WHY WOULD PIERCE O’DONNELL NEED AN AFFIDAVIT FROM BASQUIAT FORGER ALFREDO MARTINEZ? The Answer To That Question Can Be Summed Up in Two Words: Talin Maltepe
In a background story on the “Smith Archive”, published here on April 26, I revealed Talin Maltepe’s role in “authenticating” a collection of “95 lost Basquiats” owned by Randall Scott Smith. But what you don’t know is that convicted Basquiat forger, Alfredo Martinez, was part of Maltepe’s “team”. In fact, Alfredo Martinez was the person who, on February 11, 2021, uploaded the “Smith Masterpiece” catalog to Scribd!
In “Sleeping With Basquiat”, her catalogue essay for the 2018 “Smith Archive”, Toronto resident Talin Maltepe spins a tale Randall Scott Smith and his Basquiats — formerly the contents of a shipping container, long forgotten in a New Jersey aircraft hangar since 1988.
The unusually imaginative narrative cooked up for the “Smith Collection” by Maltepe and Halter, those two crazy Canadians who helped Leo Mangan get his 19 Basquiat paintings to market, has striking elements of the Orlando Basquiat myth:
“The SMITH COLLECTION is comprised of 95 works by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, and comes from a collection of about 200 works that were collected and owned by the late Rupert Jasen Smith, master print maker and art director of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and friend of Jean-Michel.
Smith is shown below with one of his “Basquiats” (painted on a cupboard door).
And, in the lower right-hand corner of the image below, taken directly from Randall Scott Smith’s LinkedIn page (I’m not kidding!), is Alfredo Martinez perusing a Smith “masterpiece”, accompanied by Talin Maltepe (black and white dress, back to camera).
Taken from the Smith catalogue:
“Randall Smith, of Illinois, had come to be aware of the collection via social media in 2013, and began to collect the works, knowing how valuable the works would be as a comprehensive collection. Over the course of approximately 3 years, Smith collected 95 works by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, constantly researching the life of the artist and the works, knowing that they were of enormous value, aware of their significance in the oeuvre of the late Basquiat.”
Well, hell, Pierce O’Donnell couldn’t let that uncomfortable fact about Maltepe and her history of low-rent “authentication” schemes leak out and ruin his Orlando Museum/Basquiat coup.
So O’Donnell locked down Martinez, with a “Declaration” and likely an NDA.
I don’t have the NDA (yet!), but I do have the “Declaration of Alfredo Martinez” strictly relating to the Orlando Museum Basquiat collection, and conveniently leaving out his role with Maltepe for the Smith collection.
Here it is.
(My favorite line: “No forger would try to imitate an artist with nearly 100 art works for sale at one time.” That’s exactly what Smith did, and Martinez was paid to give Smith’s collection his stamp of approval by Talin Maltepe!)
So how do you explain this, Alfredo?
