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

by Mark Forgy

  La Cienaga Boulevard was then, as it is today, thick with interior decorators’ shops. Here, droopy-eyed boredom greeted his seascapes with furious waves dashing the shores or lushly rendered flowers or lyrical landscapes with fiery sunsets. They were not popular reproductions of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. “Now that is art that could go with any bedroom or living-room suite,” one showroom savant told Elmyr. About this time, Elmyr felt the last residue of self-esteem draining out of him like the crush of a Mediterranean olive press. With just enough money in his pocket for bus fare home and a burger, he envisioned himself seated at the local diner, a modern-day Christ at the Last Supper. Rather than disciples, the marginalized society of Pershing Square surrounded him. It was all poetically depressing.

  Even though he was again almost penniless, he persevered and ultimately found some decorators in Beverly Hills willing to buy his own art. Sensing the palpable desperation in his eagerness to sell something, the well-understood law of mercantile Darwinism allowed them to offer as little as possible for Elmyr’s pictures. “Would you take ten dollars for this or twenty dollars for that?” they asked. He swallowed hard. Dignity often lodges in one’s throat. “Is that in cash?” A slight haughtiness returned to his voice. On his way out, his new buyer remembered, “I have a customer who loves anything with pink poodles. Would you do some pink poodles for her?” asking as though it were the most common sort of request. Fully recovering his disdain by this time, Elmyr responded with an emphatic “No!” Circumstances soon revised that adamant reply, and Elmyr embarked on his “pink poodle period,” as he characterized it.

  The Aubusson rugs and gold-epauletted doorman of the Waldorf seemed a far-away memory. Instead, more than a few of his neighbors lived as human cockroaches in urine-soaked alleys, a film-noir existence, submerged in addiction, close to drowning in desperation, flailing to resurface one more day. It is unlikely the urbane sophisticate found anyone in his shabby neighborhood who would understand his self-imposed exile. The contrast, however, between a life of ease and refinement, and his current circumstances, reflects the depth of commitment to his own self-worth and faith in his talent that others so readily appreciated—under someone else’s name.

  Elmyr reluctantly resigned to living in his entertaining, if appreciably sleazy surroundings. Paris had its colorful equivalents, although one could not compare the gaiety of Toulouse Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge to the bars around Pershing Square. They were not mixing bowls where the top and bottom layers of society mingled. It was a much more derelict world that Elmyr would normally choose to flee, but it was easy to meet people, and here no one cared what activities went on behind the doors of low-rent rooms. Elmyr soon met a former Marine and ex-boxing champion, Jimmy Damion. He was, as Elmyr described, “a sweet, undemanding, beautiful person.”

  I’m not sure if Elmyr expected to have the same out-of-the-blue stroke of luck, gaining instant success with his art as easily as Lana Turner’s beauty earned her quick fame after someone discovered her at the counter of Schwab’s Drugstore in Hollywood. One day, though, luck came his way when he desperately needed it. Among a disarray of forgotten papers in a suitcase, he found a receipt for a Derain watercolor left with a French art dealer in Chicago. He consigned it over two years before returning to California. Should he phone the dealer…why not, it couldn’t make him any poorer, he thought.

  Elmyr went to a corner phone booth and called the dealer—collect. With a little more luck, he reached him and accepted the charge for the long-distance call. Both were surprised to hear the other’s voice. Elmyr excused his disappearance, claiming he had pneumonia and amnesia. (It must have sounded more convincing in French.) Elmyr was not dead, as the dealer had suspected, and was pleased to hear there was a buyer willing to pay $400 for the watercolor. Could he wire the money right away? Within two days, he once again had cash in his pocket, more than change for bus fare.

  A week later, he and Jimmy found an apartment on Melrose Avenue between Hollywood and Griffith Park. Still, Elmyr tried to make an honest living, visiting decorators’ shops with his portfolio of seascapes, still life flower arrangements, and bizarrely popular pink poodles. Jimmy had been urging Elmyr to buy a car with the money he received from Chicago. He was never good at resisting the overtures of anyone he had a relationship with. When a La Cienaga dealer offered an old ’46 Chevy coupe in exchange for a number of Elmyr’s paintings, he accepted, much to Jimmy’s delight. More than a vehicle, though, he needed money to pay the rent, which he didn’t have.

