The Forger's Apprentice: Life with the World's Most Notorious Artist

by Mark Forgy

  The Making Of An Artist

  Elmyr’s tutelage was serious and relentless, but without the corporal punishment that flourished in my public school upbringing or that friends of mine experienced in private Catholic schools at the hands of those tyrants in habits. Nonetheless, he knew he was giving me an opportunity, an education I could not receive anywhere else. Therefore I never wanted to suggest by word or deed that I didn’t appreciate what he was doing for me. All I had to do was pay attention, do my homework, provide him the company he desired, and let him fashion me into the kind of person that might have earned his parent’s approval—though learning what I did from his stories probably would have made that goal unattainable.

  Despite signs of his precocious talent beyond the normal creative expressions of children, his conventional-minded parents may not have been ready to endorse his bohemian leanings. In view of their dispassionate connection to him, his interest in art blossomed on its own without encouragement or discouragement from his mother and father. Yet their divorce when he was sixteen perhaps made the decision to admit him to art school easier. They eventually accepted the notion of him pursuing formal training as an artist. His family’s means and social position suggested no sense of urgency for him to decide on a future career. His father, showing his concern on the matter, had this to say: “I don’t care what you do with your life. I just don’t want you to do anything where you depend on tips from others—like a barber.” As remote a prospect as this was, it reveals not only his parent’s depth of thought on the subject but a shocking lack of expectations for their son.

  While this emotional aloofness is hard for many of us to grasp, one must view it in the context of his era and upbringing. He had a succession of foreign governesses, French, German, and British. Their butler was British. Servants surrounded him. Private tutors guided his education. As in a corporate organizational chart, the parents were the CEOs and remained distant from the day-to-day operation of the household, while others raised their children. This may explain much, but it does not exonerate his parents’ emotional vacuity, a trait that he fortunately never inherited. It would be easy to imagine how the apparently disengaged relationship with his seemingly uncaring parents might make their offspring crazy with resentment. However, he accepted this fact of life with composure, I thought, and never expressed a word of disrespect toward them in all the time I knew him.

  Elmyr about 16 years old

  In 1924 life was about to change dramatically for him. There would be no more luxurious family vacations at Europe’s fashionable resorts, Karlsbad, Ostende, Biarritz, or Paris. What negligible attention he had received from his mother and father before would now seem lavish. After two years of study in Hungary at the famous art colony of Nagybánya, and feeling he had absorbed all he could learn there, he persuaded his parents to let him go to Munich. At the age of eighteen, Elmyr registered for art classes at the Akademie Heimann. “I received a strict education, heavily emphasizing classical art. I never knew that degree of discipline before, but I later appreciated it,” he said. His teacher, Moritz Heiman, would have him do a study of a hand or a nude repeatedly for five or six hours each day for two weeks until he deemed his student’s work satisfactory. “He was a rigid taskmaster,” Elmyr added.

  The Bavarian air suited him, highly oxygenated with freedom. For the first time in his life, he lived out of reach of his parents. He sensed his life was his own if only he were not still wholly dependant on his family for financial support. He was a well-bred young man of means and easily attracted new friends who were quick to take advantage of his largesse and cavalier attitude toward money. When he neared the end of his funds for enjoying life in Munich and the company of his less well-off companions, he simply sent a telegram home. His parents then immediately wired money to a local bank. The ease with which they replenished his account without a word of caution is surprising, given his family’s ties to the prudent world of banking. He later lamented this lack of restraint or forethought, which “forever influenced my carefree view of money.”

  By the early 1920s, Europe had begun to rebound from the aftermath of the ruinous war. People sought relief from its trauma in the hedonistic pleasures of Munich’s nightlife. Elmyr joined the revelry with abandon, and it was here that his youthful awakening assumed another dimension. He began to suspect the reason his parents never showed him the love he craved. Possibly, they knew before he did that he was homosexual. The cabarets, nightclubs, and bier kellars of the city offered him opportunities to meet attractive, sensually vibrant companions and receive long-desired attention. While he felt emancipated from any unwelcome disapproval from his family, an ingrained sense of social decorum and reserve inhibited an open expression of his sexuality outside his nighttime haunts. Even then, the importance of image, marshaled into his thinking, never lost its preeminence.

