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

by Mark Forgy

  Not to let lifestyle or homosexuality stand in the way of what he wanted, Fernand put a clothespin on his nose and married a woman in the 1950s for the sole purpose of acquiring US citizenship. While this ploy is unoriginal, the union had the believability of his wedding Carmen Miranda and producing an offspring named Fruit Cocktail. (Well, given his background as a cabaret dancer, that may not be such a stretch.)

  Crossing international borders was not the angst-ridden experience for Legros that it was for Elmyr. Elmyr may well have been envious of the cachet of Fernand’s American passport, as it earned him easy entry to just about any country on earth. Legros was still attracted to the lucrative market in the States and Americans’ tremendous appetite for art, which was only less voracious than his craving for wealth. While Elmyr successfully plumbed the acquisitiveness of this free-market culture during his twelve-year stay, Fernand was looking to strip-mine it. His slash-and-burn approach to business seemed to be very much in keeping with the still-lively impulse to divorce profit motive from morality. Fernand definitely fancied himself a shark and others his prey; ethics had little to do with survival.

  One reason Elmyr may have been disposed to Legros’s specious argument about putting the house in his name was that his own Canadian passport used to return to Europe was about to expire, and the grueling process of obtaining a new one might have been weighing heavily on him. Around this time, he decided to apply for a Nansen Pass. This document allowed stateless refugees the right to travel, conceived as a means to deal with the huge numbers of displaced persons after World War II. Some friends helped him through the multi-layered bureaucracy of the Spanish government. Here, again, he found that as long as he knew the right people and was able to pay them, almost anything is possible. It remains unclear to me today how he emerged from the onerous paper-shuffling in Madrid with an entirely new identity. He was now officially Elmyr Joseph Dory Boutin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the name on his driver’s license morphed from Elmyr to Elementer. Immigrants that arrived by the millions through Ellis Island in New York were certainly familiar with the quixotic spelling transformations of their names, which often had little to do with their original identities. Elmyr suggested, “Anything that didn’t sound Spanish left them totally flummoxed.”

  As Elmyr thought increasingly of Ibiza as his home, he paid great attention to appear as normal and law-abiding as possible. His decision to pursue his new state-sanctioned identity papers, however, was probably born out of impure motives. Shortly before his Canadian passport reached its expiration date, Fernand asked a friend to take it to the Canadian Embassy in Rotterdam for renewal, where he made a surprising and unpleasant discovery. Elmyr explained the mess in a tone of unforgotten disgust: “The passport that I paid very expensively to get was actually someone’s real identity. Legros said, ‘Don’t worry, he is some petit functionaire,’ in some small town who would never apply for a passport. It turned out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were looking for him for some crimes—including bigamy. When they presented my passport at the embassy, my or his name appeared in one of those big books with the names of undesirables. Fernand’s friend fled the building when they started asking him questions.”

  regatta in the style of Raoul Dufy – oil

  While Elmyr watched laborers laying the foundation for his new house, Fernand began a courtship of sorts with a Texan oil tycoon named Algur Meadows, an art-collecting philanthropist. His previous gestures of magnanimity included endowing Southern Methodist University with an art museum that housed a collection of over a million dollars’ worth of art he purchased in Madrid. It included paintings by El Greco, Goya, and other Spanish masters. Since irony has no limits, he later discovered that these treasures were mostly worthless, yet this public embarrassment did nothing to thwart his zeal to collect. Legros was more than willing to accommodate his unsinkable optimism. Cliff Irving alleged that over a thirty-month period, he sold the oilman an estimated “fifteen Dufys, seven Modiglianis, five Vlamincks, eight Derains, three Matisses, two Bonnards, one Chagall, one Degas, one Marquet, one Laurencin, one Gauguin, and a Picasso.” His purchases netted hundreds of thousands of dollars for the aggressively persistent art dealer. When the daring duo, Fernand and Elmyr, were ultimately exposed, the ensuing scandal had the entire art world blushing from embarrassment, and none felt more foolish than Algur Meadows. There are many ways one can earn fame. He may have cemented his reputation by owning the world’s largest collection of fake paintings. Former Texas governor John Connelly later bought many of these—he thought, although the would-be modern masterpieces also turned out to be—fake Elmyrs. His place in history was quite different from Meadows’s. He accompanied President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the day Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated him in Dallas. Governor Connelly, also shot, survived his wounds from the assassin’s bullets but not his misadventures in the art business.

