by Mark Forgy
Thirty-six hours later, Herner showed up at Elmyr’s Hollywood hotel; he claimed he was unable to reach the agent in Switzerland. While still standing in the doorway of the hotel room, almost chest-to-chest with the just-arrived dealer, Elmyr added, “And what happened to the other drawings I gave you?” Herner’s head recoiled as if being breathed on by a tormented bull. The Modiglianis went to Geneva with the agent and the Renoirs were still at his gallery in Mexico. Then, in a scene eerily prescient of the dealings he would have countless times with Fernand Legros, Oscar consoled Elmyr with Hollywood melodrama, appearing convincingly contrite to the beleaguered painter, promising answers and restitution. His gloomy mood lightened when he offered to give Elmyr $3,000 on the spot. The rest of his money would be forthcoming when Oscar tracked down his wayward agent.
Regaining Elmyr’s confidence somewhat after handing over the check, he suggested that they meet in two weeks in New York, as Herner expected to have this affair entirely resolved by that time. If not, he would fly to Switzerland to get the money each of them had coming. Before the slick Austrian left California, though, he managed to sufficiently weasel his way back into Elmyr’s confidence and once more plumb the depths of his bottomless gullibility. When Elmyr walked up to the front desk of the Waldorf Astoria to check in for his appointed rendezvous with Oscar in New York City, he handed his leather valise to the bellhop. It contained a number of drawings, including two large Renoir pastels, a larger Modigliani painting, and a smaller oil of Matisse. The Matisse was another of his well-traveled canvases from Miami. Herner arranged to crate the art for shipment. While discussing the works and division of future sales profits, he pointed out to Elmyr the absence of one rather significant detail. The e was missing from Matisse’s signature on the painting, and he thought it ought to be included. Elmyr then added the e while Herner looked on. As Elmyr explained the incriminating omission to me, he said, “I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew. I felt that little mistake put me at a great disadvantage that did not bode well for me.”
Herner headed for “the land of cheese and cuckoo clocks,” Elmyr said, trying to make light of his egregious slipup. Elmyr returned to California, although this time his expectations were not as great as before. He sensed disaster from the moment he left New York. Two months later, he called the now firmly distrusted Austrian. From the unchallengeable safety of his Mexican stronghold, Herner spoke to his pursuer with marked annoyance. He had sold nothing, he coldly reported to Elmyr. When Elmyr pressed him for an accounting or return of his artwork, he curtly told Elmyr to come there if he wanted them. He then hung up on the righteously distraught artist. Elmyr called back. This time Herner made it clear that their partnership was over by informing his caller that it would be inadvisable for illegal aliens to come to Mexico, and pistoleros were cheap to hire.
Whatever comfort it may have been to Elmyr, there were consequences for Herner. The original Matisse exchanged hands, but not to the mysterious Swiss agent, as the wily Austrian had claimed. He actually sold it to an American collector, G. David Thompson, in Mexico. Its sale was contingent on experts’ approval. Its examiners offered their opinion; they called it a fake. When Oscar Herner showed up in Philadelphia for the balance of payment on the painting, Mr. Thompson had a deputy sheriff there to arrest the mendacious dealer, who then generously volunteered a full refund and meekly departed with the Matisse under his arm. It circuitously was sold and resold, afterward ending up in the possession of E. Coe Kerr Jr., of Knoedler, Paris, according to Irving’s account. Thompson then contacted Kerr, informing him that he purchased it earlier in Mexico and later discovered it was “wrong.” Demonstrating that a good fake has more lives than a cat, it found a couple of more homes before becoming the focus of a trans-Atlantic dispute three years later involving Mme. Duthuit, Matisse’s daughter.
Since there was no record of the painting, she condemned it as she had with one of the works Elmyr sold to Faulkner in Chicago. The dust settled eventually. Elmyr alleged he heard it traveled around aboard the yacht of a Greek shipping magnate in the early sixties and was valued at that time at around $165,000. Since the post-war economic shivers subsided, a healthy business climate had brought an uninterrupted prosperity to the United States, Europe, and now Japan. It also fueled a booming international trade in art. The value of works Elmyr once sold for a couple of hundred dollars were selling for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, yet he was far from becoming rich from his efforts. At the same time, there seemed to be little unanimity among the scholars and experts called upon to decide his works’ authenticity. Even those works discredited by Matisse’s daughter appeared doubtful only because she could not corroborate their existence against recorded inventories. The quality of his work was never at the heart of these disputes. In fact, it was precisely because his fakes were so good that many were reluctant to condemn them, for the fakes slid so easily into the body of work of these renowned artists.
