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

by Mark Forgy

  Because Elmyr never divulged the extent of his confidences with his friend, it is impossible to know the degree of innocence or complicity the Canadian enjoyed as he walked into Hatfield’s gallery with two watercolors, one a somewhat cubist-style by Derain and the other a would-be Vlaminck landscape. He left them with the dealer for the customary grace period for examination. Several days later, he received a check for the purchase of both—$2,000.

  Just as General Custer had no inkling of any real danger, until, of course, it was too late, everything appeared copasetic to Elmyr. His inability to grasp the consequences of the risks he continued to take harbored in the self-deluding notion that his sins were insignificant. In his mind, he was just a struggling refugee just trying to make a living. After some months in Los Angeles, he thought a change of scenery might just be the salubrious change he needed. He was curious about Mexico and wanted to see it. The problem was that he had no valid passport. Then, remembering George Alberts, master procurer of all things not quite legitimate, he phoned his genial acquaintance in Miami. He explained that he needed some documentation to travel to Mexico, like a birth certificate. Could he help? Alberts assured him he could. That same week Elmyr sold his Cadillac and flew back to Miami. His resourceful friend came through for him. George gave him a forged birth certificate under the name Louis E. Raynal. Elmyr, George, and Jimmy enjoyed their reunion at a good restaurant the evening of his return. Jimmy assuaged Elmyr’s worries for the moment when he mentioned the FBI had not been back to look for him. In any case, Elmyr was already booked on a return flight the following day to LA.

  Elmyr stored some of his personal effects with friends in Los Angeles and flew to Mexico City. He found a nicely furnished fiveroom apartment to rent near the Hilton Hotel. The advantage of being an expert art forger was the luxury of an instant collection of fine art. He may have left his valuable reference books in California, but sheets of paper and canvas were easier to transport. His inventory of precious art came with him. Soon they would all be magnificently framed at a fraction of the price in the States. He reveled in the open markets with Technicolor produce and flowers. With his knowledge of French, Italian, and Portuguese, he found he could at least understand the gist of the language, with some room for error, of course.

  By the time his pictures graced the walls of his home, he was ready to make his foray into Mexico City’s high society. He frequented some of the elegant nightspots, and soon became acquainted with the community of artists, gallery owners, and wealthy patrons. Elmyr fit in wherever he went; he was charming, cosmopolitan, entertaining, and now a gracious host to his newly acquired friends. They flocked to his lavish cocktail parties. One gallery owner, Antonio Souza y Souza, was both young and rich. He quickly became a conduit for Elmyr to meet the kind of people most likely to buy his artwork. Antonio then asked Elmyr to show his entire collection at his gallery. He had just concluded a successful exhibition by the renowned Mexican painter Ruffino Tamayo, who also appealed to Elmyr’s sense of civic duty. The public would be so grateful, he suggested.

  “Someone I met from the museum in Mexico City asked if I would loan the collection for exhibition, but they wanted me to wait a while because they recently had a big show of the impressionists,” he told me with an obvious air of pride. Elmyr thrived on the ego stroking and, giving in to their flattering overtures, said yes to Antonio. Opening night was a glorious cultural event. The way he described it to me made me think of one of those turkey farms with a cacophony of clucking birds, the poor creatures cramped so close together that if you threw a coin into the flock it wouldn’t hit the ground. (Come to think of it, on many occasions I was one of those turkeys.) As much as Elmyr loved being the center of attention amid a flurry of social activity, the exhibition was a financial disaster. He explained that, “The prices of the artworks were much higher compared to what they were normally used to. If you asked more than two or three thousand dollars, they expected to see Rembrandt’s signature on it.” The show, however, garnered considerable press coverage that portrayed him as a “rich collector.”

