It sounds like something out of a thriller film. Twenty-five previously unseen paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, dating from the height of his career, are found in an abandoned storage-locker; bought in 1982 for the extraordinarily low price of $5,000 by the screenwriter Thad Mumford, they have been languishing in storage since their new owner failed to pay the costs.
Forty years later, they form the basis of Heroes and Monsters, a monumental exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art. It’s hard to overstate how important a find this is: Basquiat holds the US auction record for the sale of an untitled 1982 skull painting, which fetched $110.5 million in 2017. Finding 25 hidden paintings from the same year is the equivalent of finding a previously unknown Shakespeare play written in 1600, or an unreleased Bowie album from 1972.
And yet, these types of mind-boggling discoveries don’t happen. Even in the context of the dramatic arc of Basquiat’s life – from street-artist to protégé of Andy Warhol and boyfriend of Madonna, before a premature death at 27 from a heroin overdose – if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Last week, The New York Times ran a story about the Orlando paintings that had all the hallmarks of crime fiction: suspicious experts, smoking-gun clues and shady financial interests. The newfound works are all painted on cardboard, which isn’t unusual for Basquiat, who liked to use found materials. Except, on the back of Untitled (Self-Portrait or Crown Face II) is a FedEx mark. An expert on the FedEx brand told the Times that this font wasn’t used until 1994, six years after Basquiat’s death, and 12 years after the work was supposed to have been painted. Other news outlets have increased the drama with rumours that the museum’s management silenced its employees with a gagging order, and that its computers had been seized by the FBI.
Basquiat experts, however, aside from those used by the Orlando Museum to affirm the legitimacy of the paintings, have been silent about all this. This is not the stunned silence of an industry shocked by such a dispute, but rather resigned acceptance. Basquiat artworks have been faked since the artist’s death in 1988 – if not before.
