Elmyr de Hory: Bane of the Expert

Whenever one of us walks into an art museum, no matter the level of knowledge of the works or their creators, we enter a contract with our esthetic that what we are looking at is legitimate. The question of authenticity does not cross out minds. We assume this is true; otherwise, the entire experience has no point. It is the art buyer, assumed to be an expert, who determines authenticity, and we place our trust fully in their judgements. What happens, then, when these experts are subverted? When a master forger sells pieces by respected artists, and the pieces are deemed authentic and hang on the wall, we never know the difference. Elmyr de Hory did just this for 25 years, making his living selling forgeries, many of which still may not be identified as such.

Born in Hungary in 1906, supposedly to noble parents, Elmyr de Hory (not his real name, but this fact has been completely obscured, he went by some fifty different names throughout his life, but this was his preferred alias at the end of his life) attended art school and fell in love with painting and the history of art. During his time in school, he also developed a love for both fine living and young men. It was the latter obsession that led to his first prison sentence in a Transylvanian institution for "political dissidents." He didn't stay long and, after release was almost immediately sent to a concentration camp for the dual crime of Judaism and homosexuality. After a severe beating, Elmyr was sent to a hospital outside of the camp, from which he escaped, and fled to France where, now free, tried to make his living as a painter. While he was unsuccessful at selling his own pieces, he did discover that he had an uncanny ability to mimic the work of great artists, particularly Modigliani and Picasso and, after selling one of his drawings to a friend who took it as the real deal, Elmyr realized that if he couldn't sell an Elmyr, he certainly could sell a Picasso he just "found."

Thus begins the career of the greatest art forger of the 20th Century. From this single sale, an unknown number of great works entered the marketplace, all from his "family estate." Most were fooled, some were not. Those who knew the pieces were forgeries would call the authorities to charge him with fraud, but Elmyr was good at staying a step ahead of the law. He travelled all over the US and South America, fooling experts everywhere, paid handsomely for his work. But, by the mid 1950s, it seemed that the jig was up. When the police got too close, he fled to Mexico City, where he was promptly jailed under suspicion of murder. The police extorted money from him, then his lawyer did the same. Elmyr was able to pay him off with a forgery, and returned to the US. Things got much tougher for him at this point. Because of the quantities of fakes he was able to sell, his method of forgery became identifiable, and sales dwindled. He began selling faked lithographs door-to-door, earning just enough to make ends meet, but was spiralling into a deep depression. He tried killing himself but, failing this, moved to Miami, where he met Fernand Legros, an art dealer who knew Elmyr's game and agreed to deal his work for a 40% cut. Elmyr was always happy to have others market the paintings; as time passed, and he became known, he got more and more skittish about approaching dealers himself. Unfortunately, another of Elmyr's traits was that he was a total sap, falling for any lies anybody would tell him. Legros took a much larger cut of the profits, which were grand, and gave Elmyr enough money to live, but not so much that he wasn't hungry.

Eventually, the years of running made his work suffer and he tired of the game. The authorities finally caught up with Elmyr while in Ibiza and, while they never charged him with forgery (nobody could ever prove that he actually signed any of the paintings he made), in Spain he was jailed once again in 1968 for homosexuality. He spent only two months in prison, but was exiled from Spanish soil. A year later, he did return to Ibiza, where he met aspiring writer and future faker Clifford Irving. Elmyr told his story to Irving, who wrote the account in his book Fake! Most of what we know of Elmyr comes from this book, which is of dubious authenticity in its own right. What it did do, however, is raise Elmyr to celebrity status and allow him the opportunity to expound on his disdain for experts, who he'd fooled for most of his life. By now, Elmyr tried his hand, once again, at selling his own original work but it, as it always had, sold enemically and, moreover, he was not out of the woods with the authorities. While the French government was trying to extradite him on fraud charges, Elmyr finally succeeded at what he failed at so many years ago. On December 11, 1976, Elmyr's bodyguard (he had many delusions of people trying to murder him) announced that Elmyr had overdosed on sleeping pills and was dead, never to stand trial for the countless forgeries he had committed, many of which hang in museums today, undetected.

Elmyr states in F for Fake, Orson Welles' film on fakery, that "if it hangs in the museum long enough, does it not become art?" If even experts are fools, then nobody knows anything and our faith in the hundreds of years of art that we love and canonize are no longer legitimate. Which of my favorite paintings are forgeries? Much of what Elmyr said was designed to help justify what he was doing for himself, but these statements give add just enough doubt to make me think twice about genius. Looking at a Picasso, a Matisse, a Modigliani, a Renoir, is this work actually by these artists? Are they Elmyr's, or some other forger yet unidentified? The greater question becomes whether or not this matters to our cultural enrichment through art, and I remain torn.

A few examples of famous Elmyr forgeries