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

by Mark Forgy

  Elmyr visited Ivan’s gallery regularly and enjoyed the entertaining exhibition openings. This is where he acquired a reputation as a collector, buying pictures or sculptures from artists of varying talent, but who were invariably thankful. His patronage also conveniently presented him and everyone else a respectable image as someone of means. Living on a small island was akin to a small town where little or nothing goes unobserved, and even less escapes becoming the topic of gossip by others. Most assumed he had family money. Even the more inventively curious did not concoct any naughty rumors that might have an echo of truth about Elmyr’s fantastic life and closely guarded secret. Any other kind of speculation really did not bother him.

  For the first half-year, Fernand sent Elmyr his stipend and once even included a $1,200 bonus. On occasion, he would come down from Paris and hand-deliver his check and wish list of works he wanted from his employee. I do not recall ever asking Elmyr directly if he realized that Fernand had succeeded in pulling off a bloodless coup the moment he lured him into their renewed partnership. Nor can I say with certainty whether he actually believed Legros’s unctuous overtures or simply deluded himself. What is certain is that the master/apprentice relationship that began on their trip from New York to Miami now flip-flopped. Fernand was in charge, and Elmyr was doing his bidding.

  orchestral scene in the style of Raoul Dufy – watercolor

  fauve landscape in the style of Vlaminck

  Fernand was prodding his employee to produce more works that would pass for the cheery freewheeling brushwork of the popular colorist Raoul Dufy. He insisted there was a huge demand for Dufy’s watercolors, reflecting his serious-minded themes—regattas, orchestral scenes, and horseracing. Knowing Elmyr’s studious habits and love of books, Fernand came to visit him and even brought gifts. Well, it was actually a fresh supply of old arche paper and a stack of new reference books Elmyr would need to produce the art he wanted. What Elmyr failed to notice was that his partner also seemed enchanted with his Mediterranean hideaway, or rather, home. This sparked an idea like all his others, one that would benefit Fernand. He urged Elmyr to build a house of his own. Villa Platero was pleasant but too small for the two of them. Elmyr rejected his suggestion instantly. To do business with him was one thing; to have him as a houseguest was another.

  Modigliani-style portrait of a woman – oil

  Before long, Elmyr received special cardboard tubes from Paris. Inside his packages, he discovered large color transparencies of works by artists meant to give him a more exact idea of color and brush techniques so he could better replicate their styles. More highquality art books from the Swiss publisher Skira followed. Fernand, in fact, spared no expense in supplying Elmyr with the tools necessary for creating his expert fakes. He asked for more Van Dongen fauve-period paintings, Matisse oils, Degas, Renoir pastels, and Picasso cubist drawings, and still wanted to know why he had not yet received his Modigliani and Derain drawings. Elmyr made daily trips to the post office to collect his mail and was by now friendly with the old postal worker who regularly handed over the frequent packages too large for his letterbox. Under a barrage of special requests, Elmyr’s repertoire expanded, and he accepted his new challenges as he had from his exacting teacher at the Akademie Heiman in Munich. His craft may have been illegal, but that was no reason not to do it as well as he could, and his years of success suggested he was good at what he did.

  Modigliani-style portrait of a woman – pencil

  When Elmyr prepared old canvases on their stretchers, it was like an alchemist pursuing his forbidden craft. He first carefully soaked the canvases with an alkali solution to soften the old paint and then scrape them clean with a palette knife. The tricky part was separating the surface paint while leaving the underlying primer in tact. It was a time-consuming chore that he found tedious and demanding. Another restorer’s device he used was applying a golden-hued varnish that simulated a craquelure or that “alligatoring” appearance of old cracked painted surfaces. These techniques were so effective and visually deceiving that they fooled many experts. In Elmyr’s wake, the whole art establishment became extremely apprehensive about offering definitive opinions on a work’s authenticity. Now, before millions of dollars exchange hands, they commonly undergo a rigorous scientific scrutiny. There still is no infallibility in this realm, which is why a vigorous debate continues over the authorship of many works of art—and fakery persists. Imitation and fraud these days have moved more easily to items that lend themselves to mass production—e.g., clothing, pharmaceuticals, software, and machine parts—where illicit profits are tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

