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    Dali & I: The Surreal Story
    Dali & I: The Surreal Story
    Dali & I: The Surreal Story
    Audiobook8 hours

    Dali & I: The Surreal Story

    Written by Stan Lauryssens

    Narrated by William Dufris

    2.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Art dealer Stan Lauryssens made millions in modern art, but he sold only one name: Salvador Dali. The surrealist painter's work was a hot commodity for the newly rich, investors, and businessmen looking to launder their black-market cash. Lauryssens didn't mind looking the other way; he just hoped the buyers would look the other way as well. The artworks he sold came from some very shady sources. And he soon discovered that the shadiest source of all was Dali himself. The more successful Lauryssens became, the closer he got to Dali's inner circle, until he found himself living next door to the aging artist. There, while Lauryssens hid from Interpol's detectives, he learned more about Dali's secret history, the studio of artists who produced his work, and the money-making machine that kept Dali's extravagant lifestyle afloat long after his creativity began to flounder.

    Dali I offers a behind-the-scenes view of the commerce and conspiracy that can go hand-in-hand in the art world, written by a man who has been to the top only to discover it was no different than the bottom.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 22, 2008
    ISBN9781400177394
    Dali & I: The Surreal Story
    Author

    Stan Lauryssens

    STAN LAURYSSENS is a Belgian writer who personally met and interviewed many of Hitler’s henchmen. He has written a number of books on the Third Reich, including The Eichmann Diaries.

