t read much about museum shenanigans such as theft, fraud, or romantic entanglements, but they do indeed happen. More often than not, trustees and senior administrators deal with them quietly and gingerly. These days, it’s harder to keep mischief from morphing into a scandal. Two stories, for instance, made it to the realm of headlines over the past week.

In 2022, “la merde” went nuclear at the Orlando Museum of Art over a much-touted exhibition there of 25 paintings claimed to be by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988). Unknown for years, they were, the museum claimed, painted in 1982, sold by the then-ascending artist to Thaddeus Mumford, a producer and one of the lead writers for the TV show M*A*S*H and kept for 30 years in Mumford’s storage locker. Sinking into dementia, Mumford stopped paying his monthly storage rent around 2012. He died in 2018.

The facility owner eventually auctioned the contents, among them, the museum said, were the Basquiats. News of them bubbled from the murky depths, also known as the contemporary art market, and, in 2021, reached Aaron De Groft, the new director of the museum in Orlando. He solicited the owners, represented by Pierce O’Donnell, a lawyer in Los Angeles, and within months a blockbuster premiere of the pictures opened the OMA’s centennial year.

Within days, it closed, and with a bang. That these paintings, small and on cardboard, might be fakes hit the rumor mill, then, art news, and then the New York Times. De Groft was fired. The FBI got involved, confiscating art from the museum’s walls. OMA’s board, scandalized, established a committee to investigate. Michael Barzman, a Los Angeles art dealer, pleaded guilty earlier this year to lying to the FBI, admitting he’d hired an artist to produce art in the style of Basquiat. That didn’t make news.

The story seemed to have disappeared until last week, when the museum sued De Croft, O’Donnell, and the owners of the maybe-real-maybe-fake Basquiats. The museum claims fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract, conspiracy, and a variety of aiding-and-abetting charges.

I don’t know De Groft, have never been to the Orlando Museum of Art, or even Orlando, have never met anyone noted in the complaint, and don’t think Basquiat’s a great artist, or even a very good one. That’s why forgeries look as credible to the eye as work that’s indisputably his. His work’s sloppy and rote. It’s of an era and a brand. Most of the work’s small, 10 by 10 inches, but there’s one 56-by-36-incher. They’re painted with acrylic paint and oil stick, commercial pigments that Basquiat and a million other artists used.

This past weekend, I read the complaint, all 359 pages of it. It’s fascinating. De Groft denies the charges “categorically” and insists the paintings aren’t fake. But as the pile of incriminating emails grows higher, attesting to the museum staff’s anxieties, which deepened with each day leading to the show’s opening, it’s hard to believe De Groft and the other defendants. The mix of threats, lies, tricks, and greed astonished me.

I’ve been thinking about the swamp in which art authentication occurs. Case Western University is studying how artificial intelligence can develop and detect an artist’s unique application of paint, much like a fingerprint, is unique. Last month, AI facial-recognition technology determined that the de Brécy Tondo, a painting of the Madonna and Child, was found to be by Raphael. Art historians, using mostly their trained, discerning eyes, consider it a Victorian version of the Sistine Madonna in Dresden. That’s the old-fashioned way.

Some art historians aren’t buying the attribution to Raphael. They’ve got a vested interest in debunking AI. Technophobe and Luddite that I am, I’m open to it. Most art historians aren’t object-oriented anymore, and there are few I’d call connoisseurs. Younger art historians especially are prone to looking at art on a screen or accepting received wisdom.

It’s a new world. AI doesn’t figure in the Basquiat case. The issue there, though, isn’t even the quality of the art itself. As important as the art’s “looking right,” and that can involve chemical analysis of the paint and support, does the art’s provenance “look right”? At one point, Mumford said he never bought work by Basquiat, but was he senile then? The owners of the art claim that he changed his tune before he died, but they’re not producing documentation. On one picture, a label for Barzman’s auction house is slathered with paint — Basquiat’s, maybe — but legible. In 1982, when Basquiat is claimed to have painted these pictures, Barzman was four years old.

The owners point to a poem written by Basquiat in 1982, produced on dot-matrix printer paper ubiquitous at the time. The poem does indeed mention the art and suggests the pictures were painted for Mumford. Is it real? De Groft and the owners say so, characterizing it as a receipt. In my favorite part of the complaint, De Groft and the owners say that Mumford received the poem from Loretta Swit, who played Hot Lips Houlihan on M*A*S*H.

Hot Lips Houlihan. There’s a name from the past. Will she spill the beans? Swit is 85 now, lives in Passaic, N.J., and writes on needlepoint. I hope she’s a star witness.

Barzman claimed he owned Mumford’s Emmy Award, part of the stash from Mumford’s storage locker that included the paintings. This strengthened the chain of ownership from Basquiat to Mumford to him and then to the owners lending the art to the Orlando museum.