  In emulating Dufy’s painting technique, Elmyr recounted how attentive he had been to detail, noticing the Frenchman’s habit of building an impasto on his canvases by adding layers of white paint. After some experimenting and comparison, Elmyr concluded that he had used a zinc white that seemed to match well against his enlarged transparencies. Leonardo wrote his notebooks in a reverse script that one could only read in a mirror; Elmyr made notations in the margins of his books in Hungarian that were about as indecipherable as the great Renaissance master’s. If anyone found these encrypted messages, they would not risk incriminating him or revealing their purpose.

  Cloistered away in his small Ibiza villa, Elmyr seemed to be the much more discreet of the collaborative duo. Elmyr let it slip out to a few people that he also liked to do a little art on the side after a friend found him down at the port early one morning with his sketchbook, making drawings of the fishermen repairing their nets. In order to allay any unwanted attention, Elmyr said that his efforts were strictly those of a dilettante Sunday painter. During one of Fernand’s brief visits, he spotted Elmyr’s portside sketches. Fernand’s ever-fulminating personality erupted in anger. “How could you be so careless?” he chided his ruffled partner. Elmyr later suggested that Legros had only two behavioral modes: his oily, affected charm, and the maniacally enraged victim. “When anything displeased him,” Elmyr said, “he would say, ‘How can you do this to me?’” He then apparently responded like a cuckolded lover, hurling epithets and dishes at the one that caused him some slight or perceived injustice. The mere threat of these volatile scenes and tirades were sufficiently intimidating that Elmyr realized he needed to weigh his words carefully in Legros’s presence.

  Fernand, for his part, profited nicely from the sales of his business associate’s new work. He found a more upscale apartment on the Avenue de Suffren, where the upwardly mobile merchant created an aura of respectability that impressed his clients, those easily swayed by appearances. Like any common street corner shill, though, he thought of these people as dupes and only respected someone he couldn’t con. However, they continued to entrust him with legitimate artworks. Fernand even sometimes bought these consignments or traded for Elmyr’s work. Hanging next to Elmyr’s art, his increasingly believable collection and expanding connections were making him a force to reckon with in Parisian art circles.

  While Elmyr thought Fernand limited his sales to the French market, he actually sold his impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces in Chicago, New York, and Switzerland. Elmyr told me that someone offered to buy one of his Matisse oils from Fernand for $75,000 at that time, but Mme. Duthuit, the artist’s daughter, virtually controlled the traffic in her father’s work where authenticity was concerned. Fernand reputedly told Elmyr that if he could poison her chocolate bonbons, he would gladly do it. Around this time, she died. Legros, he thought, probably celebrated her passing with bottles of Veuve Clicquot and a party at the George V Hotel. Any obstacle in his path he of course viewed as a malicious act uniquely designed to thwart him. There was a similarly shared sentiment between the two men. They both revered success, and each felt vindicated by it. For Elmyr it validated his talent. For Fernand it justified any means necessary to achieve it. With each sale, Legros became more focused, single-minded, and dedicated to his conquests like a self-appointed Napoleon, a shrewd self-a
ggrandizing tactician with Vegas showgirl flamboyance.

  By the first anniversary of their reunited business venture, Elmyr had made new friends on the island, and found someone to remedy the dreaded loneliness that had previously forced him into late-night bars and terminal encounters. He wasn’t rich, but he was now happy. Fernand was now rich, but he wasn’t happy—but that had more to do with his not being rich enough for his liking. He would try mightily to remedy this over the next few years. Like a marauding, silver-tongued human variety of a Venus flytrap, he traveled thousands of kilometers, luring his prey to purchase his valuable, rare offerings. In 1963 alone, he carried his handmade black portfolio or shipped carefully packed crates of art from Paris to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Cape town, Johannesburg, and then Tokyo. The benefits from these selling trips bought Fernand new cars, wardrobes, five-star hotel suites, an art gallery, and a retinue of young men to be his paid fawning courtiers.

