Dali & I: The Surreal Story by Stan Layryssens
Dalí & I: The Surreal Story
by Stan Lauryssens
Salvador Dalí was a strange, brilliant man. His famous face, with trademark gravity-defying pencil mustache and perpetually bugged eyes, is instantly recognizable. Dalí created some of the most haunting and bizarre images of the 20th century while living the topsy-turvy life of the ultimate attention whore. (Really. Paris Hilton and her like have NOTHING on this guy.) If something was strange, if something was perverted, if an act would surely make society flinch, Dalí did it.
Dalí and I chronicles the story of two men: the artist in his declining years and the unscrupulous art dealer Stan Lauryssens. Stan specializes in Dalí; it is all he sells to his wealthy clientèle. This is not due to artistic snobbery, for Stan readily admits he knows nothing about art, but through a perfected sales pitch - BS of the ripest order - he has gained the reputation as the man to see if you want to buy some Dalí.
Unfortunately, ever since Dalí discovered the fine art of screen-printing, it's almost impossible to find a genuine Dalí. By the mid-1970s, when Stan begins his dubious career as Dalí expert, there are hundreds of prints circulating, and it is rumored that Dalí spends his entire day signing blank pieces of paper. The artist's insatiable love of money has trumped his paintbrushes and artistic vision, save for one thing: Dalí does not have a consistent signature. He signs each painting or print in a different style, making it extremely difficult to authenticate his works. How can one tell if a print of The Persistence of Memory is from Dalí or some random crook out to make an easy buck? Is Dalí creating art, or is it just a scam?
Well, scam or not (and although he paints himself as innocent and trusting, it's pretty obvious the author knows he is dealing in fakes) Stan is soon in hot water. It's that precious sales pitch that he used to sell his prints: “A British investment magazine has calculated that the art of Salvador Dalí has gone up 25.94 percent per year between 1970 and 1975, and that's only for starters. When Dalí dies, prices will skyrocket.” Well, confound it all, Dalí is just refusing to kick the bucket, and Stan's clients (many of them with sketchy connections, to put it mildly) are getting antsy for the huge profits they were promised. It's an investment, after all. The market's getting flooded with cheap prints of Dalí's art and the authorities are beginning to suspect Stan of art and mail fraud. What else can he do but flee straight to the hometown of Dalí himself, and hideout next door to his famous neighbor?
This hilarious autobiography of Stan's mad scramble to survive and escape the world of art and Dalí is often as ludicrous as the artist's creations. “What is a real Dalí?” Stan asks, but to answer that question must first answer “Who was the real Dalí?”and the stories he shares from Dalí's servants, associates, friends and lovers do more to fortify the artist's mythology than reveal the man behind the name. Since the book was released there have been a few critics about it's authenticity - Stan is a man who did eventually go to jail for fraud, after all! - but it's fun. It's worth the read just for Stan's ridiculous sales talk and the cameos of some of the hottest artists from the 60s and 70s. But a serious study of the artist this isn't; was mysterious Salvador Dalí an artist genius cashing in on society's insatiable desire for his work, or a mastermind scamming the entire art world, getting paid without doing a lick of work? Only he and his six-hundred and seventy-nine different signatures will ever know.
A movie of this book is currently in production, with Al Pacino to play Dalí.
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