Elmyr de Hory: King Con
He was the finest art forger of his day. But the Hungarian hoaxer - and 'star' of Orson Welles' F For Fake - was a great artist in his own right.
"Who is Elmyr de Hory?" It's a question Orson Welles asks time after time in his groundbreaking essay film F For Fake. A documentary of sorts about forgery in all its forms, Welles' picture is particularly interested in de Hory (pictured above) whose criminal activities didn't prevent him from becoming something of a celebrity in the 1070s. His infamy in large part stemmed from Fake, a biography penned by the thriller writer Clifford Irving.
"Elmyr has developed a fiction about his life and to destroy that fiction would tear down the whole castle that he has built of his illusions," Irving explains in F For Fake. "The illusion, for example, that he hasn't broken any law. The illusion that the world has always taken advantage of him. If you were to put it to him that he had taken advantage of the world, he would be horrified."
Before one sifts through the truth and lies of Elmyr de Hory's life, it's first necessary to demonstrate just how remarkable an art forger he was. For while many of his claims about his life are clearly preposterous, the Hungarian's insistence that he sold hundreds of paintings to leading galleries the world over is easy to demonstrate. And he didn't simply pull the wool over the eyes of critics and collectors - when Kees van Dogen was shown a de Hory portrait in the style of the Fauvist painter, the Dutchman swore that the picture was his and that he could clearly remember painting it.
Van Dongen wasn't the only artist de Hory mimicked. Modigliani, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Bracht - he could replicate all these and more. More astonishingly still, he rattled off his canvases in mere minutes. In F For Fake we see him create a Matisse sketch in the time it takes to rustle up a cup of tea.
But what of the man? If de Hory is to be believed - and his biographer Iriving believed him, at least to begin with - he was born Elemér Albert Hoffmann in Budapest in 1906; the son of an ambassador. His mother, meanwhile, came from an aristocratic banking family, thus ensuring that the young Elymr grew up with a taste for the finer things in life. It wasn't until many years late that Mark Forgy - de Hory's sometime bodyguard and close friend - discovered that all of the above was untrue and that Elmyr was in fact the son of a wholesaler.
Through an examination of institutions' registers, it's possible to say with some certainty that the decidedly middle-class Elmyr studied art at Munich's Akademie Heinmann and the Académie la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the 1920s. What's less certain is whether he returned to his homeland just prior to the Second World War only to be imprisoned for conducting a homosexual relationship with a British spy. His time in a Nazi concentration camp is also the source of some controversy as is his claim that he lost his parents in the Holocaust; in researching his book The Forger's Apprentice, Mark Forgy found that de Hory's mother and father survived the war.
Fortunately, the post-war Elmyr is somewhat easier to pin down. Returning to Paris in 1946, financial expediency convinced de Hory to give up on becoming a respectable painter and instead take advantage of his rare knack for pastiche. The sale of a 'Picasso' to a British buyer kick-started a global campaign that would see the artist sell forgeries in Europe, South America and the United States. Then, when the curator of Harvard's Fogg Museum voiced his doubts over the efficacy of a 'Matisse' drawing he'd purchased from de Hory - who was then flogging his wares under the alias 'E Raynal' - the master forger adopted a fresh raft of pseudonyms and took to selling his work via mail order.
There then followed a series of events worthy of the best kind of airport thriller. A stint in a Mexican jail, a suicide attempt in Washington DC, all manner of run-ins with Egyptian-born art dealer Fernand Legros - each one of these episodes is worthy of an article in its own right. Incredibly, when de Hory was eventually brought to book in Ibiza in 1968, it wasn't on fraud charges; rather he was sentenced to two months in prison for practising homosexuality, consorting with criminals and having no visible means of support. Banished from the Balearics for a year, Elmyr returned to the island in 1969, by which time the small-time criminal had become a bona fide celebrity.
Clifford Irving's Fake! The Story Of Elmyr de Hory The Greatest Art Forger Of Our Time was published on June 1st 1969. Though the book itself was only a modest success, de Hory's press interviews went down a storm, revealing the forger to be a garrulous bon vivant who clearly enjoyed the limelight. And with Ibiza enjoying a healthy reputation among the jet set, de Hory's villa became party central. One such soiree was filmed by the French director Francois Reichenbach which would in turn be re-purposed by Orson Welles (above) in F For Fake ); fittingly Welles was one of the guest Chez de Hory the night Reichenbach filmed.
Clifford Irving was also present that evening; a fact that became that much more intriguing when, less than two years after profiling de Hory, Irving was exposed as perpetrating a fraud on a scale far greater than any of Elmyr's. The Autobiography Of Howard Hughes was the publishing sensation of the early 1970s. That the reclusive billionaire should have set the Kleenex boxes and jars of urine to one side in order to tell his life story so excited McGraw-Hill that they forked out $765,000 for the privilege. It was only when Hughes himself got in touch with the publishers and threatened to sue them that Irving confessed his guilt. During his 17 months in jail, Irving documented his misdoings in another book entitled The Hoax which would be filmed in 2006 with Richard Gere playing the author.
Interestingly, Elmyr de Hory didn't think much of Irving's behaviour, in particular the manner in which the writer had taken advantage of his wife - it was Edith Irving who was photographed in a Swiss bank trying to cash a cheque made out to 'H.R. Hughes'. However, the painter's disgust had less to do with chivalry than with the fact that de Hory didn't consider himself to be a forger. His justification for this claim was that he'd never faked the signatures of the artists he'd impersonated. To do so would be to commit fraud. Mimicking someone else's style, meanwhile, has been going on since the days of cave painting.
Questions about de Hory's artistry run right through F For Fake. "The value [of art] depends on opinion," observes Welles. "Opinion depends on the experts. A faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who is the expert? And who is the faker? You know, art forgery used to be admired as an art." Whether or not someone who replicates the style of other artists can be considered an artist himself, de Hory never lost the desire to go legit. In his final years, he used his new-found fame to sell original Elmyrs. And all the while, the French authorities drew closer to clamping in irons the man whose tail they'd be on since the 1940s.
It was on December 11th 1976 that Mark Forgy - could there be a better name for a fraudster’s bodyguard? - informed his boss that the Spanish government had acceded to France's wishes and agreed that de Hory could be extradited. Later the same day, Elmyr de Hory took an overdose of sleeping pills. He would die in Forgy's arms on the way to the hospital.
Towards the end of F For Fake, Orson Welles observes that, "His paintings are in so many great collections that it must be said of Elmyr that he has achieved a certain sort of immortality." Indeed, over 40 years on from de Hory's death, curators continue to throw up their arms upon discovering that their prized collection is the creation of a Hungarian conman.
And then there's the truly bizarre phenomenon of fake forgeries. For evidence of this one need only look to a story that ran in the New Zealand Herald where Cordy's auction house in Auckland was contacted by Mark Forgy who explained that two de Hory canvases inspired by Claude Monet were in fact the handiwork of Ken Talbot, a British bookmaker who liked to dabble in the arts.
Further fake de Horys were unearthed when it was decided to publish a catalogue of his work. The finished work is a fitting tribute to a truly gifted artist. It also features upwards of a half-dozen canvasses that weren't painted by Elmyr. Whether this is something de Hory would find delightful, we'll never know. But as for the most famous question asked of de Hory - the one posed by The Stranglers on the track 'No More Heroes' - now you know what happened to "the great Elmyra".