  Munich was long an important center of artistic foment and rebellion. The Blue Rider (Die Blaue Reiter) group held important exhibitions there. Artists such as Franz Marc, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and August Macke moved from a symbolic and emotional use of color of the expressionists toward pure abstraction. While Elmyr did not seem drawn to the conceptual philosophy of abstraction, the unconventional and bold use of color incited his imagination. Picasso, along with George Braque, already transformed early twentieth-century art, turning their interest in “Negro art” into cubism.

  Picasso’s flirtation with abstraction later reverted to the clean figurative lines of his classical period. Upon viewing one of Picasso’s drawings from this period at the Galerie Tannheuser, Elmyr was “flabbergasted.” At that time, he admitted, “I did not understand his cubist work at all.” Given Elmyr’s more traditional art education, he saw the same command of line and expression of old masters’ drawings in Picasso’s art. “The world,” he later observed, “has never known an artist like Picasso. When, at an early age, he had already established his reputation as an artist—referring to Picasso’s blue period—he had the courage to change, to completely reinvent himself, to experiment and explore new ideas.” He added that, “If he had simply wanted to assure himself of a bourgeois life and guaranteed comfort, he could have continued to churn out work in that style for the rest of his life.” This was precisely what Marc Chagall did, in his view, and, for his lack of courage to change, Elmyr had little respect for the artist. He expressed it like this: “For the last fifty years, he’s been copying himself.”

  Again, feeling the restlessness of his age, in 1926 Elmyr lobbied hard, trying to persuade his family to allow him to continue his education in Paris, and of course to underwrite his move. They voiced no resistance or objections, displaying the same laissez-faire detachment toward him he long ago came to expect. “Paris was the center of the artistic universe,” he explained, “and I savored the idea of living in that creative milieu.” After visiting the city on several occasions with his parents and older brother on vacations, “I tingled with excitement,” he said, “at the prospect of being on my own in Paris.”

  Elmyr thought he would easily leave Munich behind. The thrill of moving to France was all he could think about now. “I didn’t feel good about leaving my friends. There was one boy I was infatuated with. He was blond, good-looking, tender-hearted, and the sole reason I would have stayed, but the allure of Paris was irresistible. There are few cities as beautiful and sophisticated as München, and it was a gateway to my adulthood. The Akademie Heimann also helped me a great deal, developing my artistic skills. It was more like a boot camp. The training was arduous but thorough. I also learned a lot about myself there, but it was time to move on after my two years there. I was twenty years old and eager to live in Paris.”

  The going-away party for him migrated from nightspot to nightspot until the revelers conveyed him to the train station, where an unusually inebriated Elmyr boarded a train that evening. Shouts of “good luck!” rose up from the group as the conductor signaled, “All aboard!” Elmyr leaned through the compartment’s ope
ned window and wished them all the best of futures, restraining his emotions until the train departed. The ker-chunk of the closing doors announced the train’s departure and pulling his life in a new direction. Again he traveled first class as the train threaded its way through the night, crossing the Bavarian countryside, through pine forests, mountain tunnels, orderly farm land and neat villages, up to the Rhine, then through Alsace, the Voge Mountains, Lorraine, and ultimately to Paris. The overhead light in his compartment illuminated his reflection as he leaned his head against the window. He already mourned losing the companionship of his friends and first serious love interest. Their faces and personalities, the silent hours of extra drawing assignments in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek Museum, capturing the sinewy musculature of the Greek and Roman statues, the cafés of Maximilianstrasse, he knew would momentarily join other memories of his past. As he sat alone with his thoughts, recapitulating the images of his last two years and feeling no fear of reprisal, the sadness of leaving hurt him now desperately. His tears mirrored the rain-streaked glass outside, the rocking click-clack of the train his remorseful lullaby.

