Con-artist says Dali faked it

Spanish painter Salvador Dali and his wife Gala, are alleged to have indulged in orgies. Photo / AP

With his trademark upturned wax moustache and penchant for giving lectures in a diving bell, Salvador Dali thrived on courting controversy and enjoyed a wildly eccentric lifestyle. Throughout his life his detractors said he was more concerned with cultivating his own avant-garde image than the quality of his artistic output. But friends staunchly defended the Spanish painter, saying that he simply lived his brand of surrealism as much as he painted it. But when little-known Belgian art dealer and former convict Stan Lauryssens published a memoir alleging that most of Dali's works were fakes and done so with the artist's approval, it shocked the art world even though it was long accustomed to fantastical claims about one of its most fantastical members.

Now Lauryssens' book is being turned into a major Hollywood production with Al Pacino lined up to play the Spanish surrealist as he neared the end of his life. The film is one of three Dali biopics in production which reveal just how much Hollywood has succumbed to Dalimania two decades after the painter's death.

Producers of all three films will be keen to finish their projects as soon as possible - when two films based on the life of the writer Truman Capote came out in quick succession the second was poorly attended while the first raked in the dollars and won a best actor Oscar for Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The first film to reach cinemas is likely to be Little Ashes, a British biopic starring Twilight actor Robert Pattison, about Dali's teenage years in 1920s Madrid. The film focuses on his sexually ambiguous friendships with the poet Frederico Garci Lorca and aspiring film-maker Luis Bunuel. It will screen in the United States later this year.

The second film, Dali, directed by the British film-maker Simon West, will star Antonio Banderas in the leading role and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Dali's sexually charged wife Gala. It will explore how the painter conquered America and the world with sex, sin and surrealism - only to succumb to scandal and misfortune. But it is the adaptation of the memoir Dali & I: The Surreal Story by the 63-year-old former cheesemaker turned art dealer, who was chased for years by Interpol and imprisoned for selling thousands of fake Dali works, that is likely to be the most controversial.

In Spain, where Dali is considered a national hero, Lauryssens' book caused outrage not only because it claimed that Dali was directly linked to an extensive fake production output but also because it described salacious details of Dali's sex life. Lauryssens portrays the painter and Gala as voraciously charged lovers who regularly indulged in orgies.

The foundation that controls Dali's estate has vehemently denied many of the claims but so far it has taken no legal action. When the book was published in Spain last year the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation said: "These falsehoods can only be explained as part of a promotional campaign for the book and the film, which will be realised in the complete absence of any historical, artistic or ethical rigour."

Lauryssens, who lives in Belgium, believes his book will make a highly entertaining film: "The money and most of the people are all signed up, they're just waiting for Pacino before they begin shooting. The film will tell the story of how I sold thousands of fake Salvador Dali paintings and how Dali himself knew and approved of the whole industry that dealt in his fake works."

Given his shocking claims, it is perhaps little surprise that Hollywood is attracted to Lauryssens' book, particularly as the life of the art dealer, who will be played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy (Sunshine), already reads like a film script. Long before he entered the secretive fake art world Lauryssens had been involved in many less-that-honest dealings. He began his con-artist career in the late 1960s while in his 20s, putting holes in ordinary cheese and selling it as Swiss Emmental. He later moved into journalism where he pretended to interview a host of Hollywood celebrities. "I did a lot of good interviews but in order to get access to people I had to make a lot up as well," he says. "Within two years I'd fake-interviewed almost every Hollywood star." ' In 1972 he turned his attention to Dali. "I made up a great story about how he and Disney were working on a sort of pornographic cartoon together." That story caught the attention of a shady investment group in Belgium who assumed Lauryssens was a Dali expert and hired him as an art dealer.

So, at just 25, Lauryssens found himself flying around Europe buying scores of Dali paintings despite having absolutely no experience. "A lot of Dali's less popular stuff is not exactly pleasing to look at," he says, "so it was very hard to find buyers. Eventually I was introduced to some of Dali's entourage who said the best money could be made in selling fakes because they were the items that tended to have his most popular elements, like the melting clocks."

Lauryssens, who was eventually caught by Interpol in the late 1980s and served two years in jail for selling forgeries, says that the more he dealt in fake Dali works the more he discovered that these were created by some of the people closest to Dali, even with his alleged approval.

"From the 1960s everyone knew that Dali needed close to half a million dollars a month to fund his lavish lifestyle. He was living like a mini-maharajah." Dali frequently admitted that he made enormous sums of money by signing hundreds of quick sketches and lithographs which would then sell for thousands, once saying: : "Each morning after breakfast I like to start the day by earning $20,000."

The existence of several hundred thousand Dali lithographs has encouraged a flourishing global trade in fakes. And when Dali died of heart failure in 1989 his estate was left with US$87 million ($170 million). Lauryssens' claims are so controversial because he alleges that most of the Dali works produced after the 1960s were not touched by Dali but churned out by an army of assistants.

Lauryssens says: "If you discount paintings, which are much harder to fake, I would say up to 75 per cent of all the works out there that attributed to Dali were not done by him."

In the early 1980s, before his prison stint, Lauryssens went to see Dali in his seaside villa in Catalonia. The dealer says Dali was balding, his stomach swollen "and his right arm shook from shoulder to wrist". It was all a far cry from the ostentatious showman.

- INDEPENDENT