Authentication committees can be a jumping fence, ha-ha, or mine field. Sometimes established by an artist’s estate, they’re composed of experts who rule on what the artist did and didn’t produce. Basquiat had an art dealer who, in a well-ordered world, would know what Basquiat did since the artist would sell only through his dealer. But Basquiat was a drug user and graffiti artist who did lots of impromptu, fugitive work. As Basquiat’s prices soared — in 2012, a work of his hit a record when it sold for $26.4 million at Christie’s — pieces by him started to trickle, then pour, into the marketplace.

In 2012, the Basquiat authentication committee established by his estate disbanded, probably because its members feared lawsuits. The difference between a “yes, it’s Basquiat,” and “no, it’s color-by-numbers” is millions of dollars. Once the committee disbanded, Basquiat authentication went Wild West. It seems at that point, the Orlando Basquiats surfaced.

Along with the look of Basquiat and a provenance history, these pictures needed an exhibition history and scholars to suggest, preferably in a museum catalogue, that Basquiat had painted them. De Groft and the OMA agreed to provide both. The museum hired Jordana Saggese, an art historian with a Ph.D. who teaches at the University of Maryland, to write an essay for the exhibition catalogue, paying her $60,000.

I wish someone would pay me $60,000 to write an essay for an exhibition catalogue. My deep expertise in American Romantic painting and poetry and the Hudson River School, alas, is priced to sell in the Filene’s Basement of academia. But I digress. Saggese wrote her essay, which didn’t authenticate the art since that wasn’t her topic. but she placed the art in the context of Basquiat’s career. Indirectly, and possibly through naïveté, she gave the owners and De Groft what they wanted.

Saggese is highly credentialed, but she served well on another front. The owners of the art were involved, through O’Donnell, in the development of the catalogue. This is a big no-no. In an email, O’Donnell complained about the catalogue essayists: “Good try. With all due respect, three males, two white males,” the latter referring to himself and De Groft. “And no blacks or women!?! We have time to find a couple. Take a look at the article re top Blacks in art. We have time to find a couple.”

I believe Saggese is a black woman, making her a twofer, and she wrote two books about Basquiat, which — it seems odd, I know — doesn’t make her an authority in Basquiat connoisseurship. De Groft seemed keen on pushing a Basquiat exhibition as the museum’s response to the Black Lives Matter race riots. The museum arranged for the exhibition to open during Black History Month.

Once the art news suggested the pictures were fake, Saggese — today, still, an art-history professor at the University of Maryland — demanded that the museum not use her name to prove the art was by Basquiat. “You want us to put out there you got 60 grand to write this,” De Groft wrote to her in an email, in a rhetorical spirit. “Ok, then, shut up. You took the money.” In a priceless bit of mansplaining, he said he was smarter than she and owned more books.

The other expert essayists were De Groft and O’Donnell, shock of shocks. The OMA hired an art-history graduate student to assemble a Basquiat timeline for 1982. Her father was O’Donnell’s law partner. The complaint claims that De Groft and O’Donnell “placed strict constraints” on her research, especially contacts with people who actually knew Basquiat in 1982. The complaint discloses emails from her expressing her frustration over how these restraints impeded her work. She’s not a defendant.

I can’t say whether or not, or when, De Groft conceived of the Basquiat show as a personal money-making opportunity. That’s for a jury to decide. It seems clear he knew the owners would try to sell the pictures after his exhibition. “Our timing couldn’t be better,” O’Donnell wrote to De Groft, sending a clipping of an art-news story headlined “Are We in for a Basquiat Auction Boom?” A Basquiat had just sold for $110 million.

By mid June 2021, De Groft was in the thick of it. He wrote an email speculating that the 25 pictures — sold as a group — might hit $250 million. It seems clear he thought he’d get a cut.

Orlando’s chief curator received an email on December 23, 2021, from someone whose name is redacted. He or she claimed to have worked on Basquiat exhibitions in the ’90s and Aughts and also claimed that the press images the museum used to promote the show were of fake Basquiats. The chief curator forwarded it to De Groft. “You are the quiet smart one of us,” De Groft responded, adding, “Hope it does not all blow up. Need your help. You are stuck with me.” After the art press began writing about fake Basquiats in Orlando, the chief curator wrote to De Groft pledging that he wasn’t the source for the stories.

The whole affair has many eyebrow-raising moments, aside from Hot Lips Houlihan. A “catastrophic event” destroyed De Groft’s cellular data just ten days before the FBI served its subpoenas. You know, the kind of event that bedeviled all those Russia-hoax FBI phones, otherwise known as “stomped to bits by Gucci loafers.” On the back of one of the pictures was a FedEx label in Universe 67 Bold Condensed font. FedEx claimed it hadn’t used this font before 1994. The museum offered a $10,000 reward to the first person to present a FedEx box from before then.

De Groft, as the Basquiat fiasco loomed, was also privately peddling a painting by Titian and a painting by Pollock, both of which he’d authenticated. In a typo-filled email sent at 2:01 in the morning on February 1, 2022, he invited the owner of the purported Titian to the Basquiat opening in Orlando. “I have a high end LA lAwyer who I I worki f with to sell these $200 million BasquiIats and another $200 million Pollock. . . . You boys need to o P sun up for my expertise and access. I know you will do th math.” Then, he said, “Titian is up next, with a track record” he’d have in marketing newly discovered art. “Then I will retire with mazeratis and Ferraris.”

