Man agrees to plead guilty in Basquiat artwork fraud scheme
A former Los Angeles auctioneer has agreed to plead guilty in a cross-country art fraud scheme where he created fake artwork and falsely attributed the paintings to Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
The paintings ultimately wound up at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida before they were seized by federal agents last year in a scandal that roiled the museum and led to its CEO’s departure after he threatened an art expert and told her to “shut up.”
Basquiat, a Neo-expressionist painter whose success came during the 1980s, lived and worked in New York before he died in 1988 at age 27 from a drug overdose. The Orlando Museum of Art scandal came in 2022 when a federal raid ended in the seizure of 25 paintings whose authenticity had been in question for a decade. The museum had been the first to display the artwork, and its former director had previously insisted the artwork was legitimate.