NICHE DRIVES A CAREER OF CHALLENGES AND REWARDS

While in Charleston Bernard Ewell, ASA sent me an article he recently wrote and published in the ASA Personal Property Journal. It is about finding and developing a specialty and becoming an expert or authority in that particular area. Mr Ewell is an expert on Salvador Dali and he recounts how his reputation and specialty appraising career developed. There are many generalist appraisers in the profession, and I do believe it is wise to also have a specialty area where you are known and considered an expert. Much appraisal business and assignments can develop from a single specialty.

I am posting half of the Ewell article now, and in a few days I will post the remainder.


NICHE DRIVES A CAREER OF CHALLENGES AND REWARDS
© Bernard Ewell, ASA

In 1980 a client from Alaska brought two lithographic prints attributed to Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989) to my office in Colorado Springs. They were accompanied by “certificates of authenticity” issued by a gallery in Hawaii. My efforts to find information and answers were consistently met with warnings from other appraisers and colleagues that the Dalí market was dangerous and a “can of worms” and it would be best to avoid it. Dealers and publishers routinely stonewalled and warned me off. One publisher’s attorney told me to mind my own business. I was hooked.

Now, twenty-nine years, numerous Federal court expert witness assignments and fifty-two thousand Dalí prints later, I am between spending a month in Mexico and a month in Ireland writing. I’m thinking back over a career of developing this niche that no one else wanted. I have an international practice, a substantial income and ten weeks of vacation a year. I also have a reputation as The International Dalí Authority. I hope that some of my students in American Society of Appraisers’ valuation courses and my practice management seminar followed my advice to find and develop a niche of their own.

The secret is to find a subject or artist of interest, seek out everyone with any information and experience in the field and always remember that if a person has integrity, nothing else matters; if a person does not have integrity, nothing else matters. Always maintain a disinterested third party relationship to the art you specialize in. Don’t buy, sell or broker it. Careful development of credibility will expand a reputation and eventually there will be no need to do any marketing or promotion. Those in need of expertise and answers will seek out the expert and opportunities will multiply.

Of the many rewards, one of the greatest is to become a trusted source of information for other appraisers who can then accept assignments involving your specialty or artist and, with your help, address the needs of their clients.

Salvador Dalí made his first commercial print in 1930. It was a heliogravure of an original drawing to which he added some original engraving in the plate. After executing about seventeen hundred print titles prior to 1980, he is remarkably now also credited with thirteen lithographs in 1980 and two in 1982, even though I have copies of affidavits in which he swears to have signed no prints or paper for prints after 1979 and, in fact, states that he signed his name fewer than one hundred times in 1980.

What lies between 1930 and 1980 is one of the most extraordinary—and confusing—stories of any artist of any era. We hear of Dalí signing many thousands of blank sheets of paper (not true); marking printing plates by shootings nails at them from an antique harquebus; drawing on lithography stones with ink applied by a French bread stuffed into a rhinoceros horn; and using an octopus dipped in ink. He is also credited with the creation of vast numbers of prints that I have repeatedly proved in court bore forged signatures. The whole Dalí graphic mess constitutes the greatest art fraud of all time and involved the criminal efforts of hundreds of publishers and dealers. Even today the cons continue.

A consummate showman as well as an artistic genius of the highest order, he spent the last nine years of his life as a recluse and probably as a prisoner—if you believe the findings of an extensive investigation by Spanish Television. During that period (1980-1989) many thousands of prints attributed to Salvador Dalí were sold to unsophisticated buyers who were assured that the artist was very ill, would die on Thursday and the value of his prints would skyrocket. They are fakes and I am now the only uncompromised expert who can tell the difference between them and the legitimate works.

Now that Dalí has been dead for twenty years, it is reasonable to expect that the Dalí market would have pretty well settled down and that there would be dependable sources of information on print authenticity and values for the personal property appraiser to depend on. Not so. The same old “is they is, or is they ain’t” questions are still difficult to answer and there are still players in the market who work assiduously to mislead potential buyers and researchers and suggest that I’m not who I say I am.

To be continued.