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

by Mark Forgy

  His gratification was not instant; he waited three long days before receiving his windfall check. During that time he considered the array of options now in front of him. It was the most money he had possessed at one time. He had grown weary of Europe, still in the midst of postwar recovery. Entering a travel agency, a poster of Rio de Janeiro with its iconic Sugar Loaf and white sand beaches captured his attention. It was winter in Stockholm, and he wanted to escape its ice and snow. The cold weather reminded him of his wartime suffering, and he was ready for something different. “So I bought a one-way ticket to Rio,” he recounted, with a smile so familiar to me.

  Elmyr Discovers

  The New World

  “When I got off the plane, the heat and humidity struck me like opening the door of a sauna. I just left winter in northern Europe, and I was now in the middle of their tropical summer and could not get out of my long wool underwear fast enough,” he recalled in amused delight. He went to the famous Copacabana Hotel that was highly recommended and the best in town. “I had just turned forty and hoped this change would be a new life, a new opportunity,” is how he characterized this drastic move.

  Five months after I first met Elmyr and began living with him, BBC television came to interview Elmyr. The British producer Richard Drewett collaborated with French filmmaker François Reichenbach and a French television channel. Their coproduction, entitled Elmyr, The True Picture? debuted in the fall of 1970. In one scene, Elmyr sits in front of the fireplace of his villa, La Falaise. A fire burns behind him. He fields questions from an off-scene interviewer. He briefly recounts some of his far-flung travels. Then, he responds to the question, “Why did you travel so much?” He said, “I don’t know. What makes people travel? You think you want to see something different, meet someone better-looking in the next town…I don’t know why.” A seamless edit then shows Clifford Irving, Elmyr’s first biographer and fellow Ibiza resident. Irving quickly adds, “Because the FBI and police in five states were hot on his trail, and when things got uncomfortable he had to leave town on a Greyhound bus…”

  Elmyr in Brazil – 1947

  Elmyr would not have portrayed himself in the way Irving described. The disparity of their responses to the same question illustrates the difference in their views and spaciousness in interpretations of events. Elmyr saw his wanderlust in a romantic lilt. Irving saw him fleeing the law as a petty criminal. Well, there was truth in both those statements. At that time their relationship was already thorny. Irving, purportedly, was not paying Elmyr royalties from the book as their agreement stipulated. It is understandable that opposing perceptions had spread beyond this instance to the point that the artist and writer were no longer on speaking terms when I started working for Elmyr. They declared a temporary truce during the making of the documentary, but it was short-lived. Other factors contributed to the dissolution of their association, but mostly hinged on their dispute over the proceeds from sales of the book.

  In any event, Elmyr’s escape to the southern hemisphere reinvigorated his joie de vivre. Wearing the smile of someone first tasting chocolate, he reminisced in the BBC documentary, “If I didn’t live in Ibiza, there are only two other places I would live…Rio de Janeiro or California.” He further told me, “The Brazilians are physically beautiful people, with no hesitation to make love and enjoy life. They have an élan, a style I never experienced before. It was such a change from Europe coming out of the shadow of the war.” The Brazilians’ sensuality freed him from the ossified morality that relegated his sexual orientation to criminal status. The backlash of the 60s’ counterculture that flourished in Ibiza likely emancipated him in much the same way.

  Appreciating the gregarious, sophisticated, and fun-loving Brazilians, he made new friends easily. “They were very much lovers of life like their Latin ancestors,” he insisted. Elmyr soon met an expatriate Frenchman and sublet his “small but lovely home in an area called Gloria Hill.” Here, Elmyr set up a small studio and resumed painting, work that reflected a strong School of Paris influence but in a style that was his own. A photo of Elmyr from this period shows him happily at work, a thin, casually dressed artist standing before his easel. His smile suggests a blissful contentment and perhaps the sense of a promising future. With the remaining money from the $6,000 he earned from the sale of his Picasso drawings in Stockholm, he planned to revive his career as a painter of “Elmyrs” in South America. He succeeded in garnering some portrait commissions, but those were not enough to earn more than he spent. In fact, he never learned that kind of bourgeois bookkeeping or skill enabling him to do so.

