The production of fakes by great artists was nothing new. Michelangelo, for example, churned out a few phony ancient sculptures in his day. But Dali was different. He copied himself, and he did it with crappy, mass-produced prints that made millions. “Dali sleep best after receiving tremendous quantity of checks,” he used to say. In his later years, a sad coda to a once brilliant career, the eccentric artist found it was easier, and a lot more lucrative, to sign thousands of blank sheets. A machine would do the rest. The result was a glut of worthless Dali “lithographs” and “original prints” that circulated around the world.
The artist was unapologetic for his participation in the gigantic fraud. “If people want to produce poor representations of my work and other people want to buy them,” he said shorty before his death in 1989, “they deserve each other.”
Source:
Farquhar, Michael. “Fantastic Forgeries and Literary Frauds.” A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds. Penguin, 2005. 155. Print.
Further Reading:
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Dalí de Púbol
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