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    Reviews for Dali & I

    2.5/5

    24 ratings22 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      My excitement at receiving this book from the LT ER program dwindled to nil when I realized that the author was a poor storyteller who sought to use the book as a vehicle for further defamation of the artist. While I'm sure there was some fact mingled in with the fantastic, none of it was compelling enough for me to make it more than a third of the way through the book on no fewer than three separate attempts. The writing isn't poor, but it's nothing special.
    • 1/5
      I was very excited about this book. As an art dealer who claims to have been Dali's neighbor and to have moved in the same social circle, Lauryssens is in a position to write a fascinating study of Dali and the art world. Instead, he wrote this book.Lauryssens isn't a writer. His dialogue is so unnatural, so stiff, that it felt like I was reading a brochure. The only areas that are done well are the transcriptions of Dali interviews (not by the author), as Lauryssens just lets Dali speak for himself. The author seems to have no idea of why someone would want to read a book by an art dealer who sold fraudulent Dalis. He quickly glides over multiple arrests and jail time for art fraud only to then take the reader through pages of him buying a house with his girlfriend, which brings up another problem- every person in this book, including Lauryssens, is so one-dimensional that you don't care what happens to them. The little information about Dali is given as gossip by others that Lauryssens encounters, including a man called "The Salesperson" who claims that Dali was a child molester. Lauryssens' claim of being in Dali's circle is really a stretch, as the Spanish town he moves to, where Dali grew up and is living his final days, is so small that everyone had met Dali at some point. This is an instance when you really wish that a ghostwriter had been employed because the premise had so much potential.
    • 3/5
      When I got this book, I was excited, because I like art and take classes at school, and I wanted to learn some stuff about Dali. But it took me so long to get into the book, and then while some parts were interesting, most of it was kind of boring. So it's just okay, but not something I would own if I hadn't gotten it through Early Reviewers.
    • 4/5
      This is perfect for art or Dali lovers but I think that because it is a non-fiction novel it was a bit slow in parts. Overall I liked it even though some parts were a bit disturbing, definitely not a book for children.
    • 1/5
      I was very disappointed in this book. The back cover blurb said that Stan Lauryssens was an art dealer who sold nothing but Dali and the longer he sold Dali the closer he got to Dali's inner circle until he ended up living next door to the artist. And it references the many fake Dali artworks on the market and mentions that Dali himself hired other artists to make fake Dali art.Okay, so this sounds interesting. Rich people laundering money buying art, a dealer who gets to know Dali, an insider who can reveal the truth behind the frauds.Except Stan only met Dali once, toward the end of Dali's life and long after he was no longer able to paint. They lived on the same mountain in Spain not because they were friends or because either of them chose it, but because Stan's girlfriend chose the house and moved there while Stan was in jail.Oh, did I mention that Stan was a very good con man? He wasn't an art dealer. He sold people paintings and other Dali artwork that he suspected was fake and later learned was most assuredly fake. He also sold paintings, like Dali's version of "The Last Supper", that he didn't own, had no access to, and had no legal rights to sell. That's the one that landed him in jail, by the way.There really isn't much story here. A lot of details are missing, and a lot of time periods are simply passed over. Unfortunately, when he skips over a time period he invariably jumps right into the middle of discussing the effects of something that happened during that time, without ever clearly explaining what really happened.There are other books out about the Dali art scandals and all the fakes and the artists whose paintings were sold as Dali's. Even the short descriptions of these books and the people involved from Wikipedia and other web sites make more sense and give a more complete understanding than what you'll get from this book. And, if you check other references, you'll see that other people involved with Dali say that Stan's book is more fiction than fact.Not my cup of tea.OH: this book is becoming a movie starring Al Pacino as Dali. From what I've read, the entire story is being reworked and the movie is supposed to show Stan as not only Dali's friend, but a protege. In other words, from a book about deception in the art world, a book that is probably more false than fact, there is going to be a movie that takes what few facts are left and turns them into fiction.I believe I'll have to pass on the movie as well.
    • 3/5
      The story of the great painter Dali, written by Stan Lauryssens, art dealer of Dali'master piece.I was transfixed by the beginning of the book and kept on reading until the main essence of the story lost its way right in the middle of the book. The beginning is very well written but it gets repetitive after a while.
    • 2/5
      My excitement at receiving this book from the LT ER program dwindled to nil when I realized that the author was a poor storyteller who sought to use the book as a vehicle for further defamation of the artist. While I'm sure there was some fact mingled in with the fantastic, none of it was compelling enough for me to make it more than a third of the way through the book on no fewer than three separate attempts. The writing isn't poor, but it's nothing special.
    • 1/5
      I'd previously written a review of this book, and then it was deleted when I removed it from my library. Frankly, I found Laurysson's conduct scuzzy and his book poorly structured and far-fetched. Dali's own sordid hobbies added some bizarre interest, but the whole book left me feeling soiled and tired.
    • 4/5