  “I loved life there,” he told me, “but did not have the success I hoped for, so I decided I’d try out the United States. Fernand Leger talked about New York when I saw him in Paris after the war, and I thought it sounded like a city I should see.” In August of 1947, growing restless once again, he left Rio for what he thought would be a brief visit to New York. “New York excited me, to see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, all those landmarks that, for us Europeans, symbolized the entire country. I later found out it was much bigger, more complex than Manhattan,” he said. His old friend and teacher, Leger, along with Consuelo de St. Exupéry in Paris and some of his new friends from Rio, provided him introductions to people there. According to Elmyr, within three weeks of arriving he met Anita Loos, the author best known for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; film star Lana Turner; Averell Harriman, the diplomat and one-time governor of New York; Dan Topping, who then owned the Yankees baseball team; and Hungarian compatriots Zsa Zsa Gabor and her mother, Magda. Elmyr later painted a portrait of Zsa Zsa nude, with a guitar “strategically placed in front of her.” He later recalled, “She did pay me but very poorly, and complained that one of her tits was too much in the center.” Lilienfeld Galleries exhibited it in January 1948 in a one-man show of Elmyr’s work.

  New York was vibrant, and the social life suited him. When his threemonth tourist visa expired, he had only begun to savor the possibilities of living there. “Besides, it was a big country, and I did have a curiosity to see more of it. So, I decided I would stay longer,” he admitted, with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. A small duplex apartment he rented on East Seventy-Eighth Street in Manhattan was a perfect pied-à-terre where he would hold court, receiving his illustrious guests and friends. One of these, René d’ Harnoncourt, was, curiously, then director of the Museum of Modern Art. Elmyr unfortunately never provided me any anecdotes regarding their relationship, although it was common knowledge that Elmyr was an artist and had already done some portraits of d’ Harnoncourt’s society friends. All along, Elmyr intended to make a living from painting his own work, while he viewed his hidden talent as something to fall back on in emergencies. His secret, for the time being, was safe.

  While in New York, he also became acquainted with some of the mythic figures of the famed Algonquin round table: Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood. His social life glittered, but it did not come cheaply. His fondness for fashionable tailored suits that were often $300 apiece, and his cocktail parties “where even the rich came hungry and thirsty” were expensive indulgences whose costs far exceeded the money he received from the occasional portrait commission. What he needed, he thought, was to have a successful exhibition. An offer came from a prestigious art dealer at Lilienfeld Galleries.

  His financial reserves dwindled while he prepared for his show. He later pointed out that artists commonly pay for many of the expenses involved such as framing, catalogs, and sundries, along with a sizeable commission of the sale prices to the gallery. These details he blithely ignored, thinking that his little black book with its names of people from the A-list would guarantee success. Despite appearances, the country was still in a post-war recession. Nor did it dawn on him that January was historically the worst month of the year for retail sales. Combined with these overlooked realities, a severe snowstorm hit the city the day his show opened. Predictably, his planned moment of triumph dissolved into a crushi
ng disappointment and personal disaster. Few people showed up. Elmyr said the show “was a critical success,” which is showbiz-speak for death at the box office. According to one who described his work, it was “charming, capable, attractive, romantic in his approach” and “de Hory leans to an Expressionist palette in some of his best works.” Art News wrote, “His lively realism, reckless paint and lush colors strike the well-known chord of the School of Paris as do his subjects—French ports, harlequins and facile portraits” (Irving 1969).

  One small oil painting sold, but that did not cover even the cost of the exhibition’s catalog. Elmyr’s funds were almost exhausted, and he felt emotionally drained from this setback. Only one viable option remained to extricate him from this unpleasant predicament. There were no more sheets of vintage French paper at his disposal, and he didn’t dare use anything with an American watermark. Instead, he searched through some of the used bookstores on Fourth Avenue and found two large volumes entitled, respectively, Gothic Cathedrals and Views of Paris. In each were blank pages, discolored from age and suitable for an important Picasso gouache. He used as his inspiration a bronze sculpture the Spanish master had done, L’homme à L’Agneau—the man with the lamb. On the vacant leaf from the smaller book, he executed another pen and ink, a Greek period line drawing that, by now, he could have done blindfolded.

