Suit Over Dalis Is Newest Stroke Against Art Fraud

As Reynolds Morse relates the story, the man who traveled to Cleveland to see him about seven or eight years ago was nervously insistent. The visitor wanted permission to reproduce a painting by Salvador Dali that belonged to Morse.

The publisher, Pierre Marcand, was worried because he had already made the print, a study of the artist’s wife, Gala, and was running a costly ad offering it for sale, according to Morse.

Morse was stunned by what happened next.

“He got a gun out of his briefcase and said, ‘If you don’t give me permission, I’m going to have to kill myself,”’ recalled Morse, founder of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., in a telephone interview.

Morse refused to budge, telling Marcand, “ ‘I’m sorry, this is a private collection.’ He finally put the gun away.”

Marcand’s dramatic gesture was stunning, even given his reputation in art circles for flamboyance. A debonair French national who lived until recently in a large house in the swank Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills, Marcand enjoyed an enviable and lavish existence until last month, when the artworks he produced threatened to bring about his downfall.

On June 23, the Federal Trade Commission secretly filed a civil suit against Marcand, 50, and his company, Magui Publishers Inc., accusing them of engaging in deceptive practices by producing and selling at least 22,000 fraudulent prints attributed to well-known artists--Dali, in particular. Before the lawsuit was made public June 29, the agency won a court order freezing Marcand’s assets.

In recent years, authorities have waged war against art galleries from Honolulu to New York for allegedly selling thousands of Dali prints worth little more than posters as investment-quality art. The cases are hard to win because dealers often successfully claim that they relied on the word of their suppliers, FTC attorney David R. Spiegel said.

But with the Marcand case, the campaign entered a new phase, as U.S. authorities for the first time went in pursuit of a supplier rather than a dealer to “reach further back in the chain,” Spiegel said.

By Morse’s estimate, the flood of counterfeit Dalis on the art market has cost unsuspecting consumers $1 billion. Michael Ward Stout, attorney for the artist, who died in January, said, “The market for authentic and good Dalis has kind of been eradicated by” the fraudulent works.

The FTC’s latest target owns three sports cars, favors white suits and also has a residence in Tahiti. One visitor to Marcand’s Beverly Hills house said it reminded her of the Playboy Mansion, with “beautiful women all over the place.”

‘More of a Businessman’

“He’s very suave, very French, very European,” said Dick Ruskin, an art appraiser who believes Marcand is “aboveboard.” Marcand is “fairly knowledgeable (about art),” Ruskin added, “but he’s more of a businessman than he is knowledgeable.”

From 1983 on, the FTC’s complaint alleges, Marcand published unauthorized reproductions of Dali’s work, marketing them as valuable artworks, “the product of a close working relationship between Marcand and Dali.” Magui sold these works to galleries throughout the country for between $300 and $2,000, and the galleries in turn retailed them for between $1,500 and $6,500, the FTC charges.

In reality, the works are worthless, according to the FTC, which estimates Magui earned anywhere from $6.6 million to $44 million from the prints.

Marcand’s attorney, David Paul Steiner, denies that the publisher ever characterized the prints as anything but “interpretations” of Dali’s work made from plates commissioned by Marcand. “My client didn’t sell these artworks as investments,” Steiner said. “He sold them . . . because they were aesthetically pleasing.”

The lawyer said Marcand is being victimized by jealous competitors and harassed by overzealous government officials quibbling over his failure to disclose “on the face of the painting in 3-inch-high letters that this is an interpretation of Dali.”

But the FTC said that most works display the words “by Dali.”

Marcand himself was not available for comment. But in another lawsuit brought by the FTC against Federal Sterling Galleries, a telemarketing operation based in Arizona, Marcand--who supplied a large number of the bogus graphics to the gallery--testified that Dali had no role in creating the artworks. In January, a federal court ordered the principal defendant to pay $4.6 million in restitution.

Supplied Galleries

Magui was also the supplier of at least three other galleries that were found to have marketed fraudulent art and was convicted of criminal charges in Europe, the FTC said.

