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

by Mark Forgy

  Elmyr again boarded a train for Budapest to be with his family. “We started putting some of our possessions in storage, the Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, the Meissen china, the family portraits, tapestries… oriental rugs went to a large warehouse in Pest on the other side of the Danube. During the war it was hit by the German Stukas, the dive bombers, and everything was completely destroyed.” He sadly recounted the unimaginable devastation and deprivation in the battle for Budapest “which was the second-longest siege, after Stalingrad, during the war.”

  Despite his urgings, he could not convince his family to leave Budapest, so he stayed on to help in whatever way he could. Within months of Germany’s invasion of Poland and the Allied powers declaration of war, the Nazi wermacht overran Hungary and installed the profascist Horty regime. They arrested Elmyr and his father. Although his father was Catholic, his status as a diplomat made him especially dangerous in the eyes of the Nazis and their puppet regime. They deported him to the infamous death camp at Auschwitz, where they focused on exterminating the Jews; but his fate, for the time being, remained uncertain.

  Whatever remained of value in his family’s estate, the Nazis confiscated. They also sent Elmyr to the scenic Carpathian Mountains, to a detention camp. “It was a particularly severe winter in Dracula’s land, Transylvania,” he told me while we appreciated the fire in the fireplace at his home one night. “The Carpathians are some of the most rugged mountains in Europe, and why they put the camp there I have no idea. There was probably two meters of snow covering everything, and the temperature was frequently below zero Fahrenheit. Somehow, the commandant learned that I was an artist so he had me do a portrait of him. He had a wood-burning stove in his quarters so I worked as slowly as possible so I could stay warm. I devoted minute detail to all his medals.” It was unlikely that he ever thought of his artistic talent as a survival skill; however, it was a concept he more easily embraced later.

  Perhaps the commandant intervened on Elmyr’s behalf, but he was uncertain why they released him. Returning to Budapest, he found his mother reduced to poverty but still alive, while his father’s fate was unknown. Servants that had long worked for them now helped them survive on meager food supplies they had hidden. The entire foundation of his life crumbled. Every vestige of wealth and privilege seemed like ancient history, and they all now huddled together in a democratic misery.

  During his recollections of the bombings of the Hungarian capital, he remarked, “I thought it ironic how Paris jubilantly welcomed Charles Lindbergh after what I learned about him later.” Lindberg, understandably an aviation enthusiast, had a warm spot in his heart for Herman Goering, Hitler’s head of his Luftwaffe, and didn’t think he was such a bad guy. Goering, apart from his passion for airplanes, and indulging his flair for theatrical designs of uniforms draped with ribbons and medals had more than a passing interest in art. His main preoccupation throughout the Second World War seemed to be methodically organizing the wholesale ransacking of Europe’s public and private art treasures for the greater glory of himself—and the Third Reich. Then, Goering may have learned a thing or two about looting from Napoleon.

  Within a year of his release, the Gestapo rearrested Elmyr once again, and this time they sent him to a prison camp on the outskirts of Berlin. There, under interrogation and methodical torture, they broke one of his legs. “Then, they sent me to a hospital where a very good German doctor reset the bones and put a cast on my leg.” However, one day Elmyr noticed a rare lapse of attention to detail: the absence of a guard at the front door, although the soldier’s coat draped over the back of a nearby chair. Thinking it was a perfect spring day for a walk; Elmyr threw the coat over his shoulders and hobbled out on his crutches. “A nurse then stopped me. She said, ‘Where are you going, soldier?’ I told her the doctor said I needed some exercise. I simply neglected to return. I had friends in Berlin that would help me, but it’s a large city and I wasn’t sure where to go. The Allies were bombing regularly, and you could see the destruction everywhere. If I were religious, I would say that a guardian angel was watching over me. I was probably a few blocks from the hospital when a car passed and came to a stop about twenty meters ahead of me. I thought, well, this is the end for me now. When I approached the car, I tried to hide my face in the collar of the coat. My heart stopped when the passenger door opened. Then I heard a woman’s voice: ‘El-myr, is it you?’ I looked over and saw the sister of a friend I knew from when my father was in Berlin. I had no idea how she recognized me. I opened the back door and told her I just escaped from a hospital and would tell her the rest but first she should just start driving. We drove to her home that belonged to her parents. She and her brother inherited it after they both died. It was near a park and still intact despite the daily bombardment. She told me Erich, her brother, worked at the Reich Chancellery, and even if the Gestapo were looking for me, they would not come to their home. They hid me for a month and even procured false identity papers. They also arranged my travel documents so I could return to Budapest. They tried to talk me out of returning to Hungary. The Russians were already advancing in the east. They knew Germany was not going to win the war. They were among many of the Reich’s reluctant supporters. No, they were not diehard Nazis by any means, just forced to conform like everyone else. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t rescued me.”

