The Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Great American Insurance Company are petitioning a Florida court to declare that the owners of a trove of fake Jean-Michel Basquiat works are not entitled to a $19.7m payout for the art, which the FBI seized from the Orlando Museum of Art (OMA) in a 2022 raid.
The works’ owners—Pierce O’Donnell, Taryn Burns and William Force, known collectively as the Basquiat Venice Collection Group (BVCG)—claim that they were acting in good faith and are entitled to their claim, since the insurers did not verify the works’ authenticity when the owners were added to the insurance policy. As part of its loan agreement with BVCG, OMA added them to its loan-insurance policy as an additional insured party, according to the Associated Press.
However, in court documents filed late last month, the insurers call on the court to declare “that forgeries do not constitute ‘covered property’ under the policy and that accordingly plaintiffs owe no duty to” BVCG or OMA. Their representatives add that “coverage is unavailable because the property alleged to have been lost does not constitute covered property inasmuch as the property was inauthentic”, and therefore “they have no value, or only nominal value, and should be destroyed, subject to FBI and [Department of Justice] protocols”.
The insurers’ lawsuit was filed in Florida state court in Orlando, but the works’ owners have petitioned to have the case moved to an Orlando federal court, since the parties are based in different states (Burns and Force reside in California, O’Donnell in Texas). The insurers counter that the case should remain in the state court, because it is also the venue for the lawsuit and countersuit between OMA and its former director, Aaron De Groft, who was instrumental in bringing the Basquiat exhibition to the museum and fired shortly after the FBI raid. (Almost exactly a year ago, OMA dropped its lawsuit against the five people who at the time were identified as the co-owners of the fake Basquiats.)
In their filing seeking the declaratory judgment, the insurers add that they should not be responsible for coverage “because of intentional or negligent misrepresentations by BVCG representing the works were authentic in connection with the loan. BVCG represented that they were loaning authentic artworks to which BVCG had good title when in fact BVCG knew or should have known that they were not authentic.”
On Friday (17 January), US district judge Paul G. Byron ordered the insurers, OMA and BVCG to select a mediator for their dispute and select a mediation date within the next 14 days.
The exhibition in question, Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Thaddeus Mumford, Jr. Venice Collection, closed abruptly in June 2022 after the FBI raided OMA, seizing 25 works that had been presented as Basquiats but whose authenticity was in doubt. Days later, the museum’s board of trustees fired De Groft. Several other leaders left the museum as the scandal widened in the following months, and the institution has faced enduring financial hardships since.
In 2023, the Los Angeles-based auctioneer Michael Barzman admitted in court papers that he and another forger only identified by the initials JF had created the fake Basquiat works in 2012. Barzman also admitted that he had fabricated the works’ provenance story, which held that the works had been discovered in a storage locker that was previously rented to the screenwriter Thad Mumford, who purportedly had bought the works directly from Basquiat in 1982. (Barzman ran an auction house dealing in the contents of storage lockers whose renters had ceased to pay.)
