Aside from creating art, prancing around with his ridiculous mustache, making weird gestures, painting his wife Gala, and melting clocks in surrealist settings, Salvador Dalí also loved money. The artist once said: “Each morning after breakfast I like to start the day by earning twenty thousand dollars.” He resorted to a rather simple trick in order to increase the numbers of his bank account: he would draw some of his ideas on a metal plate and then order the reproduction of the “original prints” on the plate. Many of these ideas resulted in multiple reproductions his “original” engravings. So he managed to earn a great deal of money without too much effort.
However, one thing led to another. Dalí used to pre-sign the blank sheets that would be used in the printing process of the authorized lithographies, which resulted in an barrage of falsified works. The artist was persuaded to sign many of these sheets of paper by his personal assitants, John Peter Moore and Enrique Sabater. In the 1960s, a print-ready sheet bearing Dalí’s signature was already worth $40. Both the artist and his assistant were not unaware of this.
John Peter Moore kept a 10 percent commission for every Dalí contract he arranged. This turned out to be very profitable for the artist too. Between 1976 and 1977 Dalí signed over 17 thousand blank sheets. As rumors about the signed sheets spread, its proliferation increased dramatically and marketplaces sold thousands of sheets. Soon, Moore was pointed as the main culprit for promoting the artist’s excesses.
As the word continued to spread, markets started selling thousands of signatures, many of them falsified by other people. That continued until 1985, when Moore himself claimed that Dalí had only signed 350,000 blank sheets of art paper in his career. He received help from two people in order to accelerate the signing process. One person would place the lithographic paper on the table, while the other removed the signed paper. He could sign around 1800 pages in just an hour. Dalí would even sign the papers in secret to avoid having to pay his assistants any further commissions.
Despite his practices all his collaborators amassed fortunes. They carried out all kinds of sales strategies to continue filling their pockets. For example, during a period in which Dalí fell sick and couldn’t provide his signature, they decided to stamp the artist’s fingerprint instead. That’s how he signed a contract on December 6, 1980 with the largest supplier of graphic works in Paris: Gilbert Hamon. With this, Dalí granted them complete exclusivity to use his lithographies and gained another hundred thousand dollars.
The authorized lithographies continued to be falsified. With so many signed sheets in the market, it became increasingly easy to forge fake versions of them and start a business selling Dalí’s unknown collections.
Thanks to the international distribution of these sheets, the original artist grew even richer. In 1985, fake Dalí signatures were valued in 720 million dollars in the United States. Two years later, two of these fakes were seized in Japan and valued in 34.5 million dollars. In 1988, four gallery owners were prosecuted in New York for exhibiting fake Dalí paintings, and in 1990, a thousand fakes were found in Barcelona, Spain about to be sold.
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There is no doubt that Dalí loved excess and notoriety, especially after he was expelled from the Surrealist group in 1939. However, this wasn’t Dalí’s only secret; he had many other hidden secrets and oddities that even nowadays keep coming to light.
Sources: El País, Artsy, La Jornada
Translated by Andrea Valle Gracia
