Dali Planet #157:
The Perrot-Moore Art Centre
Today the Perrot-Moore Art Centre on Carrer Vigilant in Cadaques has pieces by Dali, Picasso, Caravaggio, Goya and Matisse, but it was once home to the huge collection of Dali artwork amassed by Peter Moore.
The former British Navy and Secret Service officer was a close friend of Dali and Gala from 1960 to ‘75 and served as the artist’s personal secretary and business manager, travelling with him regularly to New York and Paris and doing more than anyone else to expand his creative repertoire and place his work on the market.
In a former incarnation this building was the Miramar Hotel, on whose terrace Dali first met Gala. Moore and his wife Catherine Perrot opened their museum here in 1978, with Gala and Dali in attendance, and lived here until his death in 2005.
Above is a postage stamp that Dali created for France in ‘78.
Moore’s relationship with Dali soured with the advent of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, however, and then in 1999 police raided his home and Moore was charged in connection with forged Dali prints. At Moore’s suggestion, Dali had signed thousands of blank sheets of paper that were then printed with so-called “limited editions” of lithographs and sold. That, and the fact that Dali varied his signature regularly, produced a torrent of fakes that unhinged the art market and threatened to shrivel the value of his genuine pieces.
Little came of the charges, ostensibly because Moore was in his 80s, but when hundreds of the works from his collection were auctioned off in 2003, more trouble appeared.
The sale enabled him to reconcile with photographer and Dali authority Robert Descharnes, another intimate friend of the artist with whom Moore had feuded, but the following year Moore was accused of reducing the size of Dali’s 1969 painting “The Double Image of Gala” — stolen from New York’s Knoedler Gallery in 1974 and rediscovered here at his home-gallery in 1999 — and showing it publicly under a different name. A court ordered him and his wife to pay the Dali foundation more than $1 million in compensation.
