“You see, I have no head for business. In fact, after all these years I’ve decided I’m not even an intelligent man.” — Elmyr de Hory
This article contains mentions of the Holocaust and suicide.
Elmyr de Hory was a Jewish man born in Budapest in 1906 to a middle-class family, though for most of his life, he would maintain that he was raised as an aristocrat. At the age of sixteen, his parents divorced, and he was sent to a prestigious art colony and was later taught in Paris. He returned home to Hungary just as the second world war began. After a few minor arrests, he was sent to a concentration camp for being both Jewish and gay.
It was after the war ended and Elmyr de Hory was released that he began wandering Europe. He had become rather directionless after he was separated from his family during the Holocaust. He believed them to be dead, though there is evidence to suggest that they may have survived. With training in art that was losing its popularity as he learned it, Elmyr first tried to become an artist of his own merit.
This pursuit would not leave Elmyr through most of his life, but soon it did fall to the wayside as he learned of his rather peculiar talent for forgery. It was all revealed when he was in particularly desperate times. A rich friend was visiting his house, and upon seeing an ink drawing on the wall, she said she was certain it was a Picasso and asked to buy it from Elmyr. Elmyr did not correct her.
This would be the beginning of a fantastic and somewhat ridiculous career for Elmyr. Try as he might, he was never able to find recognition for his own work under his own signature again and again he would find himself on hard times and turn back to creating under the more famous signatures of men like Picasso and Dufy.
He would later discuss this, saying:
“[The] establishment knows nothing. A college art student knows easily as much about modern art as the best dealers in the best galleries. The dealers know one thing very well: to buy cheap and sell dear. That’s the extent of their expertise. I long ago realized that if I do commercial things in painting I got such a minimum that it was barely enough to hold me alive-not enough to live on but just too much to die on. My better work, I could sell it to the galleries at any price. But if I brought them the same drawing with the signature of a Picasso they were ready to peel out any amount of money. I found the whole thing incredibly-how to say?... partly funny, partly sad, partly disgusting.”
Despite, or perhaps because, of his disdain for the art scene at the time, Elmyr found himself a career, going from city to city, with his suit and monocle, a set of forgeries under his arm, and selling his work to art dealers. He weaved them a story of his life as a displaced Hungarian aristocrat looking for some quick cash. For a time, he did this in America under an expired visa, making famous friends and pushing out forged art to pay for his new lifestyle.
There were times when he tried to move onto the side of the law, such as his time living in Los Angeles, where he spent a great deal of time living off of his own work, but eventually, rent day would come, and he would end up back with the art dealers, telling them about the Picasso he just found in his family collection.
Though they did not have all of the forensic countermeasures available today, there was a system intended to weed out forgeries. Much of it relied on experts who would often spend days examining a work. Time and again, they returned it, certain that the piece Elmyr had made was a genuine Matisse.
It is important to note here that Elmyr had his own ideas about the work he did:
“I don’t like that word ‘fake’ but I’ll use it. I made paintings in the style of a certain artist. I never copied. The only fake thing about my paintings was the signature.”
However one chooses to describe the job, he did it well. Whether that was because of his charm, his skill, his luck, or some combination of the three, his work was not a hard sell. Throughout America, major galleries bought Elmyr’s work and displayed them next to genuine articles without anyone raising an eyebrow.
That is not to say that there were no bumps in the road. After selling to a dealer in Chicago who found out that the work wasn’t genuine, there was a case brought up against him, and the FBI attempted to track him. This, accompanied by his expired visa, soon gave Elmyr some of the first real anxieties he had experienced in his work. He furthered the issue when he attempted to team up with a man who later double-crossed him.
Despite his profession, Elmyr was a trusting man, and he soon found himself a new partner to make his life increasingly difficult: Fernand Legros.
From the moment Elmyr saw Legros, he didn’t like the man, and instinct he should have trusted. Legros was also a gay man and was with Réal Lessard, a French-Canadian man who would soon become the third in this group. A friend Elmyr was staying with insisted that they help Legros, and when Legros saw what Elmyr was doing, he wanted in.
He said he would do the risky part, going from art dealer to art dealer, convincing them to buy. All Elmyr would have to do was make the art. With many memories of being run out of town by suspicious art dealers, Elmyr accepted the proposition.
