LOS ANGELES (CNS) - A former auctioneer from North Hollywood who admitted he helped create and sell more than two dozen fake Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings that were seized from the Orlando Museum of Art last year was sentenced Friday to community service for lying to the FBI.
Michael Barzman, 45, was ordered to perform 500 hours of community service and pay a $500 fine, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, which recommended the probationary sentence.
Barzman pleaded guilty in May to making false statements to the FBI during an interview last summer.
He admitted that he and an associate identified as J.F. created the fake Basquiats in 2012 after hatching a plan to market the bogus artwork as having been discovered in a storage locker owned by a late TV writer.
"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," according to Barzman's plea agreement.
Barzman and his accomplice "agreed to split the money that they made from selling the fraudulent paintings ... 20-30 artworks (made) by using various art materials to create colorful images on cardboard," the agreement states.
Barzman, who in 2012 ran an auction business focused on purchasing and reselling contents of unpaid storage units, admitted that he attempted to create a false provenance -- or history of the ownership of a piece of art -- for the purported Basquiats by claiming in a notarized document that the fraudulent paintings were found inside a storage locker owned by the late TV writer Thaddeus Mumford Jr. whose contents were sold at auction in 2012.
In an interview with the FBI in 2014, four years before his death, Mumford denied ever having any Basquiat artwork and was unaware of the artist's work being stored in his storage locker, according to an FBI affidavit.
Barzman's attorney could not be reached for comment.
The bogus art was sold and made its way through the art market, forming the basis of an exhibition titled "Heroes & Monsters" that opened in February 2022 at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida
"Most of the featured works had, in fact, been created by (Barzman) and J.F.," Barzman admitted in his plea agreement.
The FBI executed a search warrant at the Orlando museum last summer and seized 25 pieces that Basquiat purportedly created. During an August interview with special agents of the FBI who specialize in art fraud, Barzman denied making the paintings himself, prosecutors said.
In another FBI interview last October, Barzman admitted "it was a lie" that the artwork had come from the storage locker, but he continued to deny making the fraudulent paintings -- even after agents showed him the back of a painting on cardboard seized from the Orlando Museum of Art in which his name appears on a mailing label that had been painted over, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Earlier this week, the Orlando museum filed suit against those behind the "Heroes & Monsters" exhibit, including the museum's former director and CEO Aaron De Groft. Also named as a defendant is Los Angeles lawyer Pierce O'Donnell.
Basquiat rose to fame in the 1980s in New York's East Village art scene, incorporating graffiti and cartoon imagery in his work. Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has greatly increased in value. His 1982 painting, "Untitled," depicting a black skull, sold for a record- breaking $110.5 million at Sotheby's auction house in 2017, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.
A well-received exhibit of Basquiat's work, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure," is running through Oct. 15 at downtown's The Grand LA. The exhibition features more than 200 never-before-seen and rarely shown works by the late artist and was organized, curated and executive produced by the Basquiat estate.
Listen and subscribe to The L.A. Local podcast: your TL;DR for what's happening in Southern California
Follow KNX News 97.1 FM
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok
Related
Related
