Elmyr de Hory

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Elmyr de Hory (born 'Elmyr Hory') (1906 – December 11, 1976) was a famous Hungarian-born painter and art forger. He claimed to have sold over a thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. His forgeries garnered much celebrity from a Clifford Irving book and from F for Fake, a documentary of sorts by Orson Welles, making his works popular in their own right.

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[edit] Early life

Most of the information regarding de Hory's early life comes from what he told American writer Clifford Irving, who wrote the first biography about him. Since Elmyr's success was reliant upon his skills of deception and invention, it would be difficult to take the facts that he told about his own life at face value, as Clifford Irving himself admitted. Elmyr claimed that he was born into an aristocratic family, that his father was an Austro-Hungarian ambassador and that his mother came from a family of bankers. However, subsequent investigation has suggested that Elmyr's childhood was, more likely, of an ordinary, middle class variety. His parents left him to the care of various governesses and were divorced when Elmyr was sixteen.

Elmyr moved to Budapest, Hungary to study. At 18, he joined the Akademie Heinmann art school in Munich, Germany to study classical painting. In 1926 he moved to Paris, and enrolled in the Académie la Grande Chaumière, where he studied under Fernand Léger and became accustomed to fine living.

Shortly after his return to Hungary, he became involved with a British journalist and suspected spy. This friendship landed him in a Transylvanian prison for political dissidents in the Carpathian Mountains. During this time, de Hory befriended the prison camp officer by painting his portrait. Later, during the Second World War, de Hory was released.

Within a year, de Hory was back in jail, this time imprisoned in a German concentration camp for being both a Jew and a homosexual (while his homosexuality was proven over time, investigation into his past has shown the likelihood that Elmyr was not Jewish, but instead was christened as a Calvinist). He was severely beaten and was transferred to a Berlin prison hospital, where he escaped and later slipped back into Hungary. It was there he learned that his parents had been killed and their estate confiscated. With his remaining money de Hory bribed his way back into France, where he tried to earn his living by painting.

[edit] Life as a forger

Upon arriving in Paris, de Hory attempted to make an honest living as an artist, but soon discovered that he had an uncanny ability to copy the works of other artists. So good were his copies that many of his friends believed them to be originals. In 1946 de Hory sold a reproduction of a Picasso to a British friend who took it for an original. He began to sell his Picasso reproductions to art galleries, claiming that they were what remained of his family's estate. Galleries took the paintings and paid de Hory the equivalent of $100 to $400 per painting. Elmyr was always unique among art forgers in that, rather than attempting to copy existing works by famous artists, he only painted original works in the style of famous artists, which made the forgeries much harder to detect.

That same year de Hory formed a partnership with Jacques Chamberlin, who would later become his art dealer. They toured Europe and South America selling the forgeries until de Hory discovered that, although they were supposed to share the profits equally, Chamberlin had kept most of the money. He ended the relationship and resumed the tour alone. In 1947 de Hory visited the United States on a three-month visa and decided to stay, moving between New York City and Los Angeles.

Occasionally, throughout his career, de Hory attempted to stop making forgeries and create original artwork, but could never find a market for his work, always returning to the lucrative forgery trade. De Hory eventually expanded his forgeries to include works by Matisse, Modigliani and Renoir. Because some of the galleries de Hory had sold his forgeries to were becoming suspicious, he began to use pseudonyms, and to sell his work by mail order. Some of de Hory's many pseudonyms included Louis Cassou, Joseph Dory, Joseph Dory-Boutin, Elmyr Herzog, Elmyr Hoffman and E. Raynal.

During the 1950s, de Hory settled in Miami, continuing to sell his forgeries through the mail and studying the styles and techniques of other master painters in order to imitate their works. In 1955 one of his Matisse forgeries was sold to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; soon thereafter, authorities discovered it was a fake and launched an investigation.

[edit] Making a business of forgery

In 1955 de Hory sold several forgeries to Chicago art dealer Joseph W. Faulkner, who later discovered they were fakes. Faulkner pressed charges against de Hory and initiated a federal lawsuit against him, alleging mail and telephone fraud. de Hory fled to Mexico City, where he was briefly jailed, suspected of the murder of a British man, whom de Hory claimed he had never met. When the Mexican police attempted to extort money from him, de Hory hired a lawyer who also attempted to extort money from him, by charging exorbitant legal fees. de Hory paid the lawyer with one of his forgeries and returned to the USA.

Upon his return, de Hory discovered that his paintings were fetching fantastically high prices at several art galleries, and was incensed that the galleries had only paid him a fraction of what they thought the paintings were worth. Further compounding de Hory's plight was that the manner of his forgeries had become recognizable, forcing him to sell his fake lithographs door-to-door to make a living. While on a trip to Washington DC, de Hory began to suffer from depression and attempted suicide by overdose of sleeping pills. His stomach was pumped, and after a stay in the hospital, de Hory recovered fully and returned to Miami.

