Albert Field, Archivist of Dalis and Fakes
Hyfler/Rosner
Albert Field Is Dead at 86; Archivist of Dalis and Fakes
By DOUGLAS MARTIN NY Times
Albert Field, the designated expert in divining when the surreal is real, at
least in the work of Salvador Dali, died on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital
of Queens. He was 86.
Dali, whose precisely realistic renderings of fantastic images like melting
watches are very popular with art collectors both casual and serious, once
said that he awoke "wonderstruck" at the thought of the prodigious things he
would do that day. The problem was that countless Dali counterfeiters had a
disturbingly similar thought.
That is where Mr. Field came in: Dali appointed him to be the arbiter of
which Dalis were really Dalis.
Mr. Field, whose title was official archivist, proceeded to catalog
thousands of authentic Dali works and fakes. As a result, he was drafted as
an expert in 20 art fraud investigations. His services were also sought by
auction houses, museums and individuals, who for $150 could find out if a
$3,000 Dali was what they fervently hoped it was.
"I have found 17 kinds of fraud," he said in a newspaper interview with The
St. Petersburg Times, in Florida, in 1987, and that excluded what a salesman
might tell a customer to make a sale.
Forgers were drawn by Dali's awesome output, which made single copies hard
to pinpoint, and by his easy-to-forge signature, among other things. Some
accounts have suggested that even Dali's wife and friends were not above
abetting counterfeiters.
Dali had his own theory. "Someone who is subjected to forgery the way I am
must really be fantastically good," he said.
An eccentric genius, Dali found a kindred spirit in Mr. Field, who was not
exactly bound by convention himself. A thin, spectral figure with a wispy
white beard, he lived and worked in a crammed row house in Astoria, Queens,
decorated with large old subway signs and, of course, Dalis.
"Don't walk on that! That's a Dali rug," Mr. Field screamed at a reporter
for The New York Times in 1998. "Still Life by the Light of the Moon," to be
specific.
Mr. Field, a former schoolteacher, collected playing cards, and had reason
to think that his 6,000 decks might be the world's largest agglomeration of
them. He climbed the Matterhorn and Mount Fuji and was on his way to having
scaled the tallest peak in each of the 50 states.
He combined his interests in nudism and hiking by trekking the Appalachian
Trail in the nude. He sang bass with the Oratorio Society of New York for 53
years.
He never had the slightest interest in any artist besides Dali, said Frank
Hunter, a friend and business associate.
George Albert Field Jr. was born on Nov. 8, 1916, in Maplewood, N.J., where
he grew up in affluence. He graduated from Columbia as an English major and
earned a master's degree in English from Harvard. He taught English and
science at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, then mathematics,
English and science at public junior and senior high schools in New York
City.
Mr. Field fell for Dali's work when he went to his "Dream of Venus," a
Surrealist fun house at the 1930 World's Fair. His visit to the first major
retrospective of Dali works at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 deepened his
passion.
He eventually met Dali in the early 1940's, and the artist responded to his
adulation. During the three or four months of each year that Dali would
spend in New York, the two would meet on Sundays at the St. Regis Hotel. Mr.
Field would take along photographs of works attributed to Dali. When they
were fakes, the artist would write "fals" on the photos, leaving off the
final "e," Mr. Hunter said.
In 1955, Dali asked Mr. Field to be his official archivist. Since Dali could
not type, Mr. Field typed a letter formalizing his appointment. Dali signed
it.
Mr. Field eventually decided to concentrate on prints rather than on
paintings and other art forms, because he figured he had a chance to get
through prints in his lifetime. He traveled to Europe 40 times in his quest
to pin down the authenticity, whereabouts and provenance of Dali's
outpouring of prints.
He even got to know all but one of the major forgers personally. In 1998, he
put the results, complete with color pictures, in his self-published
"Official Catalog of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dali."
A. Reynolds Morse, chairman and former director of the Salvador Dali Museum
in St. Petersburg, wrote in the book's introduction, "Only the labors and
scholarship of Mr. Field can begin to restore any kind of order to the vast
world of Dali reproductive prints,"
Mr. Field bequeathed all his research material to the museum. He visited
Dali many times at his home in Spain and was granted the privilege of
watching him paint.
Once, for no reason Mr. Field ever learned, Dali's wife, Gala, poured a
bottle of Champagne over his head. Mr. Field preferred to get wet in Dali's
swimming pool, comfortably nude.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Albert Field in his Queens home in 1998, with works by Dali
behind him. (Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)
Bill Schenley
<snipped>
Very cool obit.
Brigid Nelson
<snip>
>
> Mr. Field eventually decided to concentrate on prints rather than on
> paintings and other art forms, because he figured he had a chance to get
> through prints in his lifetime. He traveled to Europe 40 times in his quest
> to pin down the authenticity, whereabouts and provenance of Dali's
> outpouring of prints.
There was quite a Dali scandal here in Portland
Oregon in the mid eighties. It seems that a local
gallery was selling Dali signed prints that
weren't. I heard several versions of the story,
the upshot seems to have been that someone had got
Dali to sign blank print papers that were later
printed with unauthorized copies of Dali's works.
This had happened, it was said, because Dali was
really "out of it". He spent the last several
years of his life bedridden after injuries
sustained in a housefire - it was also said that
his staff took great advantage. The gallery where
I saw those prints promptly went out of business,
and I felt a bit disillusioned, having felt
priviledged to see an actual "Dali" print.
brigid