  Fernand took advantage of well-respected auction houses, making them accomplices in his schemes to defraud the “suckers” as he thought of his buyers. Parke Bernet in New York and Sotheby’s in London were certain destinations when he was in those cities. Auction houses legally emancipate themselves from responsibility for a work’s authenticity. It offers them a convenient and guilt-free loophole that shifts the burden of proof to the seller. They still possess staffs of extremely competent experts who will offer an opinion on the merit and possible auction value, but by their own admission, they are not in the business of “authenticating” what goes on the auction block.

  While in New York, Legros met a husband and wife who were art dealers, Rose and Edwin Bachmann. They introduced the dealer of important French art to many of their friends and clients in Manhattan. Through some of these new contacts, he obtained a powerful marketing tool that was the equivalent of the Holy Grail for a devoted Christian. It was a privately printed tome containing the names, numbers, addresses, and special interests of collectors throughout the States. He could now appeal directly to an exclusive clientele with rare tastes, desires, and the means to indulge them. This decoder ring was going to be extremely useful to Fernand when he would begin to pursue some of his deeppocketed American customers.

  Legros was too familiar with the system of providing or seeking customary documentation indicating a work’s legitimacy—along with Mme. Duthuit and Mme. Modigliani, only a few renowned experts who held the fate of an artwork in their hands shared their power and influence. The French term aupres du tribunal described those individuals officially recognized by the government as scholars, or those having a direct personal connection to an artist, who were authorized to provide a judgment on the authenticity of the artwork. For their opinions, they received a small fee. While Fernand may have thought this nuisance custom existed specifically to hamper his sales efforts, it long preceded his entry into the picture-dealing trade. With his usual pluck and tenacity to find a path to what he wanted, he decided to do whatever was necessary to obtain the expertises that legitimized Elmyr’s fakes and make the money he deserved. Some experts unhesitatingly corroborated Fernand’s attempts to procure these authentications. Elmyr’s works were so good that they found their quality unimpeachable. This fact apparently overwhelmed whatever questions may have arisen about the artworks’ lineage. Since these legal attestations from the experts made a painting or a drawing instantly marketable, and meant tens of thousands of dollars in potential sales to Fernand, in his own subtle way he helped the experts come to the right conclusions. If he detected any hesitancy on the part of the examining expert, he voluntarily increased their paid fee by dropping a thousand dollars on the table. If not picked up right away, he dropped another thousand down. “People like round numbers,” he claimed.

  Legros enlisted one respected authority, André Pacitti, who was so cooperative in giving him his imprimatur on his growing collection of Dufy watercolors that he seemingly became more doubtful of original Dufys later on. In a characteristically bold move, Fernand had contacted the elderly Dutch painter, Kees van Dongen, who lived in the south of France, near Monte Carlo, for the last forty-five years. As Elmyr proudly recounted this story, he said, “Van Dongen was shown a painting done by me. It was a portrait of a woman in his fauve-period style that Fernand called Woman with a Pearl Necklace. If he had painted it, it would have complimented a portrait he did in 1908, called Woman with Hat. Legros said he not only recognized it as one of his, but also told him all the sensual details about how he interrupted his work to make love to her. Needless to say, he got the expertise from the ninety-yearold van Dongen.”

  “Later,” he further explained to me, “Legros found a Japanese engraver to copy the official stamp that authorities used [Expert aupres des Douanes Francaises], like Pacitti, André Schoeller, Malingue, or Epstein.” Fernand also acquainted himself with a number of Parisian collectors whom he “persuaded” to supply him letters verifying that various works by Elmyr had been in their private collections. These lubricated the process, allowing much of his production to slide into the ranks of bona fide works of art and, I believe, remain unchallenged to this day.

