The Curious Case of the Contested Basquiats

Twenty-five "masterpieces," an FBI raid, and the maddening, sometimes impossible task of rooting out fakes and forgeries

- Bianca Bosker

The paintings that appeared on eBay in the fall of 2012 featured skeletal figures with frenzied eyes, blocky crowns, and gnashing rows of teeth. They were done in brilliant blues and electric reds, mostly on scraps of cardboard that ranged from notebook-size to as big as a kitchen table. According to the man who was selling them—a professional auctioneer named Michael Barz man— he’d found them in a storage unit whose contents he’d bought after its renter had fallen behind on his bills. Barz man claimed he’d tossed the art in the trash. Then he’d fished it out and put it online.

Various deal-hunters who saw Barz man’s pieces were impressed by their resemblance to work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist known for his energetic paintings of skulllike faces and expressionistic figures whose art grew only more celebrated after he died from a drug overdose in 1988, at age 27. Within a few months, the cardboards were snapped up by collectors who, intrigued by what they had, threw themselves into establishing who’d made them.

Discovering a trove of unknown paintings by Basquiat— whose art has sold for as much as $110.5 million and hangs in museums around the world— sounds way too good to be true. But the new owners gradually amassed evidence to suggest that the works were authentic: a forensic analysis by a handwriting expert, an in-depth report by a Basquiat scholar, and a statement of authenticity signed by a founding member of a committee that the Basquiat estate had established to vet potential forgeries. A few experts asserted that these paintings weren’t just by Basquiat, but were some of the best he’d ever made—“better conceived, drawn, colored and executed than works in the