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Elmyr de Hory is considered by many to be the most talented and successful art forger in the world. Striving for a career as an artist, with some misfortune, he realized along the way that he had an exceptional gift for imitating the styles of the great modernist masters. However, these forgeries, which passed unnoticed for decades by many art experts, were just one more branch of a mysterious existence steeped in deception.
Born in 1906 as Elemér Hoffmann to lower-middle-class Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, Elmyr de Hory began his formal art training in the Hungarian art colony of Nagybánya at the age of 16, continuing at the Akademie Heinmann art school in Munich. In 1926, he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Académie la Grande Chaumière, where he studied under Fernand Léger.
By the time he finished his art studies, his figurative painting style became outdated, as new avant-garde movements such as Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism began to emerge. This has made his prospects of becoming an artist difficult. During this period, he was convicted ten times in five European cities for crimes including check fraud, counterfeiting documents and falsely claiming an aristocratic title. This demonstrates that his skills in artifice had their origins in financial crime, and were probably driven by an inability to live within his means, as would certainly be verified by his post-war lifestyle.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, de Hory returned to Hungary, soon ending up in a Transylvanian prison in the Carpathian Mountains for political dissidents; he was involved with a British journalist and suspected spy. Although he was released later during the war, he soon ended up in a German concentration camp for being a Jew and a homosexual. However, this story has never been confirmed. Edith Tenner, the widow of de Hory’s maternal cousin and his only surviving relative, suggested that de Hory might have spent the war in Spain.
Upon arriving in Paris after the war, de Hory had little success in making a living off his art. Along the way, he realized his uncanny talent for copying styles of noted painters, managing to sell his pen-and-ink drawing to a British woman as a Picasso. After several failed attempts to ignite his own career, de Hory focused on his talent as a forger. He continued selling his forgeries to renowned galleries in Paris, claiming to be a displaced Hungarian aristocrat selling his family’s art collection. For a while, he focused on forging works on paper, as the correct paper was much easier to obtain and these works could more easily fly under the radar, as many of the artists he faked were still alive. When he began producing works on canvas, he would usually purchase nineteenth-century works at flea markets and scrape the paint off them, aware of the possibility of forensic examination of supports. To artificially age the works, he used two widely available commercial varnishes – one produced a quick cracking and the other imparted a golden, aged hue.
Upon moving to New York In 1947, he forged his first Modigliani oil painting and sold it to the Niveau Gallery in New York, soon expanding his forgery repertoire to include works by Matisse and Renoir as well. To avoid suspicion, he had begun selling the works under many pseudonyms, including Louis Cassou, Joseph Dory, Joseph Dory-Boutin, Elmyr Herzog, Elmyr Hoffman and E. Raynal. Throughout his crime spree, he created an illusory world around his persona which gave his art and himself the appearance of authenticity. This brought him friends, clients, and acceptance.
In 1959, de Hory made a business arrangement with two dealers, Fernand Legros and Real Lessard, who devised many of the most brilliantly insidious tactics for selling his forgeries on five continents over a period of nine years. These included co-opting the experts, copying stamps and producing their own documents. By 1964, many art experts began being suspicious of these works. This collaboration came to an end when Legros sold over 40 forgeries to Texas oil millionaire Algur Meadows who discovered the fraud and unmasked de Hory as the artist behind the works.
https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/elmyr-de-hory-art-forger/
https://www.kelosa.com/blog/en/personalities/elmyr-de-hory-the-art-of-forgery-in-ibiza/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory
Dimensions:
27.75"x 37.75"
Pickup category timeslot {A}