  He would soon find himself in the spotlight again. The show closed. Elmyr had not sold one picture. Feeling the crush of disappointment and a need for cash, he approached Senora Montes de Oca Quijada, who owned Galeria Proteo, inquiring if she wished to purchase part of his collection outright. When he was willing to sell many of the Modigliani drawings averaging $350 apiece, she knew they were way below their market value. Politely telling Elmyr she would consider his offer, she then wrote to some American dealers with questions concerning Sr. Raynal, the collector. News circulating through the grapevine was not good. Elmyr knew his proposition probably seemed overly eager, especially for someone perceived as “rich.” “Two or three weeks passed before I phoned her,” he recalled as he relayed the incident to me. “Her voice was icy cold. There were no pleasantries. She just said, ‘No! I’m not interested.’”

  His Mexican adventure was beginning to look nothing like a rest at the spa in Baden Baden. Two months had passed since his arrival. Entertaining his would-be clients had not earned him one peso. It vividly reminded him of a Hungarian saying: “If you dine with the rich, you end up paying the bill.” An unexpected turn of events was about to make him forget the failed show and dearth of success at selling anything. Responding to a few light knocks at his front door one morning, Elmyr opened it to find three uniformed police officers. His terror was instant. Mexican jails were rumored to be something out of Dante’s Inferno. Would he accompany them to police headquarters, they asked. Any pretense of composure was out of the question. “I was in trouble and I knew it,” he told me. His friend, Jean Louis, who was visiting him at the time, went with him.

  At the stationhouse, they led him to an interrogation room, where he waited for an English-speaking translator. Again, the nightmarish memories of his treatment by the Gestapo brought him to the verge of tears, although he resisted this impulse so he would not appear to be an already-condemned man. Besides, they had not yet accused him of a crime. When the questioning began, “Remarkably, they said nothing about art, nothing at all,” he continued. Nor was it about identity papers. While this might have relieved his tension, it did not. They in fact wanted to find out his connection to a murder. A sixty-year old homosexual Englishman was found strangled in his home. The police arrested a young man named Carlos and jailed him as a suspect in the case. They found Elmyr’s phone number and address in his possession. He protested his total innocence in the matter. “Then why did he have your name and address, Sr. Raynal?” they wanted to know. A moment of intense concentration dredged up a faint recollection of a brief encounter with him at a cocktail party. It was a standard practice to offer one’s carte de visite at these affaires, followed by the casual invitation of, “Call me sometime.” The unthinking gesture now linked him to a capital offense.

  While the police had only circumstantial evidence leading them to Elmyr, his questioning was routine procedure. Nor did they actually think he had any role in the crime. They did, however, suspect that he was guilty of being a homosexual. They also knew he was a rich foreigner. A little more than three hours passed in a bleak, hot room in the company of the rightfully feared Mexican police. It seemed a great deal longer. The topic ultimately returned to money. They suggested a mere thousand pesos (about ninety dollars) would cover their expenses and secure his release. Jean Louis then bargained them down to half that amount. An appreciably paler and weak-kneed Elmyr left the station with the support of his friend. His interrogating detectives then goodnaturedly gave them a ride home.

  Seven days later, they again picked him up for questioning. This time, though, they got directly to the point, wanting another five hundred pesos. He paid them without arguing, as Jean Louis, his flea-market negotiator par excellence, had returned to Paris. Elmyr at this point was probably beginning to feel somewhat like a New England maple tree, permanently tapped irrespective of the season. He protested the institutionalized extort
ion to the British ambassador, Sir Andrew Noble, who in turn recommended William O’Dwyer, former New York City mayor and ex-ambassador to Mexico. Now in private law practice in the capital city, he reassured Elmyr that this sort of harassment was not uncommon, and he would see that it stopped. True to his word, the authorities no longer bothered Elmyr. His lawyer’s bill, though, sounded like another form of extortion at $1,000. O’Dwyer went on to explain that $500 of that went to the chief of police.