It reads as if De Groft was drunk when he wrote it. Sober or inebriated, did it not ever occur to him that you don’t write anything in an email you wouldn’t want your mother to read? And many of his emails were sent on his work account, which means the museum owns them.

De Groft thought he and O’Donnell could broker the sale of the Basquiats to Jay-Z, whom I’d never heard of, but, in reading about him, I don’t think he’s rich enough to blow $200 million on art, or inclined to do so. And, he wrote, if Jay-Z didn’t do it, “the Chinese, or Arabs or the Russians will.”

On and on it goes. What to make of it? De Groft, first of all, is a creature of the provinces. He has a Ph.D. from Florida State University, worked at the Ringling in Sarasota as a curator, and directed the tiny William & Mary College museum before the Orlando Museum of Art hired him. Aside from other failures, he clearly got in over his head. The Orlando Museum is a podunk place with a crappy collection, but Orlando’s a big, rich town, which gives it cachet. De Groft, in pushing Orlando to O’Donnell as a venue, said the city got 73 million visitors a year, making it America’s biggest tourist hub. That’s probably true, but no one goes for the art.

I’ve written many times about vigilant trusteeship at museums. The chair of Orlando’s board quit days if not hours after the Basquiat scandal broke. Other trustees quit as well, whether from mortification, protest, or complicity-by-ignorance. I don’t doubt the board was clueless about the dark side of the art market, and De Groft kept them that way. Did trustees ask the right questions? We’ll see. It seems they could have done more to educate themselves. Surely some were contemporary-art collectors or knew collectors and dealers in New York.

I’m curious, of course, about the search committee that recommended De Groft to the trustees and the search consultant who advised them. After all, De Groft started his job as Orlando’s director in January 2021. A year later, the museum was in deep doo-doo, all produced during his short reign.

Since the FBI seized the purported Basquiats, it’s been quiet, aside from Barzman’s guilty plea. Earlier this week, Barzman was sentenced. While he didn’t get the full Hunter Biden kid-gloves treatment, the court went easy. No jail time, community service, probation, and a measly $500 fine. My sense is that this bird’s singin’, and future arrests are likely.

I think it’s very strange for the museum in Orlando to be suing in civil court. The exhibits can be read to implicate the trustees in a lawsuit from the Florida attorney general’s office for negligence.

It seems like small change, but the biggest art story in the U.K. now is the discovery of the theft of Greek and Roman jewelry and glass from the British Museum’s collection. This broke last week, as did the dismissal of Peter Higgs, an antiquities curator at the museum since 1993. The art wasn’t on public view but, rather, like tens of thousands of objects the British Museum owns, in storage and available, if wanted, to researchers. Higgs was fired in early July, but the theft and his ouster leaked last week. The Telegraph, which I read every day, broke the story, reporting that, more than two years ago, an “art expert” sent evidence to the museum of suspicious objects in the market. The number of stolen items is now believed to be “well over 1,000”and “closer to 2,000,” with a value running into “millions of pounds,” the Telegraph subsequently reported.

I’ve met Higgs and worked with him on little things when I was a curator years ago. No, not on the purchase of stolen baubles. Curators have unfettered access to storage vaults. When I led the expansion and renovation of the Addison, I insisted on cameras in the vaults, though the staff resented it. “Don’t you trust us?” some asked. “No,” and I wasn’t sad to say it. The buck stopped with me as director. I knew what staff was doing from 9 to 5 but didn’t know who had money, drug, and mental problems after hours. The British Museum’s systems are probably antiquated, and after 30 years Higgs knew what was catalogued, inventoried, and used. Apparently, the stolen art was sold on eBay.

This story ripens by the day. Tuesday, the art expert — now identified as Danish antiquities dealer Ittai Gradel — said he’d alerted the British Museum’s deputy director in February 2021 that he believed hundreds of objects had been stolen. He relayed by whom and that their destination was eBay and the black market.

Referring to the British Museum executives, Gradel said, “I was treated like the village idiot.” He suggested that the museum had sought to bury the story because Higgs had just been in charge of the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon sculptures owned by the museum. The plot sickens.

I’ll close with news of lost and unknown art — real art — that was truly rediscovered and genuinely remarkable. Earlier this summer, a construction crew working on a new housing and retail complex near London Bridge discovered a unique, intact Roman mosaic floor that probably decorated a mausoleum complex from the second century a.d. It catered to the richest and earliest Londoners at a time when the city, then called Londinium, was growing in wealth and power. Archaeologists finished the excavation.

Finding ancient mosaic floors isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but scholars at the Museum of London Archaeology, which led the dig, say the newly found site is the most intact mausoleum ever to be found in Britain. It may have been a family tomb or part of a burial club. Even then, the rich were fussy about the company they kept. The floor’s going to be conserved and displayed in museum conditions — in a case — in a place of pride in the new complex.