The great Dali whitewash

Voyeur, exhibitionist, rogue... Salvador Dali was all of these, though the heirs to his estate would rather we forgot

Oscar Tusquets, the man who helped to design the plump red “saliva sofa” in the shape of Mae West’s lips that is one of Dali’s best-known and most provocative works of art, was a close friend of the surrealist. He had first-hand knowledge of the artist’s foibles — not least his fetishistic approach to sex. “Dali was the most brilliant man I have ever met, a truly extraordinary artist. But he had his dark side,” says Tusquets, now 68 and a respected architect and designer who lives in Barcelona. “Part of him was a voyeur, part of him enjoyed orgies and paying people to have sex in front of him. Maybe it wasn’t important, but it was part of him nonetheless.”

If the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, set up to manage Dali’s estate after his death and to protect his legacy, has its way, however, such truths about the private man will he airbrushed out of history. In their view, Dali’s rackety private life — and for that matter his dubious business dealings and alleged fakery — are not up for public discussion. The foundation says it is not a “censorship organisation”. But it is now engaged in a series of bitter struggles to stop any project it believes will tarnish Dali’s reputation and, by extension, the value of his work.

Among these projects are two big Hollywood films — one with Antonio Banderas slated to play Dali, the other due to star Al Pacino — both of which the foundation opposes.

Dali appointed Tusquets a life member of the foundation; now, however, Tusquets describes his relations with the foundation as “polite” but distant. He accuses its managing body of being “puritanical”.

“It is acting like a widow trying to sanitise and sanctify the image of the dead,” he says. “From a business point of view what they are doing makes sense. But from an artistic point of view, well…” Tusquets’ voice trails off and he falls silent.Visitors flock to see the house in Port Lligat where Dali spent summers with Gala, his Russian-born wife and muse, entertaining guests such as the Beatle George Harrison, the actors Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner, and a string of beautiful models and hangers-on.

On the day I arrive the house is closed. But perched high on a cliff above the secluded cove where it sits is a sprawling villa in which the widow of one of Dali’s longest-standing and most controversial associates still lives. She is the wife of the painter’s one-time personal secretary, Peter Moore, the man Dali called his “defence minister” because of Moore’s background in British military intelligence. After 20 years in his service, Moore was fired by Dali in 1975 when Gala demanded that he be replaced by someone “younger and more handsome”. Gala’s appetite for young men lasted well into her dotage — she died in 1982 at the age of 87.

Peter Moore and his Swiss wife, Catherine, remained friends with the painter for many years after his dismissal, but shortly before Moore died in 2005, the couple became embroiled in a scandal involving thousands of his allegedly faked Dali lithographs.

The Spanish authorities eventually dropped most of the charges, taking account of Moore’s advanced years and failing health, but the couple were ordered to pay more than €1m in compensation to the Gala-Dali Foundation for tampering with one of the surrealist master’s long-lost paintings and passing it off as a previously unknown work. The legal action was one of many launched by the foundation in recent years against those dealing in alleged Dali fakes.

During my visit Catherine Moore is reluctant to discuss Dali’s personal proclivities beyond saying that “he liked to play with people like chess pieces”. On the subject of Gala and her legendary greed, however, the still-glamorous widow is more forthcoming. She recalls being summoned once by the painter’s wife to help count money, “because I am Swiss. She said I would know how to do that”.

Catherine Moore walked into a room where Gala was sitting surrounded by stacks of dollar bills that she kept stroking and counting. “Dali didn’t ask for too much. But Gala was a big gambler. She was with money like an alcoholic is with alcohol — she loved it.

It was Gala, Moore claims, who was behind all of Dali’s most outrageous money-making schemes. These included allegedly signing countless sheets of blank paper, on which fake lithographs would later be printed, with the boast: “Each morning after breakfast I like to start the day by earning $20,000.” The French surrealist André Breton was prompted to rework the name Salvador Dali into the anagram “Avida Dollars”, or greedy for dollars, a nickname that stuck.

The Dalis spent years globetrotting, and for much of that time Peter Moore, and later Catherine, were their close companions. “Dali and Gala ran up huge bills wherever they went that had to be paid somehow. My husband took care of that,” says Catherine, perched nervously on the edge of her chair in imitation-snakeskin trousers. “But not even Peter knew all the deals that Dali made and all the contracts he signed with people who turned up at his hotel, which has caused a lot of trouble since his death.

Despite Gala’s often callous treatment of her husband — flaunting young lovers in front of him and initiating violent rows — the couple remained devoted for more than 50 years, and after her death Dali sank into a deep depression. At first he moved into the medieval Pubol Castle, near Girona, Catalonia, where Gala died and was buried. Then, following a fire that left him badly burnt, he moved to a small room next to the Theatre-Museum he had established in Figueres and spent his last years there, bedridden.