  On a Friday afternoon, searching for ideas that might redeem him and Jimmy from the imminent prospect of getting kicked out of their apartment and taking up residence in the Chevrolet, Elmyr turned the pages of his art books and magazines. A photograph of Amedeo Modigliani caught his attention. The artist was strikingly handsome, his engaging stare self-assured. It was all Elmyr needed for inspiration. Thirty minutes later, Elmyr dressed in one of his expensive dark blue suits, monogrammed shirt, and Brooks Brothers shoes. On his Formica kitchen table lay a pencil drawing, a self-portrait of Modigliani. Elmyr captured the brevity of the young artist’s life in the economy and surety of its lines.

  Before leaving the apartment, Elmyr looked in his bathroom mirror and remarkably, the man gazing back was L. E. Raynal, the respected collector. His Windsor knot was perfect. Yes, he was quite distinguished. Jimmy drove him to the Ambassador Hotel, where the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries was located. Hatfield examined the drawing after hearing Elmyr’s patented story of old-world aristocratic background and current hardship. This tact was to the art of negotiation what opening a major artery while swimming in a shark tank would be to the art of surgery. Yet Elmyr always seemed surprised that others so readily took advantage of him. He, on the other hand, consistently volunteered more than others asked of him. The fundamental nature of capitalism was a slippery notion indeed.

  Hatfield said, “Sorry, I don’t buy drawings, only paintings and important pieces, although my wife collects this sort of thing, small self-portraits. She might be interested. I’ll call and see if she is.” He returned and asked how much Elmyr wanted for the drawing. He needed the money, so he stated $250, with his voice rising to a question mark at the end of dollars. The dealer, sensing the vulnerability of wounded prey, replied, “I’ll give you two hundred cash.” Elmyr accepted with all the grace a desperate man can muster. Nor would it be the last time he would hear about an acquisitive wife of a seemingly disinterested dealer.

  The paper used for the Modigliani drawing came from a book purchased at a junk shop for a dollar. Some months later Elmyr ran across an article about the recently discovered and previously unknown selfportrait. Apparently, Hatfield sold it to a buyer with one of the largest private collections of Modigliani’s works. Ignited by curiosity, Elmyr phoned a New York dealer and asked if he knew how much the buyer paid for it. The dealer wasn’t sure but suspected it sold for around $4,000. This news made Elmyr feel slightly nauseous. He furthermore had a momentary lapse of rare but clear business sense. He would have to sell four hundred paintings of pink poodles in order to make that kind of money.

  Modigliani self-portrait by Elmyr

  In this instance—and there would be many more where he felt foolish or exploited—he felt outright cheated and angry for having let himself be used like this. If, in these moments of pique, anyone asserted that he was the one taking advantage of others, he would have been impenetrable to this suggestion. It was much easier for him to rationalize his actions based on his survivor’s instinct. He was just trying to get by while habitually being a victim of the insatiable greed of dealers. The more he embraced this viewpoint, the easier it was to divorce himself from feelings of guilt associated with acts of fraud. He was a gentleman; ergo, gentlemen do not commit fraud. By whatever brain circuitry he needed to explain away his fakery, it was a pathway to a clearer conscience.

  After learning that he made one-twentieth the money Hatfield made from the Modigliani, his ill humor was further aggr
avated when he found their Chevrolet was now falling apart. About this time Elmyr met another gallery owner in Pasadena who actually showed interest in his own paintings. He also proposed to barter for his artwork. This time the offer was a 1947 Lincoln Continental, a status symbol more in keeping with the image Elmyr had of himself and the lifestyle he aspired to. For a number of saleable canvases it could be his.

  Like the mythic phoenix, he was about to resurrect himself from his near-the-bone existence. It took no special powers of persuasion when he suggested to Jimmy they take the offer of the Continental and head east. With an unfaltering conviction that all the money made from his skill should not just benefit others, Elmyr decided to satisfy the demand for the art he could supply.