      Dali & I, a memoir of the wild ride Stan Lauryssens experienced as a high-flying dealer of Salvador Dali’s artwork, sketches Dali as a grotesque human incarnation of the twisted surrealism that inspired his art. By placing his own name alongside Dali’s in the title and acknowledging his own moral shortcomings as a trafficker in fraudulent Dali art, Lauryssens seeks to redeem himself (or at least rationalize his misdeeds) as the inevitable byproduct of the aging Dali’s lack of artistic integrity and the greedy consumerism of wealthy art investors.The beginning of the book is a major hoot, recounting with how Lauryssens rose from a menial job punching holes in Emmentaler cheese, to a stint as a writer for a bogus Hollywood magazine, to a millionaire reseller of Dali art. His conversational writing style, peppered with anecdotes from close associates of Dali, makes for an easy, engaging read. And the descriptions of Catalonia, along with its impact on Dali’s art, have a poetic quality about them. Some of his swindling war stories carry a whiff of exaggeration, yet I have little doubt that greed and gullibility generated many easy marks for his fraudulent transactions. The author’s second- or third-hand descriptions of Dali’s wild orgies and penchant for signing his name to voluminous amounts of art he did not produce are still harder to accept at face value. Though Lauryssens undoubtedly traveled in Dali’s circles, writes with convincing detail, and is not the first to question the authenticity of some of Dali’s later works, he would have us believe that the majority of Dali’s body of artwork is inauthentic, including many famous paintings on display in museums around the world. A tad too convenient of a theory, perhaps, serving the twin purposes of minimizing the import of the author’s own fraudulent acts (how guilty can he have been if the entire post-1930s Dali collection is suspect) and generating controversy and buzz for his book. And with a major movie starring Al Pacino as Dali in the works for relase in 2009, I can’t help but wonder if Dali & I represents yet another sleight of hand from this master of the trade. My advice: read the book (it's great fun after all) and judge its veracity for yourself!
    • 4/5
      In the genre of true-crime memoirs, you can generally categorize them into one of two kinds of books. There are the genuinely remorseful who are sharing their experience for what they hope will ultimately be a greater good and then there are those that are sharing their experience only so that they can seem slightly less guilty than everyone else involved.This memoir is definitely the latter. At the same time, Stan Lauryssens knows he has an interesting story to tell. Dealing only in Dali, he managed to con millions of dollars from individuals looking to make quick money in the art world. Dali was a larger than life figure with a prolific streak no one in the legitimate art world thought to question for a good while and money was good. To believe Lauryssens's story is to believe that everyone including Dali was scamming the entire world in order to ensure their own bankrolls. The story is compelling, but gets bogged down as Lauryssens falls in with a hangers-on crowd of individuals that all know Dali and have stories of Dali. There are recounted tales that are told around a local bar and it's quite obvious that these stories went on for days, got intermingled and largely had very little to do other than to assure those in this "almost-inner-circle" that they once may or may not have known Dali a bit better than the person next to them. This section falls lose and not quite as sad as it probably should have been. Tucked inside of this, there are good questions to be asked about modern art as a commodity and the way in which we as a society value anything that is "authentic" as an investment item whether it has actual worth or not. Lauryssens implies not-so-subtly that Warhol may have engaged in similar practices, but does not go so far as to mention exact scenarios or works. While Lauryssens is not sorry for what happened to him, it's to see why he would be in denial of his guilt in today's day and age. We live in a society where a mere photograph of a star with a newborn is a multi-million dollar deal. People line up to have people of note flat-sign hundreds of items all in hopes of dumping the items for an insane profit later. eBay customers are warned against buying signed items on a regular basis - and many fakes come with Certificates of Authenticity every day (genuine-fakes, as Lauryssens would say). Perhaps he was just ahead of his time.A fairly easy read and an interesting story.
    • 2/5
      It is surprising that the author of this supposedly non fiction book received the Hercules Poirot prize, an award of which there is not much to find on the internet. The style of writing is very basic and some of the sentence structure is awkward at best.With respect to the content I must admit that from the moment the author wrote that he fabricated celebrity interviews he lost me. From that point on I kept comparing this book with the much better written 'Catch me if you can'. Just like that infamous novel, this work of (non) fiction reeks of nothing more than reader deception instead of a somewhat exaggerated account of facts. Not only are the claims in 'Dali and I' far-fetched, the author would be rather stupid if indeed he defrauded his clients for millions and later wrote in graphic detail about them. A fair number of those clients are more than likely still alive and I can not imagine them reading this (non) fiction calmly. If taken as a work of fiction I found it disappointing. None of the characters are interesting, least of all Dali and the author themselves, which is strange for such a flamboyant person as Dali was. The plot construction revolving around the author coming to terms with his guild and lapsing back into crime is not as well crafted as was Frank Abagnale's final employment for the FBI as a consultant.
    • 1/5
      Gargoyle: a grotesquely carved figure of a human or animal. Very early in my reading of Stan Lauryssens’ Dali & I the image of a gargoyle struck me as appropriate to describe Dali. He is grotesque. He is human in physical form, but animal-like in his actions and attitudes. He is engaged in self-carving throughout his life. Here is a typical Dali quote, upon being told someone is thinking of making a movie of his life: “Im-pos-si-ble. No scrrreen in the worrrld izzz larrrge enough for the geniuzzz of Dali. They would have to prrroject it on ze moon and to portray everrry second of Dali’s life. The film would have to be seventy yearzzz long.” (88) Stan Lauryssens, the author, becomes an art dealer, dealing exclusively in Dali, after learning very early on in life that “anyone – even presidents – can be taken for a ride.” (6) And what a ride he goes on! He finds cheating, deceiving and swindling enjoyable and rewarding. His rewards include parkland villas, luxury cars and Cartier watches. He sells a photocopy of a Dali to one of the many suckers he