The deal was to split their earnings fifty-fifty, but it wasn’t long before Legros began taking a larger cut and demanding Elmyr only sell his paintings through Legros. It was under Legros’ ever-growing demand that Elmyr began to chafe. The three of them had already planned to go to Paris together, and when Elmyr arrived early with cash from paintings he had sold in secret, he abandoned his two partners and pursued his own career once again.
He lived like that for a while, flipping between forgery and his own work while traveling through Europe, eventually growing dissatisfied. By now, he was older, and he found the constant travel his work required had lost its charm. He wanted to settle down. He wanted a home. After quite the search, he found a home on the island of Ibiza.
After Elmyr fell in love with and settled in Ibiza, Legros came back into his life. He and Réal had continued selling paintings, and they held no ill will toward Elmyr. In fact, they wanted to work with him again. He would be able to settle in Ibiza with a decent allowance of four hundred dollars a month, and Legros and Réal would travel Europe selling his work.
Elmyr agreed, settling in an apartment and creating a life for himself. On a small island with an influx of artistic types, Elmyr fit in well. His extravagant lifestyle was embraced, and his seeming unemployment was glossed over by most. He made himself a life, and for the first time, he had stability.
He spoke of his life there, saying:
“It was my kind of place. People seemed to live on terribly small incomes in those days. Anyone who had two hundred dollars a month was considered rich. I became friendly with some of the up-and-coming artists like Edith Sommer, Clifford Smith, and David Walsh. They had great talent, and I had a little more money at my disposal than they did-I wanted to help them, so I bought their work. That’s why I called myself an art collector. I myself, when I first arrived, kept working on my own paintings. I still had hopes that one day I would be a success. I made a series of watercolours of the port and some views of the Old City. But as I got more and more involved with Fernand and Réal, I more and more hid the fact that I was an artist. They were furious when I told them I’d spoken to Ivan Spence, the Englishman who ran the local art gallery, about having a show of my own. Finally, I stopped doing my own work altogether.”
While he was doing this, Réal and Legros continued to sell his work, taking a larger cut than they had agreed to and paying erratically. Réal had become a shrewd businessman and explained the decision by saying:
“We had to keep him poor, or he’d have quit. He needed incentive. Whenever he had money he didn’t see why he should work, so we decided rather than give him large sums of cash we’d bring him gifts—like the portable TV set or a red sports car. That sort of thing always made him happy. He was like a child.”
The partnership's troubles were not just within the business, though; none of the three seemed to get along. Elmyr didn’t trust Legros, and the relationship between Legros and Réal was an abusive one that landed both parties in jail on many occasions.
It was after Réal left Legros to marry a woman that things tipped over the edge. Réal and Legros began fighting over Elmyr, but it was an easy decision for him. He had never trusted Legros and easily decided to stick by Réal. In the end, this was the catalyst that unraveled the whole enterprise.
The house Elmyr had in Ibiza was under Legros’ name for what he claimed to be Elmyr’s own protection. When the partnership turned sour, he demanded the home. The Ibizan court settled that the two would have to share the house. Still, there was a bigger storm brewing on the horizon.
A Texan businessman who had bought forty paintings from Legros finally caught on to their scheme, and the tower of cards began to fall. What happened next is known in the art world as a watershed moment. Painting after painting was revealed to be fake, and the grand deception was revealed.
Many art experts came forward after the trick was revealed, sure that they had never fallen for such a forgery. It seems Elmyr’s reach was vast; it is now estimated that over a thousand works made by Elmyr resided in prominent galleries throughout the world.
In one case, an art expert was said to have become so used to Elmyr’s version of a Dufy that he no longer trusted authentic Dufy works and instead saw Elmyr’s hand as the genuine article. Another story comes from the artist himself; Van Dougen, in his old age, saw Elmyr’s paintings as his own, reminiscing about the model and signing off on its authenticity.
The variety and quantity of his artwork were so wide that Elmyr himself didn’t recognize them all, later saying:
“I never understood the scale of the thing I was doing.”
The art world was shaken to its core, and an old Hungarian man with a monocle went to prison in Ibiza for two months, taking his lawn chair with him.
F.R. Fehse discussed Elmyr, saying:
“Undoubtedly, he is some kind of genius. But which kind, I don’t know. All I know is that no one quite like him has ever existed before. And, we all pray no one like him will ever exist again.”
