In the 1980s Éditions d’Art Les Heures Claires the legendary Parisian fine art publishing house shifted from a high-integrity, hand-crafted studio workshop to a high-volume photomechanical reproduction factory.
Éditions d’Art Les Heures Claires was celebrated for its fine quality, technical innovation, and special craftsmanship in printing limited-edition books and graphic art portfolios. It was the publishing house famous for its monumental 1959–1963 production of Salvador Dali’s Dante Alighieri’s La Divine Comédie (The Divine Comedy). Beyond The Divine Comedy, Les Heures Claires published several other iconic Dali luxury graphic editions, including: The “1001 Nights” Series (1971); The “Nine Muses” Series; The “La Toison d’Or” (The Golden Fleece) Suite; and the “California-Hawaii” Suite (1973) published alongside American sub-distributors for the American market. The publishing house gradually wound down its primary art-publishing operations during the late 1970s and 1980s. The company stopped commissioning new contemporary artists and under their late-stage leadership, transitioned entirely into managing its highly valuable back-catalog.
The relationship between Salvador Dalí and the French publishing house Éditions d’Art Les Heures Claires is actually one of the most successful, lucrative, and legally ironclad partnerships in the history of 20th-century graphic art. Their deep connection began as a high-stakes rescue mission in the 1950s and evolved into a multi-decade alliance. The reason the publishing house held so many extensive, unassailable publishing rights during the chaotic 1980s comes down to early financial loyalty, permanent ownership of physical printing masters, and a powerful partnership with Dalí’s most prolific Italian patron(the Albaretto’s). Their introduction was not a casual gallery meeting, but rather a high-stakes business salvage operation brokered by French publisher Joseph Forêt. Sensing a monumental opportunity, Joseph Forêt—a prominent French art publisher who knew Dalí well—stepped in to acquire the rights to stranded watercolors. Forêt brought in Jean Estrade, the committed and technical Artistic Director of Éditions d’Art Les Heures Claires.
Forêt and Estrades’s relationship was forged out of a massive international art scandal. In 1950, the Italian government commissioned Dalí to paint 100 watercolors to illustrate Dante’s The Divine Comedy for an upcoming national anniversary. However, the Italian public and parliament were outraged that a Spaniard—rather than an Italian—was chosen for their national masterpiece, forcing the government to cancel the contract. The Italian government panicked leaving Dalí with a mountain of unfinished watercolors and no publisher. This project was stalled until artistic director Jean Estrade stepped in.
Seeing an immense artistic opportunity, Jean Estrade got involved. In fact, he took over the project entirely. He bought Dalí’s watercolors and spent four grueling years (1959–1963) working directly under Dalí’s supervision to engrave 3,500 resin blocks to replicate the paintings. This monumentally successful release established Les Heures Claires as Dalí’s most trusted master publisher and immediately turned into an strong, collaborative working relationship.
The result was La Divine Comédie (The Divine Comedy) Box Set (1959–1963): A monumental 100-print masterpiece divided across 6 volumes covering Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. These were carved across roughly 3,500 physical wooden blocks rather than rolled on a flat lithographic stone.
In 1974, Dr. Giuseppe Albaretto one of Salvador Dalí’s most vital art patrons and oldest closest friends acquired Les Heures Claires. Following the buyout, Albaretto immediately took control of the inventory and publishing plates, bringing a massive cache of the 1,960 Divine Comedy sheets to Dalí at the Hotel Meurice in Paris to be hand-signed under his new ownership. Eventually, Albaretto officially registered and established Les Heures Claires, Italy, transferring the headquarters and all archival operations from Paris to Turin. Because of their decades-long arrangement of commissions, gifts, and direct support, the Albaretto family amassed an unparalleled inventory of surrealist art.
When Robert Descharnes formed Demart Pro Arte in 1986 to centralize all of Dalí’s properties, he ran into a wall with Les Heures Claires because their rights were built on three legally immovable pillars:
- The Albaretto Family Takeover: During their active years, Les Heures Claires partnered heavily with Drs. Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto, Dalí’s close personal friends and top Italian patrons. The Albarettos eventually backed and established Les Heures Claires, Italy (Torino). Because the Albarettos legally owned hundreds of original Dalí gouaches and held early, direct contracts to reproduce them, the publisher had an endless archive of grandfathered imagery to pull from. The Albaretto family—Dr. Giuseppe Albaretto and his wife Mara—were wealthy Italian patrons, major art collectors, and close personal confidants of Salvador Dalí from the mid-1950s until the artist’s death. In fact, they were the push behind Dali’s Biblia Sacra (illustrated Bible) and an intended 500-piece Thousand and One Nights cycle. Giuseppe transitioned from dentistry into fine art publishing, establishing enterprises like Les Heures Claires, Italy, to distribute Dalí’s prints and etchings. Their close collaboration yielded Europe’s largest private collection of original Dalí artworks. Arguably Europe’s largest private collection of original Dalí graphics, illustrations, and lithographs.
