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This Day In History: Art forger Elmyr de Hory died on this day in 1976. This artist is said to have sold over 1000 forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. He was so good at it that he became famous to the point that people wanted to buy his known forgeries. To this day, his forgeries still sell for a lot of money. In fact, there are now forgeries of Elmyr de Hory's forgeries.
After the war, de Hory attempted to make an honest living as an artist, but soon discovered that he had an uncanny ability to copy the styles of noted painters. In 1946, he sold a pen-and-ink drawing to a British woman who mistook it for an original work by Picasso. His financial desperation trumped his scruples, as was most often the case for the next two decades. To his mind, it offered redemption from the starving artist scenario, buttressed by the comfortable rationalization that his buyers were getting something beautiful at "friendly" prices. He began to sell his Picasso pastiches to art galleries around Paris, claiming that he was a displaced Hungarian aristocrat and his offerings were what remained from his family's art collection or else that he had acquired them directly from the artist, whom he had known during his years in Paris.
De Hory expanded his forgeries to include works in the manner of Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Renoir. When 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. (Fernand Legros listed de Hory's pseudonyms; "Elmyr de Hory, Elmer Hoffman, Elementer alias Hofman, baron de Hory, Haury, Hury or Hurry, Hory, baron Raynal, Raynor, Raynol or Rainol, comte de Herzog, baron de Boughady, von Bonhyday, Boundjy, Elmyr Lazlo, Dauray, Dory, Boutin, Dory-Boutin, Cassou Robert or Cassou Charles, Louis Curiel or Curiel Charles.)
His success came to a halt in Boston after he sold one of his "Matisse" drawings to the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in the mid-1950s. Shortly after its sale, he offered a "Modigliani" and a "Renoir" drawing from his collection. An alert curator noticed a stylistic similarity among the three drawings and refused to buy his subsequent offerings. She then began contacting other institutions and galleries, asking if they knew or had purchased artworks from the debonair E. Raynal. The American art network was now aware of the suave collector and seller of dubious works by modern masters.
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 forged 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's increasingly violent mood swings, de Hory decided to leave Ibiza. Legros and Lessard were apprehended soon thereafter and imprisoned on charges of check fraud.
De Hory 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, showing no visible means of support, and consorting with criminals (Legros), sentencing him to two months in prison in Ibiza. 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 Ibiza for one year. During that time he resided in Torremolinos, Spain.
One year following his release, de Hory, by then a celebrity, returned to Ibiza. He told his story to Clifford Irving, who wrote the biography Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. De Hory appeared in several television interviews and was featured with Irving in the Orson Welles documentary F for Fake (1973). In Welles's film, de Hory 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. In F for Fake, Welles also poses questions about the nature of the creative process, how trickery, illusion, and duplicity often prevail in the art world, and thus, in some respects, downplays the culpability of the art forger de Hory and outliers like him.
It is estimated that all de Hory forgeries were sold for more than $50 million in today's value. As Pablo Picasso once said, "Good artists copy but great artists steal." There is also Charles Caleb Colton remark: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."
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