  Within two months, he was back in Budapest. “Miraculously, we survived until the Russians took the city. We all nearly starved to death, and the winter of ’45 was the coldest in a hundred years, I think. The Danube froze almost to the bottom, and tanks had no problem crossing the ice on the river. I know I was stupid to go back to Budapest, but I needed to help my family. Sometimes you do things that have nothing to do with logic or good sense. It was an impulse in my gut or my heart, but I know it wasn’t the smart thing to do. We were living in the cellar of the house. I remember the constant sound of artillery. The husband of our cook watched from the cellar window, and machine gun fire killed him instantly. He died, and we could not even bury him. The next day Russian soldiers came. They found us hiding. One of the men shouted in Russian to my mother to give up her fur coat. She resisted and he shot her. I couldn’t save her. They killed her for her…coat. That memory still haunts me. They took me with them but left the others, as they were all old and no threat to them.

  “At that time, they didn’t know the difference between a Nazi and Hungarian or a Frenchman. Many of those soldiers had probably never seen a toilet or indoor plumbing. There were only Bolsheviks, and everyone else was an enemy. I ended up in another prison camp with Germans, Poles, British, Serbs, Croats, and Americans. We were all heading on that long march through Besserabia and ultimately a Siberian gulag, if you survived that long. It turned out that my aunt found out that the soldiers had taken me. She was friendly with a Russian general from before the war and asked him for his help locating me. One day I heard my name announced repeatedly. By that time, you are so petrified from fear that if you move one inch to the left or right, you think you are going to die. Finally, I stood up. They took me to a captain, and he gave me papers guaranteeing safe conduct back to Budapest. I was one of the lucky ones, definitely.”

  Before her death, his mother confided in him. She had buried some of her jewelry in their green house. Careful to evade detection, he retrieved the buried treasure. One of their servants that survived sewed some of the loose stones from necklaces and earrings his mother wore what now seemed a thousand years past, into the lining of his coat. He also gave some of the valuable gems to her so she could help her family survive. Using his family’s social connections, he was able to obtain Swedish-issued travel papers that he described as “useless.” The diamonds, though, proved to an effective tool when it came to crossing borders.

  Paris At War’s End

  Paris escaped the destruction that Hitler had ordered of his retreating armies. By September of 1945, Elmyr was back in the city that was home for most of his adult l
ife. Friends from his past had also managed through the Nazi occupation. His former teacher and friend Fernand Leger, who’d spent the war years in New York, was there, as were Leon Zadkin, Philipe de Rothschild, and others. His cache of gems was nearly exhausted. What remained procured a small room on the rue Jacob, where he lived and used as a studio. Elmyr revealed that the city seemed filled with people like him trying to sell off valuables and family heirlooms for which there were few buyers. “I really wasn’t sure how I would survive. Everything was in short supply after the war, and Paris was far better off than anywhere else.”

