FILE - The entrance to an exhibit by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Orlando Museum of Art, June 1, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File)
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) – Aaron De Groft, a former head of the Orlando Museum of Art who left the institution under a cloud in 2022 after it was raided by the FBI as part of an art fraud probe into more than two dozen forged Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings, has died. He was 59.
De Groft died last weekend after a brief illness, the Neptune Society, a cremation service provider, said without providing further details. The Orlando Sentinel also reported that his wife, Kathryn Lee De Groft, had submitted an obituary to the news outlet.
“We were saddened to hear about the passing of Aaron De Groft,” the museum said in an emailed statement. “Our thoughts are with his family at this time of loss.”
De Groft became executive director of the Orlando Museum of Art in 2021 following art museum administration jobs in Jacksonville, Sarasota, and Williamsburg, Virginia.
De Groft negotiated to have the Orlando Museum of Art be the first institution to display more than two dozen artworks said to have been found in an old storage locker decades after Basquiat’s 1988 death from a drug overdose at age 27. Basquiat, who lived and worked in New York City, found success in the 1980s as part of the neo-Expressionism movement.
Questions about the artworks’ authenticity arose almost immediately after their reported discovery in 2012. The artwork was purportedly made in 1982, but experts have pointed out that the cardboard used in at least one of the pieces included FedEx typeface that wasn’t used until 1994, about six years after Basquiat’s death, according to the federal warrant from the museum raid.
Additionally, the owner of the storage locker where the art was found, TV writer Thad Mumford, told investigators he had never owned any Basquiat art and that the pieces were not in the unit the last time he had checked it. Mumford died in 2018.
At the time of his museum’s exhibit, De Groft repeatedly insisted that the Basquiat art was legitimate.
An FBI search warrant said that De Groft sent an email to an academic art expert when she asked that her name not be used in promoting the works because she didn’t want to be associated with the exhibit. In the email, De Groft urged her to “shut up,” and he threatened to tell her employer that she was paid $60,000 to write a report about the pieces.
“You took the money. Stop being holier than thou. You did this not me or anybody else,” De Groft said in the email quoted in the search warrant. “Be quiet now is my best advice. These are real and legit. You know this. You are threatening the wrong people. Do your academic thing and stay in your limited lane.”
The FBI seized the paintings during the museum raid in 2022.
In 2023, former Los Angeles auctioneer Michael Barzman agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of making false statements to the FBI, admitting that he and an accomplice had created the fake artwork and falsely attributed the paintings to Basquiat.
The museum sued De Groft, claiming fraud, breach of contract and conspiracy. The former executive director countersued the museum for breach of contract and wrongful termination, saying he was being made a scapegoat. The board chairwoman and outside lawyers for the Orlando Museum of Art had signed off on the exhibit, even after the FBI had subpoenaed the museum’s records over the exhibit in July 2021, De Groft said in court papers.
De Groft’s attorney, Robert Parks, didn’t immediately respond to an email and phone call seeking comment on Wednesday. The Orlando Museum of Art said in its emailed statement that it wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss the future of the litigation at this time.
De Groft is survived by his wife and two children.
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