Things are not looking up for the former director of the Orlando Museum of Art, Aaron De Groft, and by extension for the Florida museum. At the beginning of the year, there were 25 paintings attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat and hung for the exhibition Heroes and Monsters to engage in controversy. Because these works would be counterfeits, which Aaron De Groft, then in office, refuted, unlike specialists. After an investigation carried out by the FBI, it would seem that these tables would indeed be fakes. The works were seized and the director fired. This case brought to light some dubious wrongdoing on the part of Aaron De Groft. The magazine The Observer conducted its own investigation and discovered that the Muscarelle Museum of Art, located in Virginia, had also suffered some licentious practices when De Groft was its director, between 2005 and 2018. During this time, the museum’s collection had mysteriously doubled in volume, with a number of acquisitions at bargain prices, of paintings attributed to famous European artists of their time.
The experts then contradict the authenticity of these paintings, unlike De Groft who took part of them to exhibit them at the Orlando museum when he became its director. He also participated in the authentications himself of works which we now doubt were really signed by the attributed painter. This is particularly the case of a portrait signed Titian and what further tests refute. Or a painting signed Pollock, which was to be exhibited in Orlando and whose attribution has also been contradicted by experts… The controversy is not over for the former director of the museum, nor for the museum itself…