encounters for a quarter of a million dollars. Dali, he sees, is such a phenomenon that he is signing blank sheets of paper in preparation for lithographs, prints or etchings to be added later and these are being photocopied ad infinitum, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of copies of worthless paper being sold to more and more suckers. Dali, he says, is only interested in “cash in hand, up front, as much as possible,” (107) but he himself is no different. He is thrown in prison and soon released on a technicality. The surreal life of Dali and Lauryssens continues to unfold as if on a giant roller-coaster. “Dali”, we are told at one point, has deliberately set out to dupe art critics, museum curators and art collectors...in a surrealistic joke.” (248) Lauryssens reaches a cathartic moment in which rather than swindling yet another victim, admits that the whole Dali thing is a con. (272) But given the enormous amount of duplicity engaged in by the author to make his Dali fortune, the veracity of the whole tale is questionable. In the author’s note we are assured that “events and actions...and conversations...are meant to reflect the substance” but in the end the assurance rings hollow. Nothing in the whole work can be taken at face value. The Dali thing is a con but the book itself comes across as a con, too. Lauryssens’ work seems no more than one of the fake fake Dalis he pawns off on the suckers.
    • 2/5
      Written by a man who used to make up articles for "Panorama" magazine and later defrauded investors out of millions by selling bogus art, "Dali and I" begins with a note that "this is a work of nonfiction." This is probably meant to reassure us when we encounter scenes that seem as likely and self-inflating as anything out of a James Bond movie (and indeed, a cinematic version of this book will be released in 2009). Gee, we might think to ourselves, this part seems like total baloney, but it says in the front of the book that it's all true.There's not much here other than mostly unrepentant law breaking and high living by the author and descriptions of pathetic debauchery involving Dali. Allegations concerning the use of assistants to create masterworks attributed to Dali are interesting, but can we trust this author any more than the famous surrealist? Dali allegedly conned people and openly boasted about doing so, and Stan Luaryssens is no different. His book is entertaining and even compelling at times, but nonfiction? As Stan puts it, "grab, pull, , and - snok!"
    • 1/5
      Dali & I, by Stan LauryssensI knew early on I wasn’t going to like this book. I put it down and picked it back up several times (knowing I owed Library Thing a review and had to finish it). Twice I had to start again from the beginning, having automatically erased any memory of the story from my mind. Finally, I plowed through to the end. I wish I could say I took something more away from the book than the thought that thank God it was over.I don’t enjoy the staccato 1940s detective paperback style of the author for starters, but I can forgive a lack of beauty in sentence construction if there is value in the plot. Ostensibly, this was the story of a Belgian man (the author) who gave up his job as a cheese maker to become the Hollywood liaison for a Belgian celebrity magazine. Faced with no funding to actually travel to Hollywood and do his interviews, he pasted together articles based on reading the work of other writers. His ‘interview’ with famed artist Salvador Dali attracted the attention of a man putting together an investment company, who hired the author to be an art dealer specializing in Dali’s works. Suddenly, the author finds himself rolling in money and travelling the world ‘investing’ the often ill-gotten (or at the least, unreported) revenue of clients in Dali artwork. Ironically, we eventually find out how Dali’s work was frequently forged, often mass produced, and mostly produced by artists he hired in secret. With the author scamming his clients and Dali doing the same, there is a tremendous grey area in how these transactions were happening. Unfortunately, while this would make tremendous novel or memoir, this author had no skill in crafting the intricacies of such scams—or perhaps he had a legal or moral obligation to others to remain vague. Either way, the reader is left wondering if the author ever really had any grasp on the story he was telling. If the above weren’t enough to make me use this book to start my next barbeque, I learned way, way, way more about Dali’s sex life then I had ever hoped to know. How true the stories of perversion and debauchery are, I certainly don’t feel I can trust the author’s reliability as a source, but true or not, they were just plain gross. We were also treated to great detail about Dali’s famous moustache, which interested me even less.Along the way, the author enters into a relationship, has a child, goes to jail, and loses pretty much everything. However, he fails to impart any sense of what he was thinking or feeling, treating it all with a few sentences here and there, an occasional adjective and an hour or two of soul searching about what made him a crook. His wife, Anna, shows signs of being a welcomingly complex character, but she seems to cease being a human and becomes wallpaper after their marriage.The lone saving grace for me in the entire book dealt with Anna and her village, where she takes Stan to visit when they meet while she serves as his tour guide to Dali’s hometown. There is some correlation drawn to Dali’s early and innovative artwork and the Catalonian landscape and way of life. It is not nearly enough to overcome the book’s shortcomings, but it showed the author was able to make some spiritual connection to the art at some point.Without wasting too much more time on this thoroughly dismissible book, I did a cursory look at what the Internet had to offer on him, and it appears the author’s website has put out the majority of the information available, including endless announcements of Al Pacino’s commitment to play the role of Dali when the book is made into a movie (to be happening at any moment, apparently). The Times carried a brief article in June of 2008 regarding the possible screenplay, mentioning the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation as having “vowed to take the necessary legal actions to defend the artist’s reputation.” I wish the Foundation had been able to stop the publication of this book and saved us all the trouble of reading it.
    • 4/5