  Excitement and anticipation supplanted his waning sorrow as his train neared the French capital. Intermittent showers punctuated the gray, overcast sky when he arrived. Stepping down from the glistening train car, he wore the elegant raincoat he purchased from an exclusive men’s clothing store in Munich. In his right hand, he carried his tan leather valise containing enough clothes for a week. Before leaving Germany, he arranged to have the rest of his possessions sent to him once he found permanent lodging. Looking up as he walked down the platform, he could see the glass-covered ceiling of Gare Saint Lazare. How appropriate it was to enter Paris here, he thought. Monet immortalized this famous landmark in at least a half dozen paintings, capturing it in all its subtle nuances of light and color. Swirling smoke and billowing steam from the locomotives depicted in oil paint fifty years earlier recalled the influence of Turner’s ethereal and luminescent treatment of atmosphere that so inspired Monet and his fellow impressionists.

  He enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a respected art school headed by Fernand Leger. Elmyr found a modest but comfortable pension in Montparnasse, the new bohemian quarter that replaced Montmartre as the popular haunt of artists at the end of the nineteenth-century. Speaking French was second nature to him and had been since childhood, so his transition from Germany to France was a seamless one. He was now twenty years old, but unaware on the day of his arrival that Paris would, for the most part, be his home for the next twelve years.

  Elmyr in his twenties

  Elmyr in his thirties

  Throughout this time, Elmyr met or became acquainted with many of the cultural luminaries of the period. Since Leger was his teacher, he developed a close relationship with him and his wife. This friendship allowed him to meet Kees van Dongen, Albert Marquet, Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, and others. Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Fugita, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Hemingway, and Matisse frequented the popular cafés, Le Dome or La Rotunde, where he became a habitué. He enjoyed reading and became a regular visitor to Sylvia Beach’s small bookstore on the rue de l’Odeon, where James Joyce would often give public readings of his books. Although Elmyr understood almost nothing of what Joyce was talking about, he still listened attentively. His sentiment “was probably not an isolated opinion, even among Joyce’s English-speaking audience,” he told me.

  During the day he studied his craft, but by night he was a handsome playboy aristocrat. His title of baron also opened doors of French society, enabling him at once to associate with the upper crust and live la vie bohème. Easy access to his parent’s wealth allowed him to make spontaneous trips to Deauville or Cap d’Antibes with his new friends or lovers, which was by now a lifestyle he considered normal. Through a widening network of personal connections, people introduced him to others like himself, rich socialites. With his increasingly proficient skill as an artist, Elmyr succeeded in procuring his first significant commissions.

  After coming to Paris, he did a portrait of Prince Yussopov, who not only came from the richest family in Russia before the 1918 revolution, but also orchestrated the assassination of the charismatic monk Rasputin. His prestigious clients also included Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago and the Duke of Kent. It was an important turning point in his career; his future looked promising indeed. At the urging of his teacher and mentor, Elmyr submitted a painting he did in the south of France while on one of his impromptu getaways. The judges accepted his landscape of the coast at Cagnes-sur-Mer for the annual exhibition of the Salon d’Automne. In that same year, he participated in a group exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London. While success seemed to come easily to him early, his career demanded discipline, which he favored less than his social life. When he recounted this period of his life to me, he offered this story as a parable to stress that he did not want me to have the same regrets. He was gifted, a skilled artist who, by his own admission, wasted opportunities by his lack of tenacity, guidance, and savoir faire to make a living by working for it. The mistakes of his youth haunted him for the rest of his life. At that time he could not see how radically different and difficult his life would soon become. In fact, he would not regain this worry-free self-sufficiency for almost forty years.

