Aaron De Groft, Museum Director Accused in Fake Basquiat Scheme, Dies at 59

Aaron De Groft, the former director of the Orlando Museum of Art, who came to national prominence in 2022 after paintings he was exhibiting as the lost work of Jean-Michel Basquiat were seized by the F.B.I. as fakes, died on Saturday in Orlando. He was 59.

Kathryn Lee De Groft, his wife of 34 years, issued a statement saying he had died “after a brief illness.” No further information was available about the cause of death.

In February 2022, the Orlando Museum of Art opened a blockbuster exhibition of 25 paintings that Mr. Basquiat was said to have created in 1982, when he was 22 and living in Venice, Calif.

Mr. De Groft said that Mr. Basquiat had sold the artworks, most of them painted and drawn on slabs of cardboard, for $5,000 in cash, and that they had languished for decades in a Los Angeles storage unit. In 2012, Mr. De Groft said, the storage unit was foreclosed for lack of payment and the contents auctioned off. A little-known dealer purchased the artworks for about $15,000.

At the time of the exhibition, they were said to be worth nearly $100 million. Some museum staff members raised concerns about their authenticity but were rebuffed by the museum’s board chairwoman and threatened by Mr. De Groft with termination if they publicly aired their skepticism.

Days after the exhibit opened, The New York Times published an article raising questions about the paintings. The article noted doubts expressed by several curators, and reported that one of the paintings was made on a piece of cardboard shipping material containing a printed FedEx typeface not used by that company until 1994 — six years after Mr. Basquiat’s death and 12 years after Mr. De Groft and the painting’s owners said the painting was made.