Salvador Dali
Melting clocks, a waxed moustache, and a signature he sold by the ream.
Salvador Dali was born at Figueres in Catalonia in 1904, was expelled from the Madrid academy, joined the Surrealists in 1929 and was expelled from them too. The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931, made the soft watch the most recognisable image in twentieth-century art. He worked with Bunuel on Un Chien Andalou, designed a dream sequence for Hitchcock, collaborated with Schiaparelli and Disney, and spent his later decades as a public performance of himself. He died at Figueres in 1989, in a museum he had built for his own work.
No modern artist carries a larger forgery and misattribution problem. In his last years, in poor health, Dali signed very large quantities of blank sheets which were subsequently printed on and sold as limited editions; tens of thousands of such sheets are in circulation, and a pencil signature on a Dali print therefore proves considerably less than it does elsewhere. Anything on paper needs identifying against Michler and Lopsinger, with attention to publisher, paper, watermark and whether the edition is a lifetime one. Sculpture editions published posthumously are numerous. The Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali is the authority for paintings.
If you own a work by Salvador Dali
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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