  Elmyr in Monte Carlo – 1946

  Some friends helped him during this time. Countess Palfy, Tommy Esterhazy, Baron de Thierry, and Philipe de Rothschild bought his paintings or commissioned portraits for prices averaging a hundred dollars. Life was no longer worry-free, as he had known before. One day, while contemplating how to avoid his landlord as his rent was past due, a friend visited him at his meager room on the rue Jacob. It was Lady Malcolm Campbell, who “appeared rather surprised when she saw where I was living.” He proceeded to show her some oil paintings when a small ink drawing pinned to the wall caught her attention. Sounding surprised, she asked, “Where did you get that Picasso drawing?” He hesitantly asked her why she thought it was a Picasso. “Well, I know a Picasso when I see one,” she responded. It was a simple line drawing, a nude figure that resembled something from his Greek period. “It was my turn to be surprised when she asked if I was willing to sell it,” he said. “She offered me fifty pounds sterling, I think, so I sold it to her. I didn’t feel good about it because she was a friend, but it was the day my rent was due and it assured my living for the next two months.”

  Elmyr in his Paris studio – 1945

  Three months later, she ran into Elmyr again and confessed she sold the Picasso to a London art dealer, made a nice little profit, and suggested he join her for lunch at the Ritz. While he was still feeling some twinges of guilt over the incident, he quickly recovered. When I knew Elmyr, he stated matter-of-factly that his teacher, Leger, admitted to faking Corots to make ends meet when he was desperate. He also repeated the well-known joke that “Corot painted six hundred paintings in his life, twelve hundred of which are in the United States.” Vlaminck reputedly did Cézannes. Kisling did Modiglianis. He saw nothing new in what he had done, and it just enabled him to survive so he could continue to paint, pay his rent, and eat.

  What intrigued him was the challenge of producing something that was as good as a drawing done by the greatest living artist of the century. He then went to a bookstore to find some catalogs of Picasso’s early work. Returning to his studio, he proceeded to make a half-dozen pen and ink drawings, again in Picasso’s Greek style. Of these, he chose the three he considered the best. The following day, dressed in his best (although aging) clothes, he went to a gallery on the Left Bank, the rue de Seine. Removing them from a cardboard portfolio, he explained to the dealer that Picasso, whom he knew from his time in Paris, gave them to him as a gift. In moments of nervousness, the palms of his hands always perspired. He wiped the perspiration on his pressed trousers as he looked through the gallery, waiting for a decision on the proposed sale. The dealer thought they were good and they agreed on a price, the equivalent of $400.

  portrait of Mme. George Auric – 1945

  portrait of Elmyr’s mother by Elmyr

  As unthinkable as this act may have been before the war, the world had radically changed. Life, no longer lined in satin, had acquired a harder, sharper edge. The everpresent safety net of his family’s money had disappeared in 1946. He needed to survive by his own wits and talent, by mundane skills he never learned, and this was now more obvious than ever. The concept of a “budget” was foreign to him.

  Elmyr quickly exhausted the money he made from his Picasso drawings. It was August, and he again faced the irritating nuisance of paying his rent. While having a coffee with a young friend one day, Elmyr confided his secret and his pressing need for cash. His friend, a dashing twenty-two-year-old, Jacques Chamberlin, saw an enterprising opportunity. Jacques had no money either, but he was extremely knowledgeable about art. His father, an industrialist from Bordeaux and passionate collector of the impressionists, lost everything to the Nazis, who were equally passionate about looting. The Gestapo moved the entire collection to the capital of the doomed thousand-year Reich. The Allied forces later destroyed it during their relentless bombing.

  Jacques pressed Elmyr to let him sell his artwork. He couldn’t fail, he insisted. They would form a partnership, split the money, travel through Europe, and enjoy themselves once again. The lure of recapturing the ease of living he knew before the war was precisely the sort of persuasion Elmyr was powerless to resist.