  Despite rumors about fake artworks showing up in the United States, there was no definite proof linking Elmyr to those events. In Mexico City, his social life remained vibrant. One of the people who came to his exhibition was a fellow Central European, an Austrian named Oscar Herner. Elmyr shared this recollection: “He had a gallery, not filled with as much kitsch as George Alberts’s in Miami, but close. His victims were also unsuspecting tourists. He also fled Vienna when the communists took over. Although a gallery owner, he wasn’t that knowledgeable about art. My butcher in Ibiza knows more about art than he did; he was just a clever merchant. Oscar first proposed that we go into business together, opening a first-class gallery. He went so far as to have his lawyer draw up an agreement. When I showed it to another attorney, he assured me that I would be doing all the work and Oscar would make all the profit. That should have taught me something, but it didn’t.”

  Elmyr lived as though money was still sent unquestioningly by his family whenever he needed. In fact, his funds were rapidly dwindling, and he was increasingly uneasy about his lack of sales. Nor were there any immediate prospects to assuage his concerns. Oscar still pressured Elmyr to do business with him. Elmyr later relayed that Herner made a few subtle remarks implying doubts about the authenticity of the collection, stressing again that these concerns were not due to his scholarship about art. It had more to do with the fact that he and Elmyr were both refugees, and Herner probably questioned Elmyr’s ability to escape Hungary, in the aftermath of destruction, with a sizable art collection intact. His constant cajoling finally worked. Elmyr thought it was time to leave Mexico, but decided to consign half a dozen paintings to Oscar, who enthusiastically assured him he could find buyers for the works. One painting was a Matisse oil, a girl seated at a table with a vase of mimosa. “Matisse made innumerable versions of this favorite subject,” he said. Elmyr created it in Miami Beach and thought it would have sold long before coming to Mexico. He told Oscar he wanted $10,000 for it, a remarkable deal. Herner gushed that he could find a buyer and offered Elmyr a $2,000 down payment. They agreed that anything above the ten grand would go to the Austrian.

  When faced with any unpleasant realization as to when circumstances suggested imminent danger, Elmyr would borrow the Brits’ knack for understatement. If, for example, a pitchfork-and-torch-carrying mob of villagers were coming after him, he would say of his visit to their town, “Maybe, I stayed a little too long,” making his departure sound as genteel as possible. Without a doubt, his sojourn in the Mexican capital had run its course and his south-of-the-border experience was far less enriching than he had hoped. He was now worried about getting back to the States with his forged birth certificate. Elmyr thought it best to reenter through the back door, so he flew to Montreal. In Canada, Elmyr found a great number of his compatriots who had escaped after the Russians suppressed the Hungarian revolution in ’56. Many of them were waiting for visas to get into the United States.

  “I met a charming couple,” he recalled. “They were Hungarian. How could they not be charming? Anyway, they owned a small jewelry store. When I told them about my art collection, they mentioned a cousin of theirs who was an avid collector.” Elmyr brought a portfolio of drawings to show him and, “he had an immediate interest in them,” he said, “but wanted me to leave them so he could have some experts examine them.” All the experts concurred that they were genuine. A few days after Elmyr’s depositing the drawings with him, the compatriot invited Elmyr to an elegant lunch at his home, where, over a plate of oysters, he managed to get a 25 percent reduction in the price. Still, Elmyr was extremely pleased to have the check for $12,000, and, for the first time in a while, he did not pay for the meal.

  He also met a Frenchwoman who owned a gallery in Montreal, where, one day, Elmyr, looking distinguished in a dark suit and cashmere overcoat, presented himself as a collector. Rather than buying from her, he instead talked about a small Modigliani painting he was thinking of selling. She desperately wanted to see it. “Well…I suppose I could bring it by,” he coyly suggested. She claimed she knew a big Canadian distiller who must see it. He was apparently interested but insisted on showing it to someone in New York, so he took it there. “A couple of weeks went by, and I hadn’t heard anything from her. When I called, she told me that he became ill on the trip and was in a hospital. It was March, and I was tiring of the cold weather, so I wanted to get back to California. I then stupidly told her I was leaving, but I reluctantly gave her a forwarding address. Given my problems in Miami and Mexico, I was a little leery of doing this, but I did it anyway. Needless to say, I never saw a cent or the painting again,” he reminisced, unable to hide the residual upset years later.

