Dali House

At risk of becoming “the fake-art blog”, Dali House would now like to pay tribute to the late, great Elmyr de Hory, who was so good at copying the masters that collectors started lining up for his own work just so they could say they owned a painting by the world’s greatest forger. And, in the greatest homage any citizen of this world could ever hope for, Hollywood made a movie about him. Actually, it was a documentary written and directed by my fellow Georgetowner Orson Welles.

Also, Clifford Irving, another venerated name in fakedom, wrote a book about Elmyr. Struggling for a title, he decided to call it “Fake!” Now Irving is getting a movie of his own, based on that little practical joke of a Howard Hughes “autobiography” for which he did 14 months in the slammer. Richard Gere is playing Irving in “The Hoax”, due out any day now.

Elmyr de Hory kept art connoisseurs and the cops guessing for three decades with his renditions of Picasso, Vlaminck, Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec, Dufy, Derain, Matisse, Degas, Bonnard, Laurencin and Modigliani. Interpol and the FBI were always looking for him.

He was born Elmyr Dory-Boutin exactly a century ago to a Hungarian banking family that handled the cash of Austro-Hungarian princes. His father was the ambassador to Turkey for a while. When his folks divorced, Elmyr went to Budapest to study, then Munich, where he learned to paint at the Akademie Heinmann, then to Paris and the Académie la Grande Chaumière.

Fernand Léger was among his teachers, but actually Elmyr preferred the social scene, and he liked his Paree gay. There were a few years of wild abandon during the ’20s before he returned to Hungary and fell in love with a British journalist. The government decided his boyfriend was a spy and Elmyr ended up spending several months in a Transylvanian prison for political dissidents.

He got out, and then a year later the Nazis shoved him into a concentration camp, where a savage beating broke one of his legs, and he took the opportunity of being hospitalised in Berlin to escape. He just hobbled out the front gate on crutches and eventually made it back to Hungary. There he learned that both of his parents had been killed and their fortune seized except for a few diamonds.

These he used to bribe his way across borders to get to Paris, and there, he copied some Picasso drawings, just for the study value, mind you, but they were so good that a friend thought they were real and offered to buy them. Cue the light bulb.

Elmyr started flogging his reproductions from gallery to gallery, saying they’d been part of his family’s estate. An hour’s work copying could earn him $400. It was such a great scam that in 1946 he told his buddy Jacques Chamberlin about it, and they went into business together, travelling around Europe in ritzy comfort and pitching sales.

Soon enough Chamberlin started scamming his scamming partner and Elmyr went solo again, extending his range to South America and then, in 1947, the US. America was so taken with his talent and he with its riches that he overstayed his visa by 11 years. He moved between New York and Los Angeles, selling fakes and meeting the aw-ti-taw.

Elmyr tried to go straight, honest he did, but no one would look at his paintings unless they had a famous signature on them. So he branched out in the copying business, a Matisse here, a Renoir there, always just drawings at first, but then oil paintings too. He also started using pseudonyms while arranging sales and doing his business by mail rather than in person.

In 1951 Elymr’s business savvy impressed the mayor of New Orleans so much that he was named an honorary citizen and given a key to the city. He got himself a waterfront apartment in Miami. Then he sold a “Matisse” to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. The scam was spotted and the police were on his tail with an investigation that would last almost a decade, without Elmyr ever even knowing about it.

In 1955 and ‘56 he sold several fakes to Chicago art dealer Joseph Faulkner, including some that were somebody else’s fakes. Faulkner found out and made it a federal case with mail- and telephone-fraud charges. Elmyr bolted to Mexico City using identification that was, well of course, fake.

There he got thrown in the can for murdering a British homosexual (a different one), even though he’d never met the man. Elmyr had to pay the cops off, again and again. He got a lawyer to take on the cops, and the lawyer tried to swindle him too, but Elmyr bought him off with a fake painting that the lawyer didn’t know was fake.

Back in the USA, Elmyr spotted some of his own work in a book on famous masterpieces, with amazing price tags attached to them. He realised that the art dealers he’d sold his fakes to had swindled him as well. You can imagine his chagrin finding himself in such an untrustworthy world.

But the heat was still on him, and even switching to fake lithographs as a cover didn’t help his finances or his security. He opted for the ignoble way out and tried to kill himself by taking a bucket of sleeping pills. No, the pills weren’t fake, but they didn’t work either. He was rushed to hospital.

Back in his Miami apartment, he let a pal bunk in along with another guy called Fernand Legros, a devious conman just off the boat from France. Naturally they struck up a business partnership. Long story short, Legros started skimming off the top. Plus there was a messy affair with Legros’ sweetheart, a French-Canadian man named Real Lessard.

Elmyr bailed in 1959 and went back to Europe, where he maintained his career and lived comfortably, though not spiffily. Who should turn up in Paris but Legros, who naturally asked Elmyr to give him some of his paintings to sell. Elmyr said all his stuff was locked up in his New York hotel.

Naturally, Legros got hold of all the artwork in the hotel and managed to make a tidy sum as a dealer. When Elmyr ran into him again months later, it looked like Legros had done alright, so naturally, they forged yet another partnership. This time Elmyr would stay home and let Legros and Lessard shop the fakes around for a cut of the take. Legros even built him a swank place in Ibiza.

By 1964, however, Elmyr was getting bored and sloppy. The cops were able to draw a bead on him. Realising a bust was imminent, all three men fled to Zurich, and from there Legros sent Elmyr to Australia while things cooled down.

In ‘66 Texas oil mogul Algur Hurtle Meadows found out that almost all of the 46 paintings he’d bought from Legros were counterfeits. Legros took off to join Elmyr, by now back in Ibiza, and promptly established sole ownership of the place and gave Elmyr the boot. Soon after, Legros and Lessard were cornered and jailed. Elmyr kept going for a while, then turned around and went back to Ibiza to wait for the knock on the door.

The Spanish courts had by now mounted a lovely case that covered homosexuality and having no visible means of support, though not forgery or fraud, and chucked him in jail for two months while they thought up something else. In the event, they marched him out of prison in October 1968 and told him not to come back ever again.

Man be needin’ some good news, bad, right? He was somehow welcomed back to Spain a year later and found he’d become a celebrity. He was the all-time master forger! They put him on TV and he told his story to Clifford Irving and Orson Welles made a movie featuring him and Irving, “F for Fake”, which I think was really just an excuse for Orson to show off some of his card tricks.

Finally his own signature on a painting was worth something. His original works were a hot commodity. They didn’t sell for much, but they sold.

Man got ‘nough good news, right?

France was trying to extradite him for fraud. Elmyr wasn’t going back to jail. On December 11, 1976, they found him dead in his home. This time the sleeping pills worked. His grave is on the island of Ibiza.

Or is it? There was some mystery about his funeral and some of his buddies figured he’d pulled the ultimate con by faking his own death.

Only one thing’s for sure: There’s a restaurant in Atlanta named for him and its walls are covered in fake famous paintings. Just make sure what you’re eating at El Myr Burrito Lounge is real food.