  Elmyr faced another problem. His Swedish diplomatic papers were outdated, and Jacques, with the right connections, helped obtain a French passport for him. This sealed the deal. They prepared an itinerary and a plan. Since Elmyr had had success with his Picasso drawings, why stop, they thought. They were, after all, small and insignificant enough to not have been recorded by Picasso’s longtime secretary, Sabartes. They were the artistic equivalent of an ATM card today, an easy source of cash.

  Happily, Elmyr could once again savor the finer things in life, only now the former requisites were well-appreciated niceties. He desperately needed a new wardrobe and could no longer tolerate shoes with worn heals. Before leaving Paris, he returned to the Left Bank, scouring art supply shops for pre-war paper with the proper watermarks. After languishing for years in the recesses of these stores, the paper had already assumed the aged, yellowing edges that lent a visible sign of authenticity. Within a week of their departure, Elmyr made a dozen Picasso drawings. With the seriousness of a connoisseur, Jacques examined the new contributions to Picasso’s body of work. For a moment, Elmyr thought they might not be good enough. Then, while Jacques looked squarely at his Hungarian friend, a broad smile overwhelming his face dispelled that doubt; Jacques assured him they were wonderful.

  Jacques, along with his girlfriend and Elmyr, departed for Brussels first. There, they celebrated a quick sale with dinner at a first-class restaurant on the Grand Place. Crêpes with Grand Marnier followed the Belgians’ world-famous mussels and a fine white wine. From there, they traveled to Amsterdam, London, Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, and then back to the Côte d’Azur in the south of France. Everywhere they offered the drawings, art dealers eagerly bought them. Their uninterrupted success prompted spontaneous moments of creativity in Elmyr’s hotel rooms that almost exhausted the entire supply of paper he had brought with him.

  In early 1947, they returned to London. Elmyr visited the Redfern Gallery for the first time since he participated in the group exhibition there almost twenty years before. Jacques, however, had sold them one of Elmyr’s Picassos the summer before. It was on display in their front room. It looked quite impressive in the ornate French frame with its monocle-popping price. Even with an exorbitant markup, he suspected that Jacques had given him something less than his share. He sensed an inequitable distribution of the proceeds before. With his waning trust in his young companion, Elmyr thought their business partnership should end. Broaching this subject was difficult, as he customarily fled from any unpleasantness. Predictably, arguments and recriminations followed.

  When they parted company in February, Elmyr flew alone to Copenhagen. Encouraged by Jacques’s flawless record of success, he thought he could now confidently repeat it. With about a thousand dollars in his pocket, he traveled from Denmark to Sweden, visiting some old friends from before the war. By the time he reached Stockholm, he steeled himself for the inevitable. Taking a room at the Grand Hotel, he used what remained of his supply of French paper. Five new Picassos emerged from an afternoon’s efforts. Dapperly dressed, he assembled his collection of drawings and headed to a gallery.

  He had no difficulty being partially truthful with the gallery director. He introduced himself as a Hungarian aristocrat-ref
ugee, and forced to sell what remained of his family collection. “Would you be interested in acquiring these pen and ink drawings by Picasso?” he politely inquired. When asked about their origin, this time Elmyr explained that his diplomat father bought them in Paris in 1937. He knew nothing more. The gallery director appeared interested but cautious. “Where are you staying?” he asked, and then proposed to meet with Elmyr later at his hotel.

  Returning to his hotel, he once again had visions of the Gestapo interrogations when they broke his leg. His damp palms transferred their moisture to his trouser legs, though, he willed himself to a calm but manufactured composure as he sat on the edge of his bed awaiting his prospective client. When he responded to the knock at his door, he opened it to greet not one, but three grim-faced men. His English tweed suit coat barely disguised his pounding heart. The art dealer introduced his associates; one was a curator from the Stockholm Art Museum. They silently examined the drawings and then told Elmyr they wanted to confer on the works a bit more. While they went to the hotel bar Elmyr thought perhaps he should simply make a quick getaway, although the success of fleeing at that moment seemed unlikely. A half-hour later, they returned in a more cheerful mood and offered him the equivalent of $6,000. He graciously accepted.