Elmyr de Hory

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Hory, Elmyr de (1911–1976). Hungarian painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, notorious as a forger of the work of leading 20th-century artists. He came from a wealthy family and studied art in Budapest, Munich, and Paris (where Léger was one of his teachers), and according to his own account he spent part of the Second World War in a German concentration camp. After the war he returned to Paris, and his career as a forger is said to have begun in 1946 when a visitor to his studio assumed that a drawing on the wall was by Picasso rather than by de Hory himself and offered to buy it; being very poor at the time he sold it without confessing it was his own work. (The story is typical of his romantic presentation of himself as an essentially decent person who was the victim of circumstances—and later of unscrupulous dealers.) In 1947 he moved to the USA, living mainly in New York and Los Angeles, where he liked to cultivate the company of Hollywood celebrities, including his fellow Hungarian Zsa Zsa Gabor. He sometimes posed as ‘Baron de Hory’ and made his living selling his fakes to dealers and private collectors (few went to museums; one of his ‘Matisse’ drawings was bought by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, in 1955, but there were soon doubts about it and it was never put on display). The artists he imitated were mainly stars of the pre-war art world he had known in Paris—including Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, van Dongen, and Vlaminck; his first-hand knowledge of this world helped him to produce plausible histories for his fakes. They included copies of genuine drawings and prints, as well as pastiches in the style of his chosen artists. His best drawings are skilful imitations, but his paintings are generally of much lower quality. In 1959 he returned to Europe, thereafter living mainly in Ibiza. He was arrested in 1968, following criminal charges against one of his associates, and he served a short sentence for a variety of offences, including homosexual practices and consorting with known criminals. Following his exposure he became something of a celebrity. He was the subject of a biography, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of our Time (1969) by Clifford Irving, and of a television documentary, and he featured in Orson Welles's film F for Fake (1973). However, he never made much money and led a precarious existence until he committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills (although according to an article in the Independent in 1991 ‘some suspect he may have faked his own death').

de Hory, Elmyr. See HORY.