Salvador Dalí, genius of dreams and distorted visions of the imagination, is also the most falsified artist in the world today. This is demonstrated by the recent seizures in Parma of twenty-one works believed to be fake. His immense fame and strong demand on the market have made his creations fertile ground for counterfeiters, who exploit dubious signatures and an often flawed control system.
Who was Salvador Dalí
Born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech (Figueres, 1904 – 1989), Salvador Dalí was an all-round Catalan artist, who worked as a painter, sculptor, writer, photographer, filmmaker, designer, screenwriter (and mystic). However, he is most famous for the bizarre images of his Surrealist and Dadaist works, whose inspiration dated back to the Renaissance masters. Gifted with a fervent imagination and great creativity, he often captured the public’s attention also for his eccentric ways and his antics, such as walking a tamed anteater on a leash.
Despite being just one of many artists of the Surrealist Movement, Dalì is often seen as the most recognizable and famous exponent among the general public: the high market demand for his works of art, which therefore maintain a high value and wide appeal, causes a wide demand which paves the way for counterfeits.
Dalí’s forgeries
The case of Dalì’s forgery, however, is not the type we often imagine: it is not one or more examples of famous forged paintings, but rather a sequence of copies of originals and replacements of signatures. This is possible above all because Dalì’s market is not associated so much with painting as with lithography, which is the process by which a drawing or engraving made on stone is transposed (chemically or mechanically) onto paper or another support: all you need is a matrix to make as many copies as you want.
A process that led Dalí himself to blur the boundaries of authenticity. In the 70s and 80s, as reported by the investigator and art fraud expert Colette Loll, the artist – accused at the time of being very venal – signed thousands of blank sheets of paper in advance to be used for subsequent limited edition prints. Many of these sheets were misused and exploited by other artists or forgers to sell “Dalí” made by third parties. Other works, however, appear to have been signed in questionable circumstances, when his health was worsening, before his death in 1989. This wave of authentic signatures on dubious works created truly fertile ground for counterfeiting, a phenomenon that is still widespread today.
To give an example of the scale of the problem: already in the mid-1980s, that is, while the artist was still alive, a New York lawyer representing him estimated that in those years fake lithographs of Dalí worth 625 million dollars (at the time) had been sold in the United States.
Paradoxically, the master of Surrealism thus risks becoming the very symbol of deception: an emblematic case of how fragile the boundary is between authentic and counterfeit, between art and fraud. It is up to experts and collectors to extricate themselves from this labyrinth of speculation and illusions, in an attempt to distinguish what was truly born from Dalí’s visionary mind from what is merely a deceptive reflection.