It was 1958. Elmyr was accustomed to life on the run. He heard from friends like Zsa Zsa Gabor that the FBI had asked her questions about him and seemed to have an active interest still in his whereabouts. The teeming streets of New York City always allowed him to hide in the crowds. One day, Elmyr browsed the shelves of the Fifth Avenue bookstore Brentano’s. A new edition of drawings by Modigliani caught his attention there. Edited by the respected scholar Arthur Pfannstiel, it included, Elmyr claimed, three of his drawings that he was sure of and possibly two more he thought might have been his. By this time he had done so many, he could no longer be certain of his own authorship. Included in the volume was the self-portrait he sold to Hatfield. Scholarly eulogies accompanied the illustrations in terms reserved for those admitted to the pantheon of art history. The attendant reverence of these assessments all too often sprang from the clarity of hindsight. It could only make one wonder why, if these artists’ works were so great in the first place, did it take decades after they died paupers’ deaths for the obvious to be recognized.
As the market value of both authentic and inauthentic art climbed dramatically, the irony of Modigliani’s wretched life was probably never far from Elmyr’s mind. His story merits a garland of black roses. Two days after he died penniless in 1920 of tubercular meningitis, his inconsolable lover Jeanne Hébuterne killed herself. She was nine months pregnant. Elmyr was about to confront his own disconsolate feelings of desperation soon enough.
The specter of his past seemed to follow him everywhere. Other volumes of French masters began including Elmyr’s artwork. They appeared repeatedly in auction catalogs. As he sat in the barber chair at the Hotel Pierre, he read an article about a Venezuelan oil millionaire. In the place d’honeur above his fireplace was a Modigliani portrait of Elmyr’s. It was another he had “sold very miserably.” Where these revelations once amused him, they now depressed him. An increasingly embittered man no longer felt the lament of regret he previously attached to selling his convincing creations. The respect he once harbored for many dealers, curators, and experts vanished. Unvarnished resentment replaced those sentiments. Experience, his illicit success, and not-forgotten failure to establish a legitimate career of his own now made him think of his judges as incompetent, pretentious fools.
His network of friends and acquaintances were the palliative he needed in order not to dwell on his personal setbacks. If he wasn’t alone, he wouldn’t be lonely, he thought. It may have been specious reasoning, but it was understandable in view of his incessant quest for love and reaffirmation. In his swank Murray Hill apartment, his social life continued unabated. Marilyn Monroe sipped cocktails there. “The front of my building resembled the lot of a Rolls Royce dealership, when my friends arrived,” he told me. He never lost his flair for being a charming and entertaining host.
A frequent guest was a young Moroccan doctor, Josue Corcos. At one of these lavish parties, Corcos brought an uninvited friend. Elmyr’s reaction was less than favorable. Fernand Legros was his name. His black thin hai
r, unshaven face, and long narrow nose gave him a Mephistophelean appearance. When Corcos presented him to his host, Elmyr’s nose wrinkled with undisguised disdain. From the rancid odor emanating from Legros’s rumpled suit, Elmyr also suspected he had not bathed in a few days and that the suit doubled as pajamas. Elmyr thought he looked like “a Bowery bum.” Within moments, he pulled Corky aside, asking in a horrified voice, “Who is that? He stinks! Why did you bring him here? Please get him out of here!” Corcos sheepishly explained that the young man was half Greek, half French, and newly arrived in this country. “Someone asked me to help him out and, frankly, I didn’t know how to get rid of him,” the doctor admitted. The two men then left the apartment.
It is easy for me to visualize Elmyr’s first encounter with Legros. Elmyr always sided with first impressions when meeting people, and anyone not passing this instant assessment may have just as well slid off the earth’s edge. I witnessed these occasions. When introduced to a person who started these alarm bells clanging, he would extend his arm in full rigor and recoil his head as though pushing away with a stick something foul-smelling, trying to place as much distance between his nostrils and the object of his displeasure.