  He and Jimmy enjoyed the luxurious ride in the Continental and thought it the perfect conveyance for the cross-country trip. A week after leaving Los Angeles, Elmyr felt oriented once again, with New York City’s familiar landmarks in view; Central Park, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty, perhaps the most famous symbol of hope in the world. Elmyr had already savored the promise of a better life on this side of the Atlantic. It was not El Dorado, the elusive, legendary city of gold pursued by the Spanish conquistadors. Lady Liberty’s welcoming torch was intended more as a beacon for the “tempest-tost” refugees, which he was, but he would disabuse anyone’s suggestion that he was one of the “huddled masses.” No, those people were peasants or working-class laborers found by the thousands in third-class or steerage compartments aboard the passenger ships carrying newly arrived immigrants. Nor did he eagerly subscribe to the popular political principal of democracy so widely eulogized here. Egalitarianism may be well and good, but his idea of proper governance was probably closer to the Federalist thinking—the party of landowning, wealthy, and well-educated select few—than Jefferson’s grassroots, populist notions. Even in America, he never lost sight of his privileged background. It made him who he was, and he never felt compelled to assume a false modesty in this new, supposedly classless society.

  What Elmyr found in the States was a stratified society whose uppermost members differed from European aristocracy perhaps only in the absence of titles. Wealth softened that distinction but was still a common denominator to both Europe’s and America’s elite. Since Elmyr already had a title and the bearing it conveyed, he just needed to make enough money to reestablish the lifestyle into which he had been born. He was about to make a little forward movement toward this goal.

  Elmyr found a room at the Ansonia Hotel on West Seventy-Third Street. Within minutes of their arrival, Elmyr began phoning friends and acquaintances to see what prospects he could pursue. The few hundred dollars in his possession would dwindle fast if he did not make some money soon. He did not want to be standing on the street waiting for a bus with just the exact change in his pocket again, as he did once too often in California. An hour or so later, he was invited to a cocktail party that evening that sounded promising. By six o’clock, he showed up at his friend’s apartment overlooking Central Park. His host quickly introduced him to a French art dealer who mistakenly thought Elmyr, like himself, was a fellow dealer. What the Hungarian refugee heard next was better than an engraved invitation to a front-row seat at a royal coronation. “Do you know anyone who has any drawings by Matisse and might be willing to sell?” the Frenchman asked, to Elmyr’s surprised delight. Attempting to appear challenged by the question, he rejoined, “I do know one collector. I’m not sure if he would sell. I could ask him.”

  “Please do call me if he’s interested. I’m staying at the Plaza,” the dealer insisted. When Elmyr showed up at his hotel room with not one, but three Matisse drawings the following day, the dealer thought he was a miracle worker. Conjurer would have been more apt. He could have them for only five hundred apiece with a small sales commission for Elmyr included. Again, the prices were cheap and works the dealer could easily sell at twice the price. A check for $1500 separated the lining of Elmyr’s inside suit pocket when he exited the Plaza’s lobby doors. The dealer’s words still rang in his ears: superb, beautiful.

  At the Ansonia, a party atmosphere filled the room when Elmyr opened the crisply folded check to Jimmy. They discussed what they should do next. Elmyr’s congenial companion had long lobbied for a trip to Florida. Whenever Elmyr had money, he predictably indulged himself and his friends. He could once again be generous without second thoughts. Jimmy enjoyed being Elmyr’s chauffeur and on more than one occasion suggested he get a cap and gray gloves to look the part, which in turn might make Elmyr feel a little richer than he was. A week after selling the Matisse drawings, they loaded their luggage into the commodious trunk of their luxury vehicle. Jimmy talked about how he would eat oranges and grapefruit every day and wanted to discover the contents of those drinks that sloshed around inside coconuts and were sipped through straws. He couldn’t remember sipping anything through a straw in his days as a Marine.

  A gray overcast sky shrouded the city skyline the morning of their departure. They decided it was a good omen, confirming their wisdom to leave New York, seeking instead the warm air and sunshine of Florida’s gold coast. Maybe it would be their real El Dorado. Their southward trek assumed the unhurried pace of life on an antebellum veranda. When their drive down the long Florida peninsula ended in Miami, they rented an apartment with an ocean view.