Other people in the art world like Philippe Reichenbach, who had become just as jaded to the art world as Elmyr, found the whole scandal quite funny, saying:
“I was there when the President of the Academy called in four experts to look at a little Derain that he thought was ‘wrong.’ It was on the floor, propped carelessly against the wall, unframed, and the four experts came into the room—looked at it each one for, I assure you, not more than a second—and then laughed. They smirked, they sneered: ‘How ghastly! What a joke! How could anyone believe for a second that it’s a Derain? It’s so obviously a fake!’ Voila. Then the President asked the four experts to look at a Derain that belonged to him and tell him what they thought of it. They looked, they rubbed their hands, they rolled their eyes with admiration. They cooed: ‘How beautiful, how masterly, how typical a Derain’ and so forth until you wanted to throw up. Well, I can assure you, the Derain that belonged to the President was awful. A real Derain it might have been, but even Derain, you know, had his bad days when his wife burned the toast and his cigarette ashes fell on the palette. And the little fake on the floor was really, in some parts, quite lovely. But the experts had made up their minds before they had entered the room.”
Art dealer Ivan Spence was also quite blunt about what he thought of the situation:
“Anyone who has paid fifty or sixty thousand dollars for one of these paintings deserves to be taken for a ride. I think it’s all highly amusing. Is a Matisse so beautiful or so rare that it’s worth that kind of money? Nonsense! Let’s end the veneration of what’s old and outdated. Let’s end this bloody business of an art ‘market.’ What one can hope for is that the whole scandal will teach people to buy the work of young, living painters.”
Even people Elmyr had swindled sometimes took it with surprisingly good-natured amusement. One friend was later asked if he was angry about Elmyr selling him a fake, revealing it to be a fake, and paying him back with two checks that bounced. He said:
“Strangely enough, not at all. He is what he is, and there’s something wonderful about a man like that. He’s a charming crook. I wouldn’t be surprised if he really believed on both occasions that there was cash in the bank to cover the checks. No, still I consider him a friend-if I saw him walking down the other side of the Champs-Elysees right this minute, I’d run across the avenue and embrace him.”
An art collector who bought two supposed Renoir watercolours from a gallery admitted:
“I would be a complete hypocrite if I bore the artist a lasting grudge. I don’t buy paintings the way I buy stock in A.T. & T. and Xerox. I’ve had ten years of pleasure from my Renoirs—or Reniors-by-Elmyr, call them what you will—and I will have twenty more years if I’m lucky. Then I’ll leave them to my two sons and tell them, ‘These are things of beauty. Enjoy them for what they are, not the signature they bear or what someone else tells you they are or aren’t.”
These people, of course, were the exceptions and not the rules. The art world as a whole was not pleased with Elmyr’s scam, but Elmyr himself saw it a little differently, saying:
“I’ve always been an optimist, I look to the future. Not that I have any special regrets about what I’ve done in the past. It proved to me that in spite of having absolutely no personal recognition for myself, I obviously was an artist of consequence.”
In the end, having faced extradition and more jail time in 1976, Elmyr, unfortunately, committed suicide, something he had attempted several times before.
It is hard to say, having looked at his life, whether he was a "bad" man or not. He broke the law continually and dismissively, but it is hard to be angry at a man who swindled rich people out of money through intense skill and hard work.
Defining what he did as wrong is also hard to disagree with, but not as hard as it is to dismiss his talent and clear ability. Like many queer people throughout our history, it is hard to place Elmyr de Hory in a box. His life is filled with varied accounts and levels of anger and amusement and nearly impossible to pin down.
A con man who got conned by his business partners time and again. An artist who is sometimes considered better than the artists he was faking, who was never recognized for the work that bore his own signature. It is difficult to say much about him for certain but to say that he is another example of the wild and strange world of queer history. Morality exists in more colours and shades than one would ever expect.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Irving, Clifford. Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. Print.
Forgy, Mark. The Forger's Apprentice: Life with the World's Most Notorious Artist. CreateSpace, 2012. Print.
Loll, Colette, curator. “Elmyr de Hory.” Intent to Deceive: Fakes and Forgeries in the Art World, International Arts & Artists. www.intenttodeceive.org/forger-profiles/elmyr-de-hory
Reichenbach, François. “Elmyr, The True Picture?” Vimeo, 1970, https://vimeo.com/84083934