In contrast to Legros, this unsoigné party crasher, appearance was everything to Elmyr. Anyone failing his visual inspection and smell-test was someone he’d keep at a barge pole’s length away from him. The one exception I can think of to this sensory aversion to anything malodorous was cheese, particularly French cheese. The more cadaverous its aroma, the better he liked it. Legros probably would have done better to roll in inside a giant wheel of stinky cheese, like a Trojan horse.
As long as Elmyr maintained an appearance of well-heeled respectability, it was easier to hide the underlying truth. He had been a fugitive for almost eleven years, committing fraud all the while, and was now the object of an FBI search. This, to his mind, was no reason to stop having drinks at the bar of the Plaza around five o’clock every day or enjoying the summer on Fire Island. In the midst of his cavalier incaution, though, he decided to scale back on his sales efforts. For the first time since he was a student in Munich, he would produce some lithographs—although these were not real lithographs. They too were fakes. You might call them fake fakes. They were actually original drawings done in lithographic crayon and sprayed with a fixative to inhibit smearing. He signed them as he would for a genuine limited edition, e.g., 22/50, meaning the twenty-second of fifty prints. They were quick, unobtrusive sales and easy money. Perhaps more importantly, they meant less risk to him. He sold them for two or three hundred dollars apiece.
Late that summer Elmyr traveled to Washington DC, after a friend invited him to stay at his apartment. He enjoyed the city, especially “the magnificent National Gallery. It ranks right up there with the Louvre or other great museums of Europe,” he told me years later. There, he met an “independent art dealer,” Charles Ouriel, who worked out of his apartment in Georgetown. Elmyr’s finances were a choppy sea and now in a trough; he needed to sell something soon.
From his version of their encounter, Elmyr never made it entirely clear how or why he chose to confide in Ouriel about his unique talents or who initiated the proposed business arrangement by which they would mutually benefit. What is certain is that even at his perspicacious best, Elmyr was a poor judge of people, and his own sense of self-preservation was too often mystifyingly absent. Ouriel nevertheless possessed two paintings that would have been attributed to “the school of” Bonnard and Sisley. (Elmyr later described “the school of…” this way: “In most cases this designation is to an art connoisseur as vastly different from a first-rate work of art as vin ordinaire is compared to a grand cru for the wine lover.” This epitaph accompanied his critique of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, whose collection he largely dismissed as “not having anything to do with the school of…let alone by so-and-so,” when he talked about their attributions to old masters.) In any event, Ouriel had Elmyr “enhance” them so they could pass for a genuine Bonnard and Sisley. He cautioned the dealer that the old and new paints would take a long time to meld and gain a uniform appearance. As Elmyr further related, he argued against showing the paintings too soon. Ouriel had, however, already arranged to take the Bonnard to one of Phillips Memorial Gallery’s directors in the capital. Elmyr reluctantly went along, posing as the picture’s owner. Upon examining the work, a woman in a home’s interior, the director was allegedly convinced it was an original Bonnard.
Bolstered by the approval of the Bonnard, the Georgetown dealer sent both a black-and-white photograph and a color transparency of the Sisley to Lionel Venturi, an art scholar who authored Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture. (I have no idea if he resembled Ben Turpin, the famous cross-eyed actor.) Amazingly, he wrote back from Italy. Not only did he think the Sisley was original, but, more surprisingly, he offered his expertise on the back of the photograph.
After Elmyr transformed the Bonnard and Sisley canvases, Ouriel returned to New York with some more of his Matisse “lithographs” that he sold right away to a dealer. They, in turn, quickly ended up in the hands of Peter Deitsch, who specialized in drawings and prints and then made the unpleasant discovery the lithographs were “wrong.” This shows how flourishing the in-trade market was. I had heard Elmyr refer to the art community as an “incestuous cabal.” His disparaging characterization was tongue-in-cheek and always said with a sly grin. The subject of forgery, though, did not elicit a smile among any of the New York dealers.
