A Trove of ‘Lost Basquiats’ Led to a Splashy Exhibition. Then the FBI Showed Up.

Discovering a trove of unknown paintings by Basquiat—whose art has sold for as much as $110.5 million and hangs in museums around the world—sounds way too good to be true. But the new owners gradually amassed evidence to suggest that the works were authentic: a forensic analysis by a handwriting expert, an in-depth report by a Basquiat scholar, and a statement of authenticity signed by a founding member of a committee that the Basquiat estate had established to vet potential forgeries. A few experts asserted that these paintings weren’t just by Basquiat, but were some of the best he’d ever made—“better conceived, drawn, colored and executed than works in the Catalogue Raisonné,” the forensic examiner wrote, referring to an authoritative compendium of Basquiat’s work. An appraiser valued a group of six of the paintings at $25 million.