Salvador Dali Fake Prints
Fine Art Registry® Investigation

The Really Big Bluff

ZEIT ONLINE
33/2004
http://www.zeit.de/2004/33/Der_ganz_grosse_Bluff

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Now it is official: graphic prints by Salvador Dali have been falsified in large quantities.

By Claudia Herstatt

Close proximity to celebrities can be seductive, and therefore, the counterfeiters come mostly from the immediate surroundings of the artist. According to their own account, the Torino physician couple, Mara and Beppe Albaretto, circled like satellites around the surrealist Salvador Dali, who died in 1989, during his lifetime. They spent vacations together in Spanish Cadaqués, traveled with Dali and his wife Gala to New York and Paris and allegedly resided with them in the luxury hotels Meurice and St. Regis Sheraton on Fifth Avenue. According to statements by the family, the artist even became godfather to their daughter, Cristiana.

Now, however, Dali's goddaughter is being accused of having put fake graphics into circulation over many years, together with another family member and a Belgium dealer. According to the investigating police commissioner, Ernst Schöller, from the Office of Criminal Investigations [Landeskriminalamt], Stuttgart, this is the biggest European case in the area of forged prints.

What triggered the investigations was an exhibition in the year 2000 in the Freiburger Kornhaus. 65 of the 97 works displayed there were photomechanically reproduced bulk goods, deliberately produced and signed for distribution. This can now be confirmed by senior prosecutor and press spokesman, Wolfgang Maier, from Freiburg. Nothing was right about the Dali prints – not the paper, nor the motifs nor craftsmanship – which the artist was supposed to have signed. Besides, the specified measurements were different from the ones in the catalogue raisonné.

Dali didn't speak any Italian, but the contracts that he allegedly signed were in part also written in that language. Papers, dating to the 60's, were typed on a typewriter which didn't come onto the market until the 70's.

At this point in time, the Torino printing shop, Les Heures Claires, owned by the family Albaretto, was already notorious. Time and again, the family was connected to forgeries – for instance, in combination with the Belgian art dealer Interart. However, so far they were lucky. In spite of several proceedings, courts in Milan and Brussels confirmed time and again the authenticity of the paperwork. "Now, however, that seems to be changing, since the evidentiary situation allows us to be calmly poised for the proceedings," the police commissioner says. That will also have consequences for previous judgments.

The Italian side has not reacted for over a year to a request for judicial assistance. In Brügge, they struck gold faster. There, they were able to confiscate about 300 works at Interart, a fraction of the fenced goods that meanwhile have been scattered all over the world. The many pieces of the puzzle pieces now assembled present themselves to the investigators as follows: 30 fake motifs in editions of 2000 prints each, with a presumed revenue of 30 million euro.

There is probably no other artist whose work has been falsified on such a large scale as Salvador Dali. Approximately half a million original Dali paper editions have been printed with authorization, according to the estimate of Ralf Michler and Lutz W. Löpsinger, the authors of the catalogue raisonne published in 1994. However, according to their opinion, the quantity from dubious sources that is circulating on the art market is about ten times that. In the mid-2000's, 60,000 fake prints were confiscated in the New York gallery Amiel; a court in Swiss Grenoble identified about 100,000 fakes. And those are no isolated cases. Blank signatures of the old eccentric man did their part in promoting the business dealings. Just recently, at the end of July, after years of law-suits, a settlement was reached between the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali and Dali's last secretary, Robert Descharnes. By this agreement, the artist's confidante who had been appearing in an unfavorable light, leaves to the Foundation the company he founded for the use of the copyright of Dali's work, which is an enterprise worth about 50 million euro. A Spanish court identified the signature of the artist, who by then was already very ill, as not authentic.

Via their defense attorneys, the three accused from Torino and Brügge informed the prosecutor's office that they will not comply with the court-ordered fine of about 50,000 euro each. Perhaps there will soon be a public trial.

DIE ZEIT, 33/2004

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