- Ownership of the Physical Matrices: Under European copyright law, because Les Heures Claires had legally funded, created, and published suites like The Nine Muses or 1001 Nights in the 1970s, they owned the physical lithographic stones, plates, and film matrices. Vested contract laws meant that a publisher could not be stripped of the right to print from their own legally manufactured, grandfathered materials.
- The “Subject to Prior Agreements” Loopholes: As it turn out, Dalí’s 1986 estate centralization explicitly stated that future managers had to respect contracts signed during the artist’s healthy, competent years. Since Les Heures Claires held ironclad contracts dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, they had a permanent, legal “green light” to issue retrospective compilations and interpretive sheets (lithographies d’après) well into the late 1980s. Prior Agreements were to be honored. Actually, to this day Robert’s son, Nicolas Descharnes, continues to act as a leading authenticator. He has frequently been called upon to evaluate and verify disputed pieces originating from early Albaretto commissions.
Hence, Éditions d’Art Les Heures Claires leveraged their grandfathered contracts in the 1980s by shifting from a high-integrity, elite fine art publishing house into a high-volume photomechanical reproduction factory and because Salvador Dalí was in physical crisis and could no longer really collaborate on new plates, Les Heures Claires maximized profits by aggressively recycling their pre-existing image catalog through a series of shrewd legal and corporate maneuvers.
Les Heures Claires did not violate the law—they simply maximized the legal boundaries of their pre-1981 contracts. They successfully recognized that while the high-end museum world would reject these late-80s prints, an immense, highly lucrative global middle-market existed of everyday collectors who would happily pay $100 to $300 for a high quality unframed, blind stamped reproduction of Salvador Dalí’s greatest career hits.
An art historian would detail their catalog commercialization and portfolio strategy through four specific methods:
1. Shifting to “Interpretive” Photomechanical Printing
In the 1960s and 1970s, Les Heures Claires was famous for true original graphic arts—such as hand-carving thousands of individual woodblocks for The Divine Comedy. In the 1980s, they abandoned this incredibly expensive and time-consuming process.
- Instead, they took the transparency film matrices and original gouaches they already contractually owned such as the 1001 Nights and Muses series and ran them through advanced photomechanical offset lithography presses at their Torino, Italy division.
- This allowed them to mass-produce thousands of uniform, high-gloss 50×40 cm prints with minimal labor costs, positioning them as “limited-edition fine art” when they were structurally high-end poster interpretations.
2. The Introduction of the “Facsimile Signature Matrix”
Because Dalí suffered from severe tremors and stopped hand-signing art after December 1980, the publisher could no longer sell true “hand-signed” editions. To circumvent this and maintain a premium price point, they burned Dalí’s historical signature directly into the printing plate matrix (a facsimile signature).
- By printing the signature mechanically into the image file, the sheets still looked “signed” to casual buyers in a gallery or shop.
- For authorized estate editions, approved prints with a facsimile of the artist’s signature could show show official authorization.
- They then used their legal corporate entity to apply a dry-embossed blindstamp into the margins. This allowed their distributors to market the prints as “Officially Authorized Estate Editions,” charging hundreds of dollars per sheet for an item Dalí never actually saw.
3. Creating Artificial Scarcity via Authorized Retrospective Portfolios and the Fine Print
To avoid being accused of printing cheap open-edition posters, Les Heures Claires packaged these photomechanical prints into elaborate, uniform thematic portfolios (most notably the 1984 Les Quatre Saisons suite and the ~50-print Antologia retrospective). They did it legally creating many authorized Dali prints in the process.
- The Publisher hired warehouse workers or regional distributors to take a pencil and manually write edition numbers (e.g., /1000 or /350) on the corners of the paper. Writing these numbers by hand created a powerful psychological illusion of scarcity for collectors. In reality, the numbering was completely disconnected from the artist and was strictly a marketing mechanism used by the publisher to justify selling the prints in luxury portfolios.
- The legality of the after print. To an art historian or a legal expert, creating artificial scarcity via retrospective portfolios is not fraud—it is an aggressive, highly calculated marketing strategy that operates completely within the law. While it can feel ethically deceptive to a consumer, the law draws a very strict line between predatory marketing and criminal fraud. Fraud requires intentional misrepresentation—meaning the seller must lie about what the item physically is. Les Heures Claires and their legal distributors bypassed this charge through their fine-print disclosures.