Although there are no hard and fast rules about what gives a lithograph or etching value, most authorities seem to agree that at minimum, the artist must have participated in the process, either by directly supervising the work or by approving the proofs. After a limited edition of so-called multiples is produced, the plate is either destroyed or defaced.

“Art gets its value primarily out of scarcity. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation,” said Stephen E. Weil, an attorney and deputy director of the Hirschorn Museum in Washington.

Dali graphics published after 1980 are worthless, experts say, because the artist was too ill by then to sign his name.

But Steiner said that after Dali became infirm, Marcand purchased contracts from such agents as Gilbert Hamon, a graphics dealer in Paris, for $100,000 apiece, authorizing him to have artisans create plates based on Dali paintings and produce hand-colored “interpretations” of the artworks. Marcand also bought blank paper signed with Dali’s name, Steiner added.

While acknowledging that Dali and his wife signed contracts with French publishers, Stout has said they did not entitle anyone to sell prints as original Dalis.

“Marcand absolutely believed the contracts were valid or he never would have spent that kind of money to buy them,” Steiner said, adding that Marcand stopped selling Dalis in 1985, when he determined that “the market was dead.”

Private Broker

Since then, Marcand has been serving as a private art broker--a business that now also is dead as a result of the FTC charges, Steiner said.

Contrary to Steiner’s claims about the artistry involved in making the prints, the FTC said its experts found they were produced by commercial methods “with little or no hand craftsmanship.”

Steiner blamed the Spanish surrealist himself for “creating the atmosphere of distrust and the opportunities to defraud the consumers that the FTC claims they’re so concerned about.”

Indeed, Dali had no rivals when it came to recognizing the commercial possibilities of graphics. In the 1970s he signed thousands of blank sheets of paper--as many as 1,800 an hour, according to one associate--thereby enabling publishers to mass-produce graphics.

To Morse, who began collecting Dali paintings in 1943 and became a friend of the artist’s, such assertions are “a bunch of baloney.”

“Dali was greedy but not that greedy,” Morse said.

In Morse’s version, the “legend about Dali” arose in the late 1970s, after the artist was sued by an unhappy customer and agreed to sign 17,000 sheets of paper to settle. Those sheets were bought and resold by Dali’s secretary, while later ones--including 40,000 that were discovered on a truck in 1974--were forgeries, Morse maintained.

But Weil questioned the relevance of Dali’s behavior to the current cases. “The basic question is: With what innocence or lack of innocence were these things launched into commerce?” he said.

Dealer’s Aid Enlisted

To make its case against Marcand, the FTC enlisted the help of Christine Willes, a Beverly Hills art dealer who posed as a gallery employee interested in buying Dali prints from Magui. Willes, who bought two prints, was told by a young woman representing Marcand that Dali himself was shown the original proofs for these editions and “was impressed with how well they were done,” according to court documents.

“They were sold as original Dali etchings,” Willes said in a telephone interview.

This is not Marcand’s first brush with government authorities in the United States. In 1986 he signed a consent decree with the New York state attorney general’s office admitting that he had “offered to sell and sold counterfeit Salvador Dali artworks, although said artworks may not have been made with intent to deceive.” The FTC said he has been convicted of criminal charges in Italy and has a case against him pending in France.

He has also been under investigation by the Beverly Hills Police Department, but Detective John Ambro, who is in charge of the case, declined to comment. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is conducting its own art fraud investigation but is not looking at Marcand, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Schuit said.

Marcand’s predicament does not come as a surprise to art dealers. Several years ago, Benjamin Horowitz, owner of the Heritage Gallery in West Hollywood, called Marcand to complain about a fraudulent Marc Chagall lithograph that had been reportedly purchased from the Frenchman. “We knew by looking at it that Chagall didn’t do it,” Horowitz said.

Marcand, Horowitz said, did not deny that Chagall had no hand in the making of the print. “I’m the best printmaker in the world,” Marcand told him.

“He saw nothing wrong with what he had done,” Horowitz said.