A short time afterward, Ouriel walked into his gallery, seemingly unaware of the golden rule that in business (and comedy), timing is everything. He fell into a tiger trap. Charles Ouriel left the lithos with Deitsch for the customary grace period for examination. Deitsch recognized Elmyr’s lithos as forgeries and similar to those he purchased from the other dealer. After making a few calls, Joseph Faulkner’s name came up. The Chicago dealer was still sharpening his ax with Elmyr’s name on it. Deitsch phoned him in the windy city and asked him about Elmyr. They concurred that all the lithos were probably the products of the Hungarian L. E. Raynal. The dealers from coast to coast were already watching for a man of Elmyr’s description: short, well-spoken, cultured, and selling bogus art from his private collection. The irony here was that Elmyr and Ouriel looked a bit alike. At the end of their conversation, Deitsch was sure that Ouriel was the elusive collector/faker they and others were looking for.
This incident essentially ended Ouriel’s career and made him persona non grata in New York. Showing then that his timing was as faulty as Ouriel’s, Elmyr chose that magic moment—upon the dealer’s return from his disastrous trip—to ask him for money for his work on the two paintings. Ouriel was furious and held Elmyr responsible for ruining him. Their brief affiliation ended on the spot. The shock of his anger and outburst crushed Elmyr’s spirit, like some inferior species under the heel of a shoe. He was now desperate because he was broke, depressed by the prospect of being caught, feeling old, lonely, and, most of all, tired and disillusioned.
Elmyr returned to an empty apartment. His friend was away on business. The exhausted refugee wanted only to sleep. Elmyr went to the bathroom, emptied the contents of a bottle of prescription sleeping pills into his left hand, swallowed them, and drank a glass of water with his right hand—the one that created all the art.
When his friend returned the following day, he looked in the guest bedroom. The drapes remained closed. Elmyr was sound asleep, even though he was customarily up by that time of the morning. His friend left for work and would not be back until that evening. Passing Elmyr’s room that night, he glanced in through the door he had left ajar that morning. Elmyr had not changed positions. Suddenly alarmed, he entered to find his guest barely breathing. A panicked call then brought an ambulance to rush him to a local hospital. Thirty-six hours after the attempted suicide, they pumped his stomach; he would spend the following four days in the hospital on the critical list. His improvement slowed when he de
veloped pneumonia, requiring a three-week stay in the recovery ward.
His friends rallied round him, coming to DC to visit. Even his old friend George Alberts from Miami came to see him. George had moved back to New York, taking a penthouse apartment on Fifty-Fifth Street and Second Ave., and heard about Elmyr through a mutual acquaintance. Their kindness and concern were touching, and, as Elmyr told me this story on more than one occasion, it was a fond reminder that others did love him and his life did matter. George suggested that Elmyr take his apartment for a while to convalesce. He was leaving for Europe and it would be available. When Elmyr regained his strength, George said the weather in Florida would help him recuperate. George proposed to let him use his apartment in Miami Beach if he would drive his Cadillac down from New York. Elmyr weighed only 110 pounds and was barely capable of feeding himself.
Dr. Corcos drove down to the Washington hospital the day they discharged him, to bring him back to New York. Corky, in essence, became his nurse once they were back in Manhattan. A few days after their return, he stopped by to feed Elmyr and casually mentioned that Fernand Legros had just come back from Europe aboard a Greek freighter. Elmyr looked vacantly at his caregiver. He prompted him, “You remember—the young man I brought to your apartment in Murray Hill.” His face then showing a sign of life, Elmyr exclaimed, “That horror?” His eyes were wide with shock as he recalled that walking social disaster, the smelly, unkempt, cheaply clothed person whose unpleasant image animated him enough to restore a tint of color temporarily to his pale face.
Corcos begged Elmyr to let him stay there and sleep on his sofa. “He will bathe regularly,” the doctor promised. “He is intelligent—and could help you just until you are well again,” he insisted. “He could then drive you to Florida or do anything you needed, anything at all. He just needs a break.” Surely, Elmyr could understand that. Corcos knew that Elmyr was generous, kind, and too weak to resist the appeal to his humane instincts. He eventually gave in to his physician’s pleading. When he asked Corcos where he was currently staying, the doctor went to the apartment door, opened it, and in walked his new roommate.