Salvador Dali Fakes
Fine Art Registry® Investigation

This is in response to the postings by "ethelw" on 21 and 22 July 2008, and Louis Postel, aka "Gaby", on 5 Aug. 2008

First, it should be pointed out that I am currently the Director of the Salvador Dali Archives Ltd., an organization founded more than 50 years ago by Albert Field with both the approval and cooperation of Salvador Dali. We are the publishers of the Official Catalog of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dali (Dali Archives, New York, 1996).

We have extensive, first-hand knowledge of Park West Gallery and all the players in this sordid tale. Our relationship with both Park West and the Albaretto family goes back to the 90s.

Albert Field has been dead now for nearly five (5) years, and the slanderous, libelous rantings emanating from Park West Gallery, its cohorts, including the self-proclaimed "Dali Expert", Bernard Ewell, about Albert Field, is more than outrageous - it's criminal.

The posting by "ethelw" is one example. In it she (?) remarks: "...the incredible story of the Albert Field catalog...Hochman's complete omission of Field’s trip to Turin, Italy in 1997 where he met with the Albaretto family and authenticated their collection." Then she continues with this outlandish and libelous statement: "...Field recognized the need to include the collection in his catalog, and promised to do so, but due to the senility of Albert Field and the influence and control of Albert (sic) Hochman the proper disclosures in the book were never made." She wants it both ways - how could he "recognize the need" if he were "senile" to begin with? Well, of course Field was not senile; he was anything but.

Here are the true unadulterated FACTS:

1. Bruce Hochman   Bruce Hochman (Brana Fine Art) had absolutely no part in what went into the Official catalog; he wrote nothing for the catalog, and had no input other than to suggest the front and back cover illustrations. Hochman's role was "distributor" of the Catalog. In addition, Bruce Hochman, as far as I know, does not work for Fine Art Registry.
   
   
2. Albaretto Family   Mr. Field made numerous attempts to see the Albaretto family's Dali collection prior to the catalog's publication (documents available), beginning as early as the 1960s. Each attempt was met with either no response or some dismissive excuse. It wasn't until a year after the catalog's publication (1997) that he was finally invited to view the collection. Therefore to say that Mr. Hochman influenced Field with respect to the Albaretto collection and its exclusion from the Official Catalog is a complete lie - the book had already been in print for one year before Field was even allowed to see the collection!!
   
   
3. Albert Field   Albert Field (BA, Harvard; MA, Columbia) spent the better part of 50 years of his life devoted to Salvador Dali. Dali appointed Field his "official cataloguer" in the 1950s, and thus began Field's life-long quest to discover, as it were, all the works Dali produced. He amassed a huge collection of Dali related materials along the way - including books, exhibition catalogs, newspaper and magazine articles, photographs, original Dali works, graphic works, three-dimensional works, and manuscripts. The vast majority of these items were donated to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, and when the new Museum is completed, the Library will be named in Field's honor.

Robert Descharnes, Dali's former secretary, life-long friend and expert, recently said that Field was 'faithful' to Dali. And others have said that Dali liked Field "because he (Field) wanted nothing from him..." This is not completely true, Field did want something, and that was "information", the more the better. Each week, over the course of many years, he would meet with Dali at his hotel in New York. There he would often show Dali photographs of supposed Dali works; - if something was fraudulent, Dali would write "FAL"” on the face or back of the photograph. Field would discuss upcoming exhibitions; books; publishers; and ever so gently pave the way for his catalog. Originally, the catalog project was much more ambitious. Field had envisioned a complete catalog of all of Dali's work. Little by little, the vast scale of the project made itself known, and by the 1980s Field decided to abandon that idea and concentrate instead on Dali's graphic works.

In March 1998 (one year after Field's visit to Turino), the New York Times interviewed Field at his home, and wrote this: [the Official Catalog] has been hailed by experts in the artist's work. The chairman and former director of the Dali Museum, A. Reynolds Morse, called the book a vital weapon against counterfeiters. "Only the labors and scholarship of Mr. Field can begin to restore any kind of order to the vast world of Dali reproductive prints," Mr. Morse wrote in an introduction.

There was more to Albert Field than just Salvador Dali. He was a highly respected and decorated Lieutenant Colonel in the Civil Air Patrol; he was a mountain climber (Fuji, Matterhorn); a hiker (the entire Appalachian trail) and Chairman of the Metropolitan Trails Conference. In addition to Dali, his other intellectual pursuits included collecting and writing about playing cards. He had the largest private collection of cards in the world, over 5,000 packs, each pack differing in its face cards; some packs dated back to the 15th century. The collection now resides at Columbia University’s Rare book and Manuscript library. He was also the author of "Transformation Playing Cards" (U.S. Games Systems, Inc, 1987).

And five years after the publication of the Official Catalog, four years after Field's Torino visit, in the year 2001, a camera crew arrived from Spain. Their mission: to film Field for a documentary film on the life of Dali's wife, Gala Dali. Field spent the better part of a day speaking about Gala and Dali, in French, in front of several camera men, lighting and sound technicians, myself and a friend. Funny thing, the "senility" Albert Scaglione, and his band of disreputable cronies speak of, never materialized.

Innuendo, defamation, posthumous libel and slander, threats of litigation; just a few of the tactics employed by the "world's largest art gallery" and its handsomely paid cronies.

Fine Art Registry is to be commended for standing up to this avaricious behemoth.

The "600 pound gorilla" referred to by ethelW is in actuality a ton of Red Herrings.

Frank Hunter
Director
The Salvador Dali Archives, LTD.
www.DaliArchives.com