  Others recommended going to Windsor, Ontario, and crossing into the US at Detroit. With the considerable traffic at this location, and minimal interference from immigration officials, it offered the easiest entry into the country. The long line of vehicles moved slowly but steadily past the checkpoint, except for his taxi. The grim-faced, uniformed officials waved the taxi driver aside. They asked Elmyr for his identification document. He then spent ten heart-thumping minutes as they leafed through large books; his pallor grew whiter by the minute. He prayed his name appeared nowhere on any of those pages. He was just a French Canadian sightseer, albeit a sickly one. When someone leaned into the cab and asked, “What do you want to see in Detroit?” he hesitantly said, “The art museum?” He then heard, “Have a good day.” Besides the sweaty palms, an automatic response to stress was a strong gag reflex that I witnessed often. I know his panic precipitated a stomach-churning nausea that was difficult to suppress. His cab gathered speed, passing the Welcome to the United States sign; he opened the car window, admitting cold, damp spring air. Elmyr thought he was going to be sick, though, the fresh air and exhilaration of eluding the law and safely returning to the States thwarted that dreaded queasiness. Oblivious of his complicity in smuggling in a felon and fugitive, his driver routinely deposited his passenger at the Detroit Museum of Art. By Elmyr’s own description, he “walked through the galleries like a zombie until I came to their collection of modern French art. I couldn’t believe it when I stood in front of a Matisse painting—by me. It was a gift from some foundation.”

  I don’t recall him providing any other pertinent details about the picture. It should be remembered, however, that his works exchanged hands often in a robust market and, as I write this memoir, a large number, I imagine, have long since acquired a provenance of ownership distinguished by a lineage of prestigious public and private collections. Those works that have surfaced as acknowledged fakes by Elmyr among the hundreds (or thousands) he created represent, in my estimation, a small percentage of his output. Given that Elmyr kept no records of his production, let alone an accurate accounting by which to compare numbers or percentages, I can attribute that opinion to Elmyr’s own assessment and the exposures for which there is a clear public record.

  One day, months later, Elmyr was back in his old neighborhood in Los Angeles. He picked up a copy of Art News Annual from a magazine and newspaper kiosk at the corner of Hollywood and Vine Street. In it, much to his annoyance and surprise, he saw a full-page advertisement in color. Staring back was Matisse’s young girl with the vase of mimosa, the painting he left with Herner in Mexico City. Elmyr was saucer-eyed in disbelief. Page twenty-two of the 1958 issue, devoted to his Matisse. Knoedler Galleries of New York was selling Figure with Flowers. Hurriedly returning to his hotel, he phoned the gallery, posing as an interested collector. Could they
tell him the price, he politely inquired. “I’m sorry, but it’s been sold,” the gallery director told him. “We may be getting another smaller Matisse, not quite as important, but priced only around $60,000.” With consternation audible in his voice, now an octave higher, he asked, “You mean the Figure with Flowers sold for more than that?” “Well,” the gallery’s representative calmly responded, “Matisse paintings of that quality are rare.”

  Elmyr then angrily fingered through the pages of his address book, looking for “that snake’s, Herner’s, telephone number of his tacky Bazaar.” His indignation was unmistakable when retelling this anecdote. Elmyr reached him at his “bazaar” in Mexico City. Oscar claimed total innocence but for the missing halo. He told Elmyr he consigned it to an agent in Geneva months earlier and had heard nothing since. The news of its sale in New York was also news to him, he protested. Attempting to defuse the volatile Hungarian, Oscar assured him he would unravel the mystery and fly to LA the following day to meet with him.