  With all the attendant documentation in order, it was easier to submit these artworks for sale at the government-sponsored auction house in Paris, the Hôtel Druot. Elmyr estimated that between forty-five and fifty pieces by him went to public auctions in New York, London, and Paris from 1962–65 alone. “It may have been a higher number, but I’m not sure,” he confided to me later. Fernand told him that if he thought a bid was not high enough, he would buy back the work and pay the ten percent seller’s fee to the auction house. This, however, bought him a well-placed photograph of the work in the catalog of a prominent auction house and further enhanced both the artwork’s legitimacy and value. To show that the depth of his ingenuity continued to amaze even Elmyr, Fernand demonstrated another stroke of his inexhaustible and adroitly clever mind.

  Many high-quality volumes of art books or portfolios have color or black-and-white plates only slightly affixed on the page opposite the description of the artwork, called tip-ins. Fernand scoured secondhand bookstores for discontinued editions that featured, say, a fauve painting by Vlaminck. He then sent Elmyr the original from the book and asked him to do a similar painting of the same dimensions and subject. After exerting a little gentle persuasion and financial incentive, he found a Parisian printer to provide him his new “old” reproduction of the painting on the right paper and insert it in the art book. This enabled Fernand to show variations of the same theme to buyers in São Paulo, Chicago, Tokyo, or Zurich, and impress them every time.

  Fernand’s veneer as a dealer of important works of art, along with an armory of marketing strategies and an unrelenting hard-sell approach to business, made him unstoppable. No matter how successful he was as a new potentate of the Paris art world, his growing wealth fell farther behind his soaring ego. At the same time, he demanded of his male harem and sycophants the total fealty accorded a nervous, insecure despot. Clearly, he had Elmyr exactly where he wanted him, away from witnessing the lavish lifestyle Elmyr would have rightly assumed derived from sales whose profits were not going to him. Fernand was also familiar with Elmyr’s habit of becoming unproductive when he prospered, and he was not about to do anything to staunch his revenue stream that seemed to be hemorrhaging from his own spendthrift habits.

  It was on one of his globe-trotting sales calls to Tokyo in 1963 that Legros had his Japanese engraver fabricate a complete set of customs stamps to accompany the other phony documentation he needed in trafficking these treasures across international frontiers. This was not wholly the product of his prodigious schemes to swindle people. Those Swiss, those little watchmakers, he thought, were annoyingly fixated on details. A little more than ten months earlier, Fernand left Switzerland with a portfolio containing several different works according to Elmyr. They included Vlaminck gouaches, Matisse drawings, and a Dufy watercolor. The customs officials gave him a temporary exit permit for three mo
nths for the artwork. The significance of this was most likely forgotten the moment he passed the border. Fernand quickly disposed of the works among buyers forgotten with commensurate speed. When the Swiss authorities asked for the artworks’ return, his attorney assured him he could not ignore their request that bore serious consequences—like prison. He made a hasty visit to Elmyr in Ibiza, entreating him to replace immediately the old fakes with new ones. Elmyr naturally asked if he had sold the others. “No…ah…they’re all on consignment, but I did sell a small Matisse drawing. I forgot my checkbook in Paris. I’ll send you a check as soon as I return,” he assured Elmyr. He later told me that he discovered the reason for his trip from a lover of Fernand. “He stayed with me five long days until I completed everything he wanted. If I had known he had sold everything I would have asked for much more than the $750 he promised…that I never received, by the way,” he admitted, shaking his head, but still grinning for his own incorrigible naivety.

  The rich Swiss market was too lucrative to jeopardize by not conforming to their niggling legal requisites. Fernand’s natural response would have been to spit in their faces, although he showed admirable restraint in not acting on this impulse. If they were patient enough, Fernand might one day feel magnanimous, and with a sweeping gesture from his royal scepter, deign to forgive the little cheese makers for inconveniencing him so. He now possessed not only French, but Swiss customs stamps as well. Those infernal functionaries could no longer pester him.