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“Untitled (Self-Portrait or Crown Face II),” a work said to be by Jean-Michel Basquiat, was painted in acrylic, wax crayon, and paint stick, on the back of Federal Express shipping material. Orlando Museum of Art.


This is a RAID..!

quote The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Orlando Museum of Art on Friday, taking all 25 works [paintings] that had been part of an exhibition on the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat [who lived from1961 to 1988], the museum said.

Suspicious FedEx shipping label

quote The paintings in the “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat” exhibition were said by the museum and their owners to have been recovered from a Los Angeles storage unit in 2012. The works were largely unseen before the show’s February opening. A Times report published that month raised questions about their authenticity. It noted that one of the art works was painted on the back of a cardboard shipping box bearing an instruction to “Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here,” in a typeface that a designer who worked for Federal Express said was not used until 1994—six years after Basquiat’s death.

The "Hundred Million Dollar Question"

quote If authentic, the Basquiat paintings would be worth about $100 million, according to Putnam Fine Art and Antique Appraisals, which assessed them for the owners. The owners have said in previous interviews that they were trying to sell the works.

"F.B.I. Raids Orlando Museum and Removes Basquiat Paintings"
Brett Sokol and Matt Stevens for the New York Times; June 24, 2022.
https://www.nytimes.com/202...museum-basquiat.html


My day wouldn't have been complete without my being able to say "Art world rocked..."

[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 06-24-2022).]