      This book is a fun, fast ride. I really enjoyed it, and polished it off almost in one sitting. It's an unbelievable tale of an art con whose stock and trade is Dali. He knows all the tricks, and plays the game well. He leads a remarkable life, if you believe all that's in here, but even if you don't, it's an interesting read. Suddenly the con man finds that he's the mark, and his world come crashing down around him. You may not feel a lot of sympathy for Lauryssens, but you do want to know what happens next, as he runs off to reunite with his pregnant girlfriend in Spain, and falls in with Dali's closest confidants. If you're looking for true insight into Dali and his life, look in a history book. If you want a fun yarn about what may or may not have been, a tale of deception and human greed and how surreal life can really be, you won't be disappointed.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like Dali & I, by Stan Lauryssens. Salvador Dali is one of my favourite artists - his quirks and sheer audacity never fail to entertain me. I wanted so much more out of this story. The potential was there for a truly fascinating read, but the story really fell flat. One of the main reasons for this, in my opinion, is Lauryssens' writing style. I found it to be stilted and unauthentic (much like his art career), and lacking in vital details, such as character development and realistic dialogue. I'll probably see the movie - I doubt the script was written by Lauryssens, and, as I said earlier, the story really has a lot of potential to be interesting.
    • 1/5
      I received this book through the LT Early Reviewers program over a year ago, but hadn't made it past the first few pages until yesterday. Since I was on my way to Florida and had planned a visit to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, I grabbed this book to read on the plane. The airline's inflight magazine was more interesting. Yet, I decided that I would read at least the first 100 pages. This is one of the most disjointed, poorly written memoirs I have ever read. I realize that I was reading an uncorrected proof, but didn't someone at St Martin's Press think about editing this? Imagine being trapped at a cocktail party with a drunken know-it-all who is rambling about his exploits and dropping as many celebrity names as possible. That is what reading this book is like. The book's cover claims that there will be a movie with Pacino and Cillian Murphy. The website claims Catherine Zeta-Jones will star as well. But, the film as been in pre-production now for a few years and isn't scheduled for release until 2011. My guess is that someone is trying to find a kernel of a script in this long-winded bloated book by a self-confessed crook. The bookcover also claims that Lauryssens won the "Hercule Poirot Award" for Crime fiction in 2002. The only reference I can find on the web to this award is in promotional copy or reviews for this book. Another ruse by an author who apparently things that anyone who reads this is really stupid?
    • 4/5
      Wow! Dali & I: The Surreal Story is a ride, and I never knew if I was being taken. Although the writing style is not the best, it managed to have me turning pages. The author's prose typically left me wanting more insight, more details and some sort of verification of those details. So, I guess you can take my wish for more as a far better criticism than wishing for less. This isn't just the story of Dali. It's also the bizarre story of the high stakes world of art forgeries, of which Dali and his studio perfected and how the author made his millions before getting caught. Fascinating and gross, I couldn't help but find myself fantasizing about making my own fortune in the underground world of art fraud. Of course I won't, but I'm certainly glad to have had a glimpse into it. The story of Dali is as surreal and subjectively as interesting as his art - if it was indeed his art at all.
    • 4/5
      This is book is on a very interesting subject. I enjoyed reading this book for the most part, but it did drag at times. It is hard to believe that everything in the book is true. The book is about greed. Greed by the author trying to buy and sell Dali art as fast as he can with little regard for the authenticity of the piece. There was greed by most of wealthy people who bought the art often without knowing or caring anything about what they are buying. And according to the author, there was greed by Dali himself who would sign his name to anything if it meant a paycheck. I have always been a fan of Dali’s work. This book gave me an insight into the man and the world of the art dealer that I previously had little knowledge of.
    • 3/5
      Who knows if we are even supposed to believe a single word of this memoir, seeing as how the author is a con man writing about an industry full of fakes and deception. The book is fairly readable, but just seems to skim along the surface of everything the entire time. I didn't learn much about any of the characters in this story and certainly didn't care about a single one of them.
    • 1/5
      I really wanted to enjoy "Dali & I" by Stan Lauryssens. The book could have been Girl With Pearl Earring except 20th century and funny. Based on the cover flap, it seemed to have all the elements I could want - interesting artist, corrupt and greedy art dealers, the promise of intrigue and plot twists . . . and, it was billed as a memoir, so it could count as my "worthwhile" reading for the week. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, the book was practically unreadable. The dialogue was stilted, the situations unbelievable, and I couldn't be convinced to care about any of the characters or what happened in the plot. Very disappointing, and I would not recommend this book to anyone.
    • 2/5
      I was very excited to read this book given my fascination with Dali's work and having even visited the Dali Museum in Figueres. What a let down. The author scratches only the surface of the most interesting parts of the story (the deception, the works themselves) and goes into great detail about things which seem hardly relevant (some old guy's house who knew Dali, many grotesque aspects of Dali's personality). In the end, Lauryssens gives us little to no insight into what motivated him; he presents his life of deception as very matter of fact and even his interest in Dali seems at best mildly curious. Plus, I could do without the graphic descriptions of the lurid details of Dali's sexual deviance. So much of this book is based on stories that were told to the author by a third party, leaving wide gaps of credibility. Is that the best we can expect from a fraud, who claims Dali himself may also have been one? I guess so. It's a very disappointing and frustrating read.