Jordana Moore Saggese, an art history professor hired to provide her professional assessment of 27 paintings with a contested attribution to Jean-Michel Basquiat, has released a statement denying that she ever claimed the works were legitimate.
“Those claims are false,” she wrote in a statement published by The Baltimore Sun Sunday, “Their publication caused me substantial reputational damage and emotional distress. Nowhere in the reports did I provide the positive or definitive attribution to Basquiat of any of the [Orlando Museum of Art] works.”
The works in question were featured in the Orlando Museum of Art’s show “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat” and seized during an F.B.I. raid in late June. The F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team had been investigating the authenticity of the works since their supposed discovery in a storage unit in Los Angeles in 2012. The investigation found “false information relating to the alleged prior ownership of the paintings,” according to a 41-page affidavit for the search warrant obtained by the New York Times.
Saggese, currently a professor at the University of Maryland and a noted Basquiat expert, said she had been hired by the collection’s owners in 2017 to provide her professional opinion of the works. To sweeten the deal, Saggese wrote, the attorneys told her that “after the artwork sold for millions of dollars, [he] would fund scholarships.” She agreed to take a preliminary look at the works via photos.
“I rejected nine works...
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