Former friends, including Catherine Moore, say that during these last years Dali was surrounded by a small circle of aides and assistants who carefully controlled access to him. Moore says she and her husband were so concerned that they even wrote to the King of Spain, a patron of the painter, appealing for old friends to be allowed to visit the artist.Those surrounding Dali at this time are said to have been concerned to ensure that his estate would pass to the Spanish state, which is what Dali himself had in mind when he established the foundation in 1983. Smarting at the fact that so much of the work of Picasso, a Spaniard, had passed in the form of death duties into the hands of the French state, since he lived and died in France, Dali’s entourage is said to have been determined that no last-minute deals would interfere with Spain inheriting his work.

When Dali died of heart failure in January 1989, and his body was interred under the floor of one of the rooms in the Figueres museum, his estate was worth an estimated $87m. The museum now attracts nearly a million visitors every year. Together with Dali’s house at Port Lligat, and Pubol Castle, in 2008 the museum brought the foundation more than €8.5m in ticket sales and museum-related activities. In total, the foundation’s income for the year 2007-8 was nearly €13.5m, which makes it one of Spain’s richest cultural institutions.

Some of this income is spent on acquiring new works of art by Dali from private sources, but a considerable sum is used to pay the foundation’s legal bills, which cover prosecuting forgers of Dali’s work and those breaching copyright, as well as fighting anyone whose portrayal of the artist the foundation disapproves of.

Top of the list of its targets in recent years has been a book entitled Dali & I: The Surreal Story, by Stan Lauryssens, a Belgian art dealer who served a prison sentence for peddling Dali fakes. The book not only contains salacious details of Dali’s sex life but also claims to lift the lid on just how complicit Dali was in the faking of his work.

Few were surprised when the foundation instigated legal proceedings against the publication of this purported memoir. When the book was optioned for a Hollywood film, however — with Andrew Niccol, writer of The Truman Show, in the frame as director and Al Pacino to play the part of Dali — the foundation pulled out all stops to quash it. Representatives were sent to Los Angeles to lobby against it, appealing directly to Pacino not to “debase himself” with such a project.

According to Lauryssens, Pacino was bombarded with letters calling for him to drop out of the film. The production company behind the film, Room 9 Entertainment, declined to comment beyond confiding to Lauryssens: “Likely any quote from our camp on that subject in the London Times will not be to our advantage.”

The foundation has also attempted to block far lower-key projects, including a documentary about Dali’s own extensive involvement with a film called The Cinema According to Dali, by Christopher Jones, a British writer and film-maker based in France. Jones describes it as “a total love letter to Salvador Dali”. It documents, for instance, his enthusiastic collaboration with Walt Disney in the 1940s on a short film called Destino, and later with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence of Spellbound.

Yet Jones says the foundation has tried to stop him from showing the film in a series of prestigious venues, including Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art. “If they try to stop projects like this, one wonders what you have to do to get their approval,” he says, adding that he believes the foundation’s principal focus is on money and control.

This seems borne out by the foundation’s refusal even to allow the showing of a surrealist film that Dali himself partially completed with Robert Descharnes, a long-term associate and world-renowned authority on his work. Dali appointed Descharnes a life member of the foundation to represent his interests. To the dismay of other members such as Tusquets, several years after the artist’s death Descharnes was voted off the board in a dispute over rights to Dali’s work. In recent years the board has consisted principally of people who never knew the artist, many of them businessmen and former politicians.

Speaking from Paris, Robert Descharnes’ son Nicolas, who recalls playing in Dali’s studio as a boy, accuses the foundation of being “very bureaucratic” and viewing everything they don’t control as “competition rather than collaboration”. “This makes them blind,” he says. “They try to kill off other intellectual sources who know a great deal about Dali. What the foundation is doing is censorship. It is very serious. I have never seen any other scandal of censoring like this.

It is inevitable that the foundation would weigh in heavily when it came to the biggest Hollywood project of all, a proposed $30m blockbuster called, simply, Dali. The man behind the project is the British-born film producer and director Simon West, who directed Oscar-nominated Black Hawk Down, Con Air, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Antonio Banderas, who is due to portray the artist in this film, has said he has become so obsessed with Dali since being approached to play the part that he has read “everything Dali wrote about himself… and seen everything that has been filmed of him”. He has also described the screenplay for Dali as “one of the best scripts that has come into my hands in my entire professional career”.

Reports have described the film as being “heavily focused on Dali’s outrageous and sex-obsessed lifestyle” and showing how, after building an international reputation during the second world war, he succumbed to scandal and misfortune in later life.

Speaking from Los Angeles, West admits that the film “doesn’t pull any punches and is not a Disney version of Dali’s life”. But he describes it as “ultimately a love story between Dali and Gala. Even though it was the most weird relationship ever, it was a compelling one that lasted 50 years”.