- They never claimed Dalí physically held the lithographic stone in 1984. The documentation explicitly stated these were “Interpretive Lithographs” (lithographies d’après) based on his historical works. Because they legally owned the underlying rights via their grandfathered contracts, they had the absolute right to print the images. Selling a high-quality reproduction of a painting is completely legal, just like a museum selling a premium poster in a gift shop.
- To a casual buyer, seeing a hand-written pencil number like 45/1000 implies that the artist supervised a short run and numbered the sheets. However, in the commercial print market, publishers have the legal right to number their own inventory. If a publisher decides to limit a specific commercial print run to 1,000 copies to maintain a premium price, they are legally allowed to do so. Having a warehouse worker write those numbers in pencil is simply an administrative indexing method. As long as the publisher doesn’t actually print 10,000 copies while claiming there are only 1,000, no fraud has occurred. They successfully created an illusion of fine-art scarcity using proper standard retail inventory management.
- Burning Dalí’s signature directly into the printing plate (a facsimile signature) is not forgery. Forgery is a third party attempting to mimic a signature by hand to deceive a buyer. A facsimile signature functions exactly like the Nike swoosh or the Disney logo. It is a printed brand identifier proving the product was manufactured by the company that owns the trademark rights. Combined with the publisher’s raised blindstamp, the print legally states: “This is a genuine product of the Les Heures Claires publishing house.”
- People ask when does this become fraud if at any time at all? If a gallery takes one of these $300 photomechanical Les Heures Claires prints, frames it, and tells a buyer: “Dalí hand-signed this himself in 1984, and it is a rare investment that will double in value,” that specific verbal misrepresentation is fraud.
4. Fragmenting into Regional Corporate Entities
To protect their primary French brand and shield themselves from the aggressive legal enforcement of Robert Descharnes’s Demart Pro Arte in Paris, Les Heures Claires funneled the vast majority of their 1980s commercial print runs through their Italian subsidiary, Edizioni d’Arte Les Heures Claires (Torino). Descharnes was appointed by Dali to stop an epidemic of unauthorized, over-run, and falsely designated graphic editions that flooded the market while Dalí’s health failed and he remained isolated. He was re-establishing market control over authentic Dalí works.
- Because this Italian branch operated under separate localized contracts linked directly to the Albaretto archives, Descharnes found it incredibly difficult to legally challenge them in French courts.
- By the time estate lawyers could attempt to block an edition in one country, the Italian branch had already successfully printed, packaged, and distributed the suites to international distributors and retail galleries across Europe and the United States.
The 1980s Late-Career/Posthumous Retrospectives
As detailed previously, these 1980s printings are the photomechanical offset runs pulled mostly by the Torino, Italy division after Dalí could no longer hand-sign editions. They feature facsimile signatures in the plate and the iconic raised publisher blindstamp in the margin:
- Les Quatre Saisons de Salvador Dalí Portfolio (1984): A uniform re-release of the 1972 Four Seasons imagery scaled down to the specialized 50×40 cm format, historically housed in a deep royal blue presentation box.
- The Antologia / Retrospective Masterworks Set (Late 1980s): A collection of approximately 50 individual plates reproducing Dalí’s famous oil masterpieces from his entire career. The inventory seen on eBay stores like arthouse-phoenix is drawn entirely from this collection list, which includes:
- The Persistence of Memory (Melting Clocks)
- The Temptation of St. Anthony
- The Elephants (Spindly-legged elephants carrying obelisks)
- The Sacrament of the Last Supper
- Metamorphosis of Narcissus
- Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
- The Madonna of Port Lligat
- Galatea of the Spheres
- The Hallucinogenic Toreador
- The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus
- …and others
While Robert Descharnes fought a defensive battle to slow down production and guard Dalí’s legacy from external bad actors, the Albaretto’s were one of the ultimate insider gatekeepers. By partnering with Les Heures Claires to establish Les Heures Claires, Italy, the Albarettos helped transform what could have been chaotic exploitation into a structured, high-quality, and deeply meaningful artistic period. Although controversial instead of cheap replicas flooding the market, the Albaretto’s provided collectors with authorized works bearing legitimate Les Heures Claires blind stamps. In retrospect, the collision of these forces directly led to the formation of modern authentication networks, catalogues raisonnés, and strict rules regarding lithographic editions.
It also proved that high-volume publishing and fine-art integrity could coexist.