  On a Saturday morning, he brought the gouache to the gallery of Klaus Perls on Fifty-Eighth Street. After Elmyr’s introducing himself and showing the dealer the Picassos, Perls asked if he could keep it over the weekend for closer examination. Not to appear overly anxious, Elmyr waited until Tuesday to return to the gallery, bringing with him the smaller drawing. “He seemed pleased that I brought something else to sell, and after haggling over the price, I think he offered me seven hundred and fifty dollars for the gouache and two hundred and fifty for the pen and ink. He was smiling because he knew he’d made a good deal,” Elmyr recalled, with a smile of his own.

  This may have reaffirmed faith in his own talent and helped temporarily mitigate his poverty, but his success and the rewards always seemed to fade faster than the pangs of conscience and the worry of retribution. He had already stayed well beyond his three-month visa, and since he could demonstrate no visible means of support, reapplying for an extension was out of the question. Buoyed by the recent sale, possessing a survivor’s instinct and a desire to see the country, he thought “God bless America!” He was heading west to California, but first he needed to find some old paper and buy some Chinese ink.

  Whenever Elmyr talked about his past, his face immediately displayed his emotions before he articulated his thoughts. It was an incongruous trait for someone dependent on making a living by stealth and deception. This absence of a poker face of course delighted those trying to elbow their way to any card table where he sat. However, it remains difficult for me to imagine how he managed to manufacture the guile needed to deceive others. I just don’t know how he did it. Repeatedly! Nor do I know at what point he developed the antipathy for art dealers, gallery directors, museum curators and “experts” that his facial features, words, and tone of voice would simultaneously convey. I do know this, though—the frequency with which he relied on his ability to do his fakes to make a living increased after he headed west.

  Perhaps it was his seductive charm, polished manners, classy bearing, and intelligence that would ultimately make him one of the most effective and successful con men the world has ever known. More likely, it was his artistic skill upon which all his other attributes rested so securely—and made it all look so right. Sometimes, I wish I were a trained psychologist so I could offer plausible theories about the motive or intent or rationale behind what he did. On the other hand, from what I know and what I observed, his story doesn’t require that degree of thoughtful analysis. It was all fairly simple. He was making a living using his only marketable skills.

  By his own admission he considered himself “a weak person,” yet this wasn’t true. He proved to be a survivor through unthinkable ordeals. Yes, what he did was fraudulent, definitely against the law, but at the same time he was doubtlessly the kindest, gentlest, most humane being I ever had the pleasure of meeting. So, how can one reconcile criminal acts with morality, you may ask. This is how he saw it. He would have characterized his fakery in today’s phraseology as “victimless crimes.” He insisted that he never took advantage of a person who was outside the cognoscenti of the professional world. That made a huge difference to him.

  “In Europe, a dealer could not prosecute you if he bought a piece of art as authentic and it was not, because he is supposed to know the difference. Cartier cannot sell you cut glass and call it a diamond. If you, however, offer to sell Cartier cut glass as a diamond and they buy it as such, then they should not be in that business; they should be selling hosiery or sausage in the market instead,” is how he put it. In France today, antique dealers may legally sell you an antique as authentic if only 40 percent of the piece is authentic. They can cobble something together from other pieces. I believe Elmyr would have argued that 100 percent of his fakes at least looked authentic even to those who were the most knowledgeable and in a position to judge their merit. While it is impossible to determine exactly the extent that greed played in Elmyr’s success, it would be fatuous to downplay its role.

  It was 1948 when he finally set foot in Los Angeles, where image is everything. His suave manner and debonair appearance were his most credible credentials. Here, no acting was required, though. He just portrayed himself as himself, although increasingly under assumed aliases to confound the authorities’ finding him. He was, after all, an illegal alien, though guilty only of some minor transgressions, he thought. A host of alter egos cropped up in L. E. Raynal, Elmyr Hoffman, Louis Cassou, Elmyr von Houry, Baron Herzog, and others.

