The buyers of these works that are exhibited for the first time in the OMA exhibition were William Forceart and antiques dealer, and former financier Lee Mangin, who bought them for $15,000. Both buyers have criminal records, the first for drug trafficking in 1973 and the second for cocaine trafficking (1979 and 1991), later convicted of fraud in 1999.
The third owner is the Los Angeles attorney, Pierce O’Donnellwho represented in 2016 the actresses Amber Heard in his divorce from Johnny DeppAlready Angelina Jolie of Brad Pitt, and has a criminal record for violating campaign finance laws (2006 and 2011). O’Donnell shares 6 of the 25 works and hired experts who certified the authenticity, as indicated New York Times.
In turn, the newspaper considers that a verdict of Basquiat’s heritage is not possible given that the authentication committee of his work was dissolved in 2012 and in this sense the exhibition in a museum “can increase the legitimacy of the works”.
New York Times questioned the authenticity of the works since the opening of the exhibition, last February, especially a piece that is based on a cardboard used with the design of the logo of the Federal Express company that was only used in 1994, six years after Basquiat’s death, according to experts consulted.
This painting that prompts the questioning of the rest of the works attributed to Basquiat is the self-portrait “Crown Face II” painted on a logistics company box in 1982.
The museum’s director since 2001, De Groft, maintains that the works were created on cardboard that Basquiat collected from the garbage in late 1982, at the age of 22 when he was living and working in the studio below the home of art dealer Larry Gagosian in Venice, California, while preparing new canvases for an exhibition at the dealer’s gallery in Los Angeles; works that Gagosian himself is unaware of.
On the other hand, the appraisal made by Putnam Fine Art and Antique Appraisals For the owners, the value of the works would be 100 million dollars for an artist who reached an auction last week plus 85 million dollars for one of his paintings, as indicated by the New York Times.
Already in July 2021, in a summons to the Orlando Museum of Art by the FBI, the institution was required to provide all communications between museum employees and the owners of the works of art awarded to Basquiat and that of the experts.
In turn, the Spanish media ABC, which echoes the news, indicates that it is the first time that the artistic crimes team of the Federal Investigation Agency, known as the FBI, investigates the forgery of the artist’s works.
The intentional sale of fake art is a federal crime in the United States, and Basquiat has been the target of forgeries before. It is estimated that until his death he made some 2,100 works of art according to the brooklyn museumquoted by the North American media.
Source: Ambito
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