In Miami, de Hory met Fernand Legros, who would become his dealer in exchange for a 40% cut of the profits, with Legros assuming all the risks inherent in the sale of forgeries. With Legros, de Hory again toured the United States. In time, Legros demanded his cut be increased to 50%, when, in reality, Legros was already keeping much of the profit. On one of these trips Legros met Real Lessard, a French-Canadian, who would later become his lover. The two had a volatile relationship, and in 1959 de Hory decided to leave the two and return to Europe.

In Paris, de Hory unexpectedly ran into Legros. de Hory revealed to him that some of his forgeries were still back in New York. Legros devised a plan to steal the paintings and sell them, making a name for himself and his art gallery in the process. Later that year, de Hory decided to resume his partnership with Legros. Legros and Lessard would continue to sell de Hory's work, and agreed to pay him a flat fee of $400 a month.

In 1962, de Hory moved to the Spanish island of Ibiza, while Legros and Lessard kept up the business of selling his paintings for large amounts of money from Paris. Many times they would forget to send de Hory his small monthly allowance. After several instances of this, Legros built de Hory a home in Ibiza to placate him.

Elmyr always denied that he had ever signed any of his forgeries with the name of the artist whom he was imitating. This is an important legal matter, since painting in the style of an artist is not a crime - only signing a painting with another artist's name makes it a forgery. This may be true, as Legros may have signed the paintings with the false names.

[edit] Unmasking the forger

In 1964, now 58-years old, de Hory began to tire of the forgery business, and soon his work began to suffer. Consequently, many art experts began noticing that the paintings they were receiving were forgeries. Some of the galleries examining de Hory's work alerted Interpol, and the police were soon on the trail of Legros and Lessard. Legros sent de Hory to Australia for a year, to keep him out of the eye of the investigation.

By 1966, more of de Hory's paintings were being revealed as forgeries; one man in particular, Texas oil magnate Algur H. Meadows, to whom Legros had sold 56 forged paintings, was so outraged to learn that most of his collection was comprised of forgeries, that he demanded the arrest and prosecution of Legros. Angered, Legros decided to hide from the police at de Hory's house on Ibiza, where he asserted ownership, and threatened to evict de Hory. Coupled with this and with Legros' increasingly violent mood swings, de Hory decided to leave Ibiza. Legros and Lessard were apprehended soon thereafter, imprisoned on charges of check fraud.

Elmyr continued to elude the police for some time, but, tired of life in exile, decided to move back to Ibiza to accept his fate. In August 1968, a Spanish court convicted him of the crimes of homosexuality and of consorting with criminals, sentencing him to 2 months in prison. He was never directly charged with forgery, because the court could not prove that he had ever created any forgeries on Spanish soil. He was released in October 1968 and expelled from Spain.

[edit] Elmyr de Hory's death and legacy

One year following his release, de Hory returned to Ibiza, by then a celebrity. He told his story to Clifford Irving who went on to publish the biography: Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. Soon thereafter, Irving created his own forgery: a fake auto-biography of Howard Hughes. Elmyr appeared in several television interviews, and was featured with Irving in Orson Welles' free-form documentary, F for Fake. In Welles' film, Elmyr questioned what it was that made his forgeries inferior to the actual paintings created by the artists he imitated, particularly since they had fooled so many experts, and were always appreciated when it was believed that they were genuine.

During the early 1970s, de Hory again decided to try his hand at painting, hoping to exploit his new-found fame: this time, he would sell his own, original work. He had gained recognition, but made little profit, and he soon learned that French authorities were attempting to extradite him to stand trial on fraud charges. This took quite some time, however, as Spain and France had no extradition treaty at that time.

On December 11, 1976, Elmyr de Hory's live-in bodyguard (part of Elmyr's self-created mythos was his belief that he had enemies who wished to murder him) and companion, Mark Forgy, informed him that the Spanish government had, after lengthy negotiation, agreed to turn Elmyr over to the French authorities. Shortly thereafter, Forgy found Elmyr near death in their home. He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and within minutes of being discovered, died in Forgy's arms. Clifford Irving has expressed doubts about Elmyr's death, claiming that he may have faked his own suicide in order to escape extradition, but Forgy has dismissed this theory.

Following his death, de Hory's paintings became valuable collectibles. In fact, his paintings have become so popular that forged de Horys have begun to appear on the market.

[edit] Elmyr de Hory in popular culture

  • His life is portrayed in the Canadian play Portrait of an Unidentified Man by Pierre Brault.
  • Orson Welles' documentary F for Fake (aka Vérités et mensonges) tells the Elmyr story
  • A restaurant in Atlanta's Little Five Points is named for him and its walls are covered in fakes of famous paintings.
  • The song No More Heroes, by British punk rock band The Stranglers, mentions de Hory in the line, "whatever happened to the Great Elmyr(a)". The lyricist appears to confirm the form "Elmyra" in an interview[1], but it is unclear if this is an error, an intentional feminization, or "Elmyr" with a separate exclamation after.

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