  Within hours of checking into the Ambassador Hotel, he found a bookstore, where he bought several volumes on drawings of Matisse and Renoir. He thought he would experiment with something new. Elmyr received the same classical education of these artists, which lent a familiarity of style in much the same way as students learn a certain cursive style of penmanship. After studying them for a day or two, he practiced making drawings in their individual styles. Female nudes were most popular, “and it was a subject I did countless times throughout my training, so these were rather easy to do” he told me. Of Matisse’s draftsmanship, Elmyr declared in the BBC documentary, “Matisse’s lines were never as sure as mine, never as flowing. He always added to, a little more and a little more. He was hesitant. I had to hesitate to make my drawings more Matisse-like.”

  Finding an art gallery in Beverly Hills was easy, and selling three newly created Matisse pen and ink drawings was equally easy. Elmyr found another dealer in Hollywood “who always bought everything I offered him,” Elmyr confessed bemusedly. Each time he brought in something new from an oddly abundant supply, the dealer bubbled with the Christmas morning thrill of a child. The fresh fakes did not linger long in his gallery, as he quickly sold them to many of his show-business clientele at a “five hundred percent profit.” One of this gallery’s clients reputedly left his entire collection to a prestigious museum in Philadelphia, his hometown.

  California had been good to him, and he discovered that not all artists had to starve. His experiences in detention camps brought him as near that slice of life as he cared to be. No, “my curiosity about that is satisfied!” is how he often finalized some thought he would rather not remember. If he did not dine at a good restaurant, he found that he had a knack for cooking and on occasion enjoyed whipping up some of his favorite Hungarian dishes. When not in the midst of his friends or with a special companion, he liked going to movies, and since he was spending much of his time in Hollywood, he thought what more appropriate place could there be other than Grauman’s Chinese Theater. “It was a palace of kitsch, tout à fait Hollywood,” he said.

  One of his favorite genres of leisure reading was western novels, particularly t
hose of Louis L’Amour. He liked to point out that “Hungary, too, had cowboys… a Central European variety, but still world-renowned equestrians.” Whenever a new movie with Randolph Scott or some other six-gun-toting hero debuted, Elmyr would saunter off to the cinema for the matinee.

  Elmyr goes Texan

  By 1949, rural parts of Texas started sprouting oil wells in backyards of a burgeoning new class of people—millionaires. Elmyr knew from childhood that those with wealth desired all the outward signs of their status. One of those cultural trappings was art. “Who better to help them satisfy their cravings than me?” he wondered. Besides, he always wanted to see real cowboys in their ten-gallon hats and spurs on their boots. His urge to see something new had him packing his bags once again. He had one more Matisse to dispose of and thought of visiting his favorite dealer with the insatiable appetite for French art.

  Between arranging for his departure, Elmyr stopped by the merchant’s gallery. The joyous dealer warmly greeted Elmyr, who informed him that he was soon leaving for Texas. Perhaps sensing his source of quick and sure profits slipping away, he asked Elmyr if by chance he had anything from Picasso’s cubist period he might consider selling. Elmyr carefully pondered the question as if trying to recall some obscure detail from his past. “My wife,” he explained, “loves the cubists and has a small collection of her own. I would love to give her a gift.” By an unforeseen twist of fate, Elmyr remembered that he actually did have a small cubist work by Picasso.

  Returning to his hotel room, he spent a couple hours reviewing his books of Picasso’s art. He then made a few preliminary sketches, borrowing a motif here and line there until a convincing pastiche evolved that had the “right feel” and something that satisfied his critical eye. Adding a few strokes of gouache for color, it now resembled a product of the Spaniard’s early work from circa 1914. Removing the lampshade from the light on his night table next to his bed, Elmyr held the freshly painted paper close to the exposed bulb to dry it as fast as possible, but careful not to let its heat burn it.