West says he has been “flooded with offers” from financiers wanting to back the film and actors, including Catherine Zeta-Jones, wanting to star as Gala opposite Banderas. It would, he says, be “a very commercial, big movie” shot in 3-D, blending live action with graphics and music to capture the eccentricities of the painter. In style, he says, it would be “Amadeus meets Avatar”.

But West is still waiting for the “thumbs-up” from the foundation for filming to go ahead. “I don’t want to consider what will happen if they don’t give it,” he says. “This is a serious film about one of the most recognised artists in the world. I think it is important, particularly for young people, to see that someone who lived 100 years ago lived like a rock star. It might open their eyes up in all sorts of ways to art and history. It’s a tragedy if a film about an artist on this scale cannot be made.

Despite admitting concerns that the film could end up “too sanitised”, West says a succession of scripts have been submitted to the foundation in the past two years. “We have been running every line, every image past them in the hope that we will eventually get their approval,” he says, “even though, strictly speaking, we can go ahead without their support.” The issue on which the foundation seems most sensitive, West explains, is whether or not some of Dali’s work is forged. “They’re most concerned about the perception that some museums and galleries don’t have genuine Dalis.

To find out for myself what the foundation’s thinking is, I visit its offices in Figueres, next to the Dali Theatre-Museum. Figueres would be little more than a sleepy backwater were it not for the charabancs of tourists drawn here by this surrealist building with giant egg shapes on the roof, which towers above the landscape. At night, when the museum closed its doors, Dali would insist on being pushed in a wheelchair among the exhibits so that he could make last-minute adjustments to their layout. The man who wheeled him round on these nightly vigils was Antoni Pitxot, now director of the museum and vice-chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees.

Pitxot is an imposing figure with flowing silver hair, who welcomes me warmly to the museum, with Montse Aguer, another key member of the board. Aguer, 46, who is the director of the Centre for Dalinian Studies, regales me with stories of how as a young woman she would read to Dali as he lay bedridden — extracts from Scientific American and work by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

Next I am introduced to the foundation’s sharp-suited managing director, Joan Manuel Sevillano. He denies the foundation’s reputation for being too controlling, but his words speak for themselves: “Anyone who says that, probably has something to hide about the way they are handling Dali’s rights,” Sevillano says. “Our job is to protect Dali’s heritage. We control the use of his pictures and images and, depending on the country, his name and personal likeness and voice — all the immaterial rights. That control is enormous, sufficient to stop any project we believe will be negative to Dali.

“Right now you could say a lot of the most interesting jurisprudence around the world as regards artists’ intellectual property rights is being generated by the foundation,” he boasts. “We are tough. We push things through to the bitter end. We do our job no matter what."

Sevillano, who worked for a big cement company before joining the foundation, says: “If we don’t act there will be an erosion of Dali’s consideration as an artist. At the end of the day the whole objective is to stop any erosion in the long run of the value of his assets.conversations with a string of companies that wanted to make films about Dali in recent years, Sevillano seems to revel in the power the foundation wields in blocking them. “In the movie world, where people are used to snapping their fingers and getting what they want, we are a bit weird. We don’t go along with it, which is where our reputation for being a bit dastardly comes from.Sevillano dismisses West’s film as “shallow”. “What we can’t afford to have is a bad movie that is successful,” he says. “That would destroy the work we have been trying to do for the past 15 years in repositioning Dali and making the background noise that surrounded him in his last years fall into its proper place.”

He concludes: “We are not a censorship organisation. We are not trying to project a decaffeinated version of Dali. What is true is true. We are not going to stop anyone working with the facts of his life. Dali’s life has plenty of juicy bits without the need for people to invent or add angles that would result in an erosion of Dali’s already controversial image.

Art experts question whether any film that might be made about the artist could have any impact on the value of his best work. “At the high end of the market, people who buy paintings do their research and have such a level of sophistication that I don’t know their view would be changed by a movie,” says Robin Cembalest, executive editor of the respected ARTnews.

Despite protestations by the foundation that Dali was “no more faked than any other artist” of his calibre, experts concede that any film that touches on contracts of ownership of Dali’s work and his reputed knowledge of faking could damage the value of some of his limited prints and multiple sculptures.

Those who knew Dali are adamant, however, that the artist would have adored a Hollywood movie about his life. Tusquets insists Dali “would have loved it”, but says he was never consulted by the foundation for his opinion.

“A good director would know how to handle Dali’s complex character. What the foundation is doing is trying to create an image of Dali that is not real,” Tusquets says. “They are trying to hide the dark parts of Dali that he himself never tried to hide.”

Writers name

Christine Toomey, The Sunday Times 06-06-2010

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