Aaron De Groft. I don’t think many people will recognize the name, but his story allows me to indulge one of this blog’s interests: art crime.
Mr. De Groft was the director of the Orlando Museum of Art.
In February 2022, the Orlando Museum of Art opened a blockbuster exhibition of 25 paintings that Mr. [Jean-Michel] Basquiat was said to have created in 1982, when he was 22 and living in Venice, Calif.
Mr. De Groft said that Mr. Basquiat had sold the artworks, most of them painted and drawn on slabs of cardboard, for $5,000 in cash, and that they had languished for decades in a Los Angeles storage unit. In 2012, Mr. De Groft said, the storage unit was foreclosed for lack of payment and the contents auctioned off. A little-known dealer purchased the artworks for about $15,000.
Mr. Basquiat is a big deal in the art world, and this was a major coup for the musuem.
Hmmmm. Hmmmm hmmmm hmmm. Hmmm.
Days after the exhibit opened, The New York Times published an article raising questions about the paintings. The article noted doubts expressed by several curators, and reported that one of the paintings was made on a piece of cardboard shipping material containing a printed FedEx typeface not used by that company until 1994 — six years after Mr. Basquiat’s death and 12 years after Mr. De Groft and the painting’s owners said the painting was made.
The F.B.I. raided the museum four months later, confiscating all 25 works. An affidavit revealed that the bureau had been investigating the artworks and their owners for a decade.
Hmmm!
Mr. De Groft was fired. The museum sued him.
After the Basquiat exhibit was shut down, a Los Angeles auctioneer admitted to the F.B.I. that he had helped create the faux Basquiats in 2012, some in as little as five minutes.
Mr. De Groft countersued the museum for wrongful termination, calling their claims a “public relations stunt intended to save face.” He still insisted that the Basquiats were genuine.
He said the artworks’ owners had commissioned a forensic investigation by a handwriting expert, who identified the signatures on many of the paintings as being Mr. Basquiat’s. He also cited an analysis by a Basquiat expert — since disavowed — and statements by a member of the Basquiat estate’s now-defunct authentication committee, who found the paintings to be genuine.
The status of the lawsuits is unclear. The Wikipedia section in Basquiat’s entry on “Forgeries” is interesting.
Jack De Mave, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Fugitive” (the original), “Adam-12”, and an uncredited role in “1776”.