  For the time being, though, life was both good and easy. Within a year of his moving to Paris, the French, in 1927, once again demonstrating their irrepressible joie de vivre, threw a nationwide party for an unexpected guest. A young, handsome American aviator named Charles Lindbergh excited the admiration of the world by flying solo for the first time from the United States to Paris. The sounds of champagne corks popping throughout the capital announced the celebration. Unfortunately, the gaiety would not last.

  The three-year period following Elmyr’s arrival in 1926 may have been his window of opportunity to establish himself as an artist, a goal within his grasp due to his auspicious beginning and burgeoning talent. However, other events beyond his control were about to change the course of his life.

  Two years before he stepped from the train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, an obscure writer succeeded in becoming a published author. In Germany, his book initially received little attention, though Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was ultimately a best seller. In fact, it offered a remarkably frightening formula for reenacting a global war for slightly different reasons but with improved means. On the other side of the Atlantic, America’s economic bubble burst with the stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929 that brought with it the Great Depression. Europe quickly felt its shock waves causing widespread unemployment. Barely ten years had passed since the Treaty of Versailles officially ended the First World War. Ironically, the tendency of people to search for strong leaders in times of crisis laid the groundwork for Hitler’s rise to power.

  Elmyr made one last trip to Germany before Hitler consolidated his unchallengeable supremacy as dictator of that country in 1933. “Nazi flags were displayed everywhere in Berlin,” Elmyr said. “Uniformed soldiers seemed to almost outnumber civilians in the streets. It was not difficult to see where all this was leading. I stopped to watch a military parade near my hotel one day. They carried banners resembling a sinister Praetorian guard, wearing those high black polished boots, goose-stepping over those cobblestones. I’ll never forget that image. When they passed, it sent shivers down my arms. I stupidly didn’t raise my arm to show my support, and the people around me became so angry I thought they were going to beat me up. I explained that I was a foreigner, but that didn’t seem to satisfy them at all. I knew then I had better leave the city for my own good.” It would not be his last exposure to the Nazis.

  After returning to Paris, the opportunities to sell his work diminished amid the depressed economy after 1929, even among his friends of the more-well-to-do nobility. The prospect of making a living from painting seemed more remote than ever. The uninterrupted subsidies from his family still allowed him live the life of a bon vivant.
In reality, the views from his favorite sidewalk cafés were becoming increasingly grim.

  In Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the forces of totalitarianism under the guise of nationalist fervor or imperial designs cast an ominous specter over Europe and the Far East. “That decade of the thirties,” Elmyr later observed, “was difficult for us all. Germany was rebuilding its military machine, and we all were powerless to stop it. Those that thought another war wasn’t imminent were deluding themselves. You could only have been an ostrich with your head in a hole in the ground to not see it coming.”

  Hoping for a rapprochement with his family, from time to time he returned to Budapest. Letters to his family elicited replies in a sort of emotional shorthand, perfunctorily polite but glaringly unsentimental. He ultimately resigned himself to accept their detachment as an unbridgeable gulf between them. This unpleasant reality also made him think that no matter what he did, whatever accomplishment or accolade he might earn would somehow be unsatisfactory in their eyes. By this time, Elmyr had long ago become accustomed to seeking the love he needed from others.

  By 1938, Germany annexed Austria with the Anschluss. The prospect of war looked imminent. In Hungary, the rising tide of fascism threatened the second-oldest tradition of representational democracy (after England). Germany had already reclaimed the Rhineland and the Saar regions. When Hitler’s desire for lebensraum spread to Czechoslovakia, England’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, spoke for the dwindling ostrich contingent that still believed war was avoidable when the western powers acceded to Nazi expansion. His famous exclamation of “peace with honor,” referring to their dubious agreement and supposed appeasement of Hitler, showed the extent to which some were in profound denial of the coming war. “Perhaps the British and French would not have given away Czechoslovakia with the same alacrity if they had been conceding their own territory,” Elmyr observed.