Dali House

From a vortex based partially at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the shadow of fraud nearly eclipsed Dali’s career in the 1980s — and in the ’90s, after his death — a cataclysm foreseen as early as 1972 when his longtime friend and keenest collector A Reynolds Morse sat in Dali’s suite at the Hotel Meurice in Paris watching as the artist “receives his entrepeneurs, takes their money, hands them his watercolours and starts the Niagara of works on paper. The veneer of respectability of Dali’s mass productions seems terrifyingly thin.”

In the wake of Dali’s death, Morse helped detectives end the massive fraud by exposing principles of Center Art Galleries-Hawaii and New Jersey publisher Leon Amiel, as Honolulu journalist Lee Catterall chronicled in “The Great Dali Art Fraud & Other Deceptions”.

Dali himself was largely to blame, taking advantage of the market for his prints in order to enrich himself and thus paving the way for others to cash in. He had given up making original prints in the early 1960s, and from then on allowed only “mechanical reproductions”.

When Spanish photographer Enrique Sabater Bonany replaced “Capitaine” Moore as his personal secretary in 1975 he established a company in the Dutch Antilles that was solely in charge of granting reproduction rights.

Then in 1980-82 Jean-Claude Dubarry, owner of the Barcelona agency that had supplied models for Dali, arranged contracts for reproductions — or at least presigned sheets — with a slew of dealers around the world, with Gala and Moore putting their signatures to many of them on Dali’s behalf. The contracts specified the number of editions allowed. This was not always adhered to. New images that Dali never made appeared, prints based on originals sold as originals, there were extended editions and facsimiles with forged signatures and there were a lot of fake copies. Moreover, many concluded, Dali didn’t care as long as he got his share of the sale price.

The chief stopgap against falling victim to a forgery today is a watermark of an infinity symbol that’s been incorporated into all new prints since 1980, the year Dali stopped signing prints. Anyone thinking of buying a print with both the infinity sign and Dali’s signature should think again. For more, see this site.