  Elmyr never told me where he got the idea to start selling his art through an aggressive letter-writing campaign, but that new strategy proved to be an extremely efficient and effective tool for him over the next two years of his life in Miami. He first wrote to the City Art Museum of St. Louis. Stating briefly that he was in possession of a pen and ink drawing by Matisse from between 1920–25, representing a seated woman with a bouquet of flowers; he wanted to sell it. If they were interested, he would gladly send a photograph. His inquiry paid off. After sending the photo, an exchange of correspondence followed, addressing its price, which was of course contingent on examination of the drawing.

  While he had a 100 percent success rate at selling his fakes, he prudently avoided compounding his crimes by not using the United States Postal Service when sending his works long distance. This cautionary measure would not draw the attention of the US Treasury Department or, worse yet, the FBI. He figured he did not need to know what arcane statutes he might violate, but sufficed grasping the concept of interstate commission of a crime. Years later, when I knew Elmyr and it was a period of relative tranquility and prosperity, with his illegal activities behind him, few things inspired fear in him as readily as the sight of someone in a police uniform. It was an unconscious but automatic reaction he was unable to overcome.

  Renoir-style nude – pencil

  The museum in St. Louis requested and received the Matisse pen and ink drawing, carefully rolled in a tube and safely arriving by Railway Express. (In 2010, the Hillstrom Museum of Art borrowed an Elmyr fake from the St. Louis Art Museum, originally from the Main Street Gallery, for the exhibition: Elmyr de Hory, Artist and Faker, a Matisse pen and ink drawing of a woman. It was the first example of his fakes with a forged signature I had ever seen.)

  Matisse drawing by Elmyr – purchased by the Main Street Gallery

  A private collector with some connection to the institution purchased it after apparently getting their benediction on its authenticity. Elmyr found this method of selling less stressful than the sweatinducing, tense face-to-face encounters with his prospective clients that invariably made him feel like a peddler. It was assuming that subclass status of merchant that he found more disquieting than slipping into one of his many gentrified personas that were simply a variation of his own background. After all, his deception at art was greater than his art of deception. Spending a little time with Elmyr, I learned not to confuse his animated nature and theatrical personality with a gift for theatrics. Even he realized that because of his transparency and inability to hide his thoughts or emotions, he would have been unconvincing outside his own limited range
of experience.

  From the refuge of his Miami apartment, he expanded his repertoire to doing more drawings, gouaches, watercolors, and oil paintings in the styles of Vlaminck, Derain, Bonnard, Braque, Matisse, Laurencin, Picasso, Degas, and Modigliani. Under his various assumed names, letters went out to galleries and museums in Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, Detroit, Dallas, Seattle, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Without providing an expertise, or provenance of the works he offered for sale, he remained deliberately vague about their origins. “How did you acquire these artworks?” they asked. “They came from my family’s collection,” he told them. When or where they purchased them he didn’t know, or they may have been a gift to him from the artist before the war, or acquired from a former mistress or someone with a personal connection who was now conveniently deceased.

  Elmyr would soon meet the man who was singularly responsible for widening the scope and accelerating the pace of sales, along with perfecting the attendant documentation for his art, thereby creating a truly international market for his works. For the time being, however, the strength of his talent, along with the acquisitiveness of dealers and collectors, proved to be an alchemist’s dream—turning base materials into gold—come true. Perhaps Elmyr was in a certain way a conquistador, although I know he would have bristled at this comparison. His perception of his profitable accomplishments was more self-effacing. In the 1970 BBC documentary made on Elmyr, he asserted that he never got rich off his efforts, that he “always sold everything very miserably and the really big money was made by the dealers and the people who resold them.”

  While still working from his Florida base, he offered and sold a Matisse pen and ink drawing, A Lady with Flowers and Pomegranates, to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. It was, by Elmyr’s description, “the foremost institution in America for the study of art,” and he considered their purchase of a “Matisse by Elmyr” an accolade of the highest order. Following his initial success was an invitation to exhibit a number of other works in his private collection, which he quickly sent for their perusal. These included a number of Modiglianis and a Renoir drawing. The museum’s assistant director, Agnes Mongan, examined the drawings, two of which aroused her suspicions, the Renoir and a Modigliani.