Spanish Police Have Seized Five Fake Goya and Velázquez Paintings Supposedly Worth a Collective $84 Million The works will go on view in an exhibition of seized forgeries curated in conjunction with Spanish police.

Sarah Cascone, April 14, 2023

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Mariana of Austria (1652–1653), detail. Collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid. A recently seized forgery.

Spanish police have seized five Old Master forgeries that were being sold for a collective €76 million ($84 million). Four of the works were being marketed as the work of Francisco Goya, and the fifth as a Diego Velázquez. Investigators got wind of the paintings earlier this year, when the sellers were offering them to a number of art dealers, the London Times reported.

Police from the Patrimonio Histórico division confiscated the works on two separate raids in the coastal city of Valencia—the faux Velázquez on February 8, and the rest some weeks later. Authorities are investigating four suspects, who have been interviewed, but not arrested, CNN reported. The sellers had also allegedly produced fake provenance documents in the hopes of fooling potential collectors into believing these workers were the genuine article.

“The most important thing about this crime is that it devalues the work of our creative people, in this case, great painters in our history,” Gabriela Bravo, head of the regional government’s justice department, said in a statement, noting that art forgery is the fourth-most lucrative type of crime in Spain, after drugs, weapons, and prostitution.

Manuela Mena, a Goya specialist, and David Gimilio, an art technician at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, have both confirmed that the works were forgeries—but it doesn’t seem like it was that difficult to tell. The priciest of the five works, at €50 million ($55 million) was a copy of Velazquez’s Portrait of Mariana of Austria, the composition cropped to show only her face. The full-length original was painted for the Spanish Royal Family, and is famously in the collection of the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Two of the ersatz Goyas were also copies of works at the Prado, but by the 18th-century German artist Anton Rafael Mengs. Each priced at €7 million ($7.7 million), the works were based on details from Portrait of Charles IV and Portrait of María Luisa de Parma, Princess of Asturias.

The €8 million Blessing of Santa Rosa de Lima appears to be done in the style 17th-century Italian painters Carlo Maratta or Pietro Antonio de Pietri. The final forgery, titled Allegory of the Pillar of Zaragoza, “was a work of very low quality and not even done by a professional painter,” according to authorities. It had an asking price of €4 million ($4.4 million).

All the forgeries are believed to have originated with the same owner, a Valencia collector who died in 2020. The Patrimonio Histórico police have partnered with the Museu Valencià de la Illustració i de la Modernitat on an exhibition of 112 counterfeit artworks it has seized in recent years.

A recently seized forgery, offered as Blessing of Santa Rosa de Lima by Francisco Goya. It appears to be done in the style 17th-century Italian painters Carlo Maratta or Pietro Antonio de Pietri. A recently seized forgery, offered as Blessing of Santa Rosa de Lima by Francisco Goya. It appears to be done in the style 17th-century Italian painters Carlo Maratta or Pietro Antonio de Pietri.

The newly identified fakes will soon join the display, according to Spanish news outlet Vozpópuli. Titled “False: The art of deception or art deception,” the exhibition opened late last month and runs through September 3. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/spanish-police-seize-goya-velazquez-forgeries-2285486

An Auctioneer Has Confessed to Playing a Major Role in Producing Fake Basquiats Displayed at the Orlando Museum of Art Los Angeles auctioneer Michael Barzman pled guilty to lying to the FBI about creating the works.

Sarah Cascone, April 12, 2023

Installation view of the "Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Thaddeus Mumford, Jr. Venice Collection" at the Orlando Museum of Art, 2022. Courtesy of the OMA.

The exhibition had one of those fairytale backstories: the Orlando Museum of Art had lucked into a storage unit full of previously unseen paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which it was showing to the public for the first time. Now, more than nine months after a dramatic FBI raid shuttered the exhibition “Heroes & Monsters,” which ran from February to June 2022, the truth is out. The paintings were not the work of the late street artist—whose work has sold for over $100 million at auction—but a series of forgeries by 45-year-old Los Angeles auctioneer Michael Barzman and an accomplice identified only as J.F.

On April 11, the United States attorney’s office for the Central District of California charged Barzman with making false statements to the FBI. He had previously denied both having painted the works or having had someone make them for him when speaking to the FBI in 2022. He has pled guilty to the charge, and faces up to five years in jail. “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,” the plea agreement said, according to a statement from the attorney’s office. “[Barzman] and J.F. agreed to split the money that they made from selling the fraudulent paintings.”

The two are said to have created 20 to 30 fake works around 2012 that they attributed to the artist. Barzman, whose business was auctioning off the contents of abandoned storage units, concocted a fake provenance for the works: Basquiat was said to have sold the cardboard paintings to television screenwriter Thad Mumford for $5,000 in 1982. Decades later, Mumford was behind in rent payments on his storage unit, and its contents went up for auction. It was a compelling story, and it was one that inspired storage hunter William Force and his financial backer, Lee Mangin, to purchase the lot for $15,000. After a messy lawsuit surrounding one of its opinions, the Basquiat estate had shut down its authentication committee in 2012, making it difficult for Force and Magnin to get anyone to officially weigh in on the question of authenticity.

But the fake works nonetheless found champions in some art experts, including Basquiat scholar Jordana Moore Saggese and curator Diego Cortez, founding member of the Basquiat estate’s authentication committee who died in 2021. Both agreed the works looked legitimate (according to her affidavit, Moore Saggese in said she was paid $60,000 by the Basquiat artworks’ owners in 2017 to assess the paintings). Handwriting expert James Blanco also found that the works’ signatures were a match to that of the artist. Due to these factors, it seems that the Orlando Museum leadership was confident that everything was legitimate and the museum published an exhibition catalogue with new essays on the 25 works, and touting a 500 percent uptick in attendance driven by the show. Nevertheless, suspicion about the works arose quickly after the show opened in Orlando in February 2022. The main red flag was a FedEx logo on one of the pieces of cardboard—the company hadn’t introduced it until 1994, six years after Basquiat’s death. (The FBI’s Art Crime Team later confronted Barzman about one of the works, pointing out that one of the works had been painting over a mailing label with his name.)

The raid didn’t happen until June, less than a week before the show was set to close—but the FBI had been investigating the case for years.

Installation view of the "Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Thaddeus Mumford, Jr. Venice Collection" at the Orlando Museum of Art, 2022. Courtesy of the OMA.

Mumford, it turned out, had told an FBI agent back in 2014 that he had never purchased any Basquiats or kept any in his storage unit. He even signed an FBI affidavit the year before he died in 2018, admitting that “at no time in the 1980s or at any other time did I meet with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and at no time did I acquire or purchase any paintings by him.” Following the FBI’s seizure of the suspect works, the museum fired Aaron De Groft as its director and chief executive. He has not been charged with any wrongdoing. The beleaguered institution has formed a “task force” to help rebuild the public’s trust following the fiasco.

An archived version of Barzman’s auction website stated that he “specialize[d] in storage auctions, abandoned property, buying gold and silver, collectibles, Hollywood memorabilia, classic cars, vintage instruments and more,” noting that “since 2015, Michael has been a bonded auctioneer & appraiser of rare memorabilia and collectibles.”

The FBI investigation into the case is still ongoing.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/auctioneer-orlando-museum-art-basquiat-2283954