Los Angeles–based auctioneer Michael Barzman is facing up to five years in prison, having admitted to playing a major role in the forgery of twenty-five works falsely credited to Jean-Michel Basquiat and forming the entirety of the Orlando Museum of Art’s highly touted 2022 exhibition “Heroes & Monsters.” Barzman, who previously denied any involvement in the forgery effort, on Tuesday pleaded guilty to charges of making false statements to the FBI, acknowledging that he enlisted an accomplice, known only as J.F., to create the works, in 2012, with the intention of selling them on eBay as authentic Basquiat paintings.
“J.F. spent a maximum of 30 minutes on each image and as little as five minutes on others, and then gave them to [Barzman] to sell on eBay,” read the plea agreement, according to a statement issued by the Central District of California U.S. attorney’s office. “[Barzman] and J.F. agreed to split the money that they made from selling the fraudulent paintings.
A resident of North Hollywood, Barzman earned a living auctioning off the contents of abandoned storage spaces. With J.F., he created a backstory for the twenty to thirty fake Basquiats, which involved the celebrated artist having created the paintings in 1982 before selling them to now-deceased television screenwriter Thad Mumford for $5,000. According to Barzman, he stumbled across the works while emptying Mumford’s storage locker in 2012, after the writer fell behind on his payments for the space.
Barzman sold the paintings, all made on cardboard, to storage hunter William Force and his financial backer, Lee Mangin, for $15,000. After Aaron de Groff, then the director of the Orlando Museum of Art, ordered them authenticated, the twenty-five never-before-exhibited “Basquiats” debuted in February 2022 in the OMA’s exhibition “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Thaddeus Mumford, Jr. Venice Collection.” The show was raided by the FBI’s Art Crime Team on June 24, 2022, a week before its expected June 30 closure and in advance of its traveling to Italy.
Among the red flags leading to the FBI’s seizure of the trove were Mumford’s assertion to a Bureau agent that he had never purchased or stored any works by Basquiat, whom he said he had never met. Additionally, one of the works had been painted on a flattened box fragment bearing the phrase “Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here,” in a typeface not in use by the shipping concern until 1994—six years after Basquiat’s death. Prior to extracting his confession, Bureau officials pointed out to Barzman that one of the works had been painted over an address label bearing the auctioneer’s own name.
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