Specialist Italian police have this week seized 21 suspected forgeries attributed to Salvador Dalí from a major monographic show in Parma, northern Italy.
The works were among 80 drawings, tapestries and engravings displayed in the exhibition Dalí, Between Art and Myth, which opened at Palazzo Tarasconi on 27 September. A Rome court ordered the seizure after Italy’s art squad, the Carabinieri TPC, and Dalí experts in Spain concluded that the works may be fakes.
“If the works are indeed proven to be inauthentic, those who set up the exhibition will have to justify why they exhibited inauthentic works and, of course, may be liable for certain crimes of art forgery,” Diego Polio, the commander of the Carabinieri TPC’s Rome branch, told Italy’s Radio Bruno.
Polio told the Guardian that the Carabinieri first suspected the works were fakes following a routine check in January. “Something seemed amiss,” he told the paper.
“We noticed that only lithographs, posters and drawings by Dalí were on display, along with a few statues and other objects, but no paintings or anything of importance. It was difficult to understand why someone would want to organise an exhibition of such low-value works.”
Stefano Opilio, a public prosecutor in Rome involved in the investigation, told The Art Newspaper that in February the Carabinieri sent a catalogue for the exhibition to the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in the Catalonian town of Figueres. Experts there confirmed that they had not been consulted for the show.
In a report issued the following month, the foundation expressed “strong perplexity” about the provenance of the works. Suspicions deepened when the organisation’s experts subsequently visited the show.
In a statement to The Art Newspaper, the foundation confirmed: “From the moment the content of this exhibition...became known, the Dalí Foundation expressed its doubts to the Carabinieri regarding three drawings and a series of prints.”
According to Opilio, the Carabinieri waited for the works to go on show in Parma before swooping. The sequestered works—18 lithographs and three drawings—were part of collections loaned by two Italian individuals, he added.
Culture ministry officials will now conduct a more thorough inspection of the works, which may be permanently confiscated if confirmed to be fakes. Suspects may ultimately be prosecuted for forgery or knowingly dealing with counterfeits.
“Now it is a matter of understanding whether the works were counterfeited directly by the people who put them into circulation, or whether the people who put them into circulation purchased them from others,” Opilio said.
Organised by the Palermo-headquartered Navigare company, Dalí, Between Art and Myth previously ran at Rome’s Historical Museum of the Italian Army Infantry–which is managed by the country’s ministry of defence–from January 25 to July 27.
In a note, the Carabinieri stressed that preliminary investigations do not imply guilt. Navigare and Palazzo Tarasconi did not reply to The Art Newspaper's requests for comment.
