Elmyr de Hory - a very good art forger

Jonathon Keats wrote about famous art forgeries with the rather pro­vocative title Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age (published by Oxford UP 2013). He noted that the Fauvism of Derain and Matisse, which portrayed the world in feverishly unrealistic colours, captured the disquieting intensity of everyday experience. Questioning, provoking, agitating. These are the most productive attributes of modern art.

Art forgery also provokes anxiety, wrote Keats. Modern forgeries reveal modern failings. And when the important galleries’ systems of authentication fail, the process calls into question the integrity of traditional lines of authority. Who can we trust? Indeed. Some forgers have used ruses that upset commonplace assumptions about culture and authenticity, belief and identity.

In an ironic way, Keats believed that good art forgeries achieved what legitimate art accomplished when legitimate art was most effect­ive. It provoked us to ask agitating questions about us and our world. Even when the forgers’ artistic merit was not aesthetic.

I want to specifically examine the fakes of Elemer Hoffmann, the man known as Elmyr de Hory (1905-76). His paintings were aesthetically very pleas­ing and apart from fooling the collectors, galleries and insurance companies about the true financial value of the works, it is diffic­ult not to admire his talent. Especially for me because I love the very 20th century masters he copied – Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and de Vlaminck. Readers may remember my earlier post called German Expressionist art – fakes.

Henri Matisse

Small Odalisque in Purple Robe, 1937

Private Collection

Elmyr de Hory was born in Budapest to a middle class family who valued their children's education. At 18, he joined the Akademie Heinmann art school in Munich to study classical painting. In 1926 he moved to Paris, and enrolled in the high quality Académie la Grande Chaumière, where he studied with the wonderful artist and teacher, Fernand Léger.

The details of his WW2 experiences are unclear but he may well have been locked up in a Berlin prison hospital, from where he escaped back into Hungary. It was there he learned that his parents had been killed and their estate confiscated. Lucky to be alive, de Hory bribed his way back into France, where he tried to earn his living in art.

Elmyr de Hory’s first known forgery appeared in 1946, when he sold a Picasso-like drawing for a lot of money to a patron of Le Dóme café in Paris. Here is another tug to my heart strings; I loved the way Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and every other cultural giant dined in Le Dóme. I also loved the idea that de Hory soon moved to Montparnasse, a popular outer suburb of Paris for artists, and stayed there for 12 years. It was probably at Gertrude Stein's salon that he met Dutch painter Kees Van Dongan, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and every other young hopeful.

De Hory soon sold three more Picasso-like drawings for good money. Now de Hory had enough money to travel, and his next stop was Copenhagen. artfakes showed how walked into a gallery and offered them four Picasso-like drawings, which he claimed came from a aristocratic Hungarian family. An expert from Nationalmuseum Stockholm came to his hotel, validated the drawings and paid handsomely for the pictures. Elmyr de Hory had made his first international big deal. From Stockholm to Rio de Janeiro to New York, where he exhibited and sold works at Lilienfeld Galleries.

Odalisque

apparently by Matisse,  

actually painted by Elmyr de Hory

I only became interested in de Hory’s forgeries when he expanded his oeuvre to include Matisse, Modigliani and Vlaminck. de Hory was feel­ing very comfortable within the USA, and was selling his forgeries to museums, galleries and wealthy art patrons. Among the buyers was the Museum of Modern Art and also Knoedler, a famous art company which had long competed with Joseph Duveen to be the supplier to the great­est art collectors in history.

In Tokyo de Hory sold a Derain-like oil painting, a Dufy-like work and a Modigliani-like drawing to The National Museum of Western Art. He said the art was not to copy their exact paintings, but to create something that the painters might have painted. This sentence seemed self serving for the forger, but it did state his ideology very well.

de Hory's ideology can be seen in his admiration for Kees van Dongen, a Dutch artist who had moved to Paris to work. van Dongen had participated in the hugely successful 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition along with other artists who became known as the colourful Fauves. Both of the two paintings below appear to be painted by Kees van Dongen. The Lady in Red (on the left) was actually painted by de Hory; The Lady with a Large Hat (on the right) was painted by van Dongen in 1912 and is in a private collection.

Which is the real van Dongen?

de Hory lived the good life for many years in Spain, It was only in Dec 1977 that the Spanish police decided to extradite de Hory to France, the country that most wanted to put the forg­er on trial. But Elmyr de Hory overdosed on tablets and died before the trial could begin. Whatever knowledge he had in his head about which works he faked and in which collections the fakes sit… died with him.

**

“Fakes and Forgeries” was an exhibition put on by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, from July-September 1973. It was one of many exhibitions held since WW2, examining the problem of authentication in art.

The Hillstrom Museum of Art presented “Elmyr de Hory: artist and faker,” an exhibition of the life and work of de Hory. The exhibition, at Gustavus Adolphus College, in St Peter Minnesota, ran from February-April 2010.

The gallery Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid put on an exhibition of fake masterpieces by de Hory in February-May 2013. The idea behind this exhibition went farther than the simple presentation of fakes. Instead it asked what does art really look for: beauty or the signature of a certain painter?

I have questions too:
1. If de Hory was a talented enough artist to create credible Matisse-, Modigliani- and Vlaminck-style paintings, why did he not create the exact same paintings with his own name on the canvas?
2. May we admire de Hory’s paintings, regardless of his attempts to fool wealthy patrons?
3. What have we learned about early 20th century expressionism, given that the gorgeous colours and strange shapes were so easily adapted by later artists?
4. Would it be appropriate to collect de Hory paintings in their own right?