  There is not a lot on public record concerning Meadows’s thoughts on his disastrous foray into the dark waters of the art world. Those close to him may have been privy to his views on the topic. At the same time, it probably would have been prudent not to broach the subject at all if one wanted to remain on speaking terms with him. After his convincing singular reenactment of the Spanish Armada, his alacrity to repeat the debacle a second time, or numerous times, comes back to Voltaire’s haunting observation that “history never repeats itself but people always do.” Both he and Elmyr could have commiserated a long while on this, I suspect. Elmyr’s skill at fooling others never surpassed his propensity to let others fool him. He recognized this weakness but like an Alzheimer sufferer started each new day afresh, willing to invest confidence in others, warranted or not.

  Elmyr alleged that Meadows’s dealings with Legros suggested the Texan millionaire was a tough negotiator and frequently succeeded in bargaining down the prices of the art he bought. His hardedged business acumen, however, did little to make up for not understanding what he was buying. Then again, Elmyr consistently fooled experts, curators, and dealers who made it their business to know better.

  A film made about a retired over-the-road truck driver who bought a painting in a junk shop stirred up controversy in the refined world of art. She had no idea that what she purchased may be an original work by the abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollack. Excerpted from the documentary for the television newsmagazine program 60 Minutes is a segment showing former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving studying the painting. He looked at the tableau of paint drippings with head tilted back, using the end of his nose like a rifle sight. Then, he proclaimed it “DOA—dead on arrival.” Never mind that a fingerprint found embedded in paint on the disputed canvas purportedly matched one on another recognized Pollack. All I know is that Elmyr spent twenty years of his life debunking the oracular self-importance of people like Hoving. In the BBC documentary on Elmyr, he expressed his opinion thus: Museum directors may be very good at raising money for their institutions, but their knowledge of art is absolutely négligeable. If her junk-shop find is ultimately determined to be an authentic Pollack, its current market value is estimated around 75 million dollars. Not a bad price for paint drippings. The experts can then pontificate on why this artist’s paint dribblings are worth that. It should be no surprise that many see the art world as dysfunctional.

  At this point in Elmyr’s career, he succeeded in reducing his exposure to danger but was also reduced to creating whatever Fernand asked of him. He no longer had the artistic license to do as he wished and consequently became bored with some of the monotonous repetition of his commissions. Legros always prodded Elmyr for more oil paintings to maximize profits, explaining that it took just as much effort to sell a drawing as a painting and the latter was far more lucrative. He further insisted that Elmyr add more red color to the works. Fernand’s predilection to red, Elmyr explained, was because “when he was growing up in Egypt, it was the color most closely associated with King Farouk.” His color preference consequently mimicked
royal tastes while his ego assumed regal grandiosity. Yet, with a practical eye toward sales, he insisted it was a good choice of color, well suited to American living rooms. It also happened to be a color Dufy lavished on his light and airy themes, one of which was a crowd scene entitled Reception at Elysee Palace. Fernand had Elmyr do numerous variations of this in the visual shorthand of the Frenchman. They were easy to sell, colorful, and possessed the psychic depth of a dinner plate, which is perhaps why they were so popular.

  The uninspiring sameness of this particular subject prompted Elmyr to warn Fernand that he found his efforts unsatisfactory and made him promise that if he encountered a problem with any of his work that might be “weak,” he was to return it to him immediately. He intended to destroy anything that could be viewed as doubtful and arouse suspicions. His dissatisfaction with the Dufys proved prescient. Predictably, one of his Dufys went to Fred Schoneman, of Schoneman Galleries in New York, for an appraisal. Like its creator, he also found it mediocre enough to think it was not genuine. Armed with his damning assessment, its buyer went back to Legros for return of his money. To placate his client, Fernand rushed out and bought a painting by Georges Rouault for $30,000, and offered it in exchange for the fake Dufy. He accepted. Rather than returning the suspicious Dufy to Elmyr, he later sold it to Algur Meadows.

  News of the incident unfortunately followed Fernand back to Paris. If they could not find the source of the fake painting, he reasoned, he could successfully limbo under that stick the French police, given the slightest provocation, would freely wield against him. Worrying that the nosy authorities might discover some link between him and Elmyr, he flew from Paris to Zurich and then drove to Kitzbuhel, finding Elmyr was once again ensconced in his winter ski chalet, at work on a new order of masterpieces. No sooner had he arrived at the snowbound getaway, that he began making calls to Paris. For reasons no longer understood, he believed the French Duxieme Bureau, the government branch that deals with espionage cases, was looking for him.

  Whatever that gland was in his body that secreted paranoia, Fernand possibly thought his was in perfect working order. He informed Elmyr that his recent brush with Schoneman in New York, of which he knew nothing until that moment, was causing, in Elmyr’s words, “a little unpleasantness” in Paris. After picking up the gist of Legros’s panicked phone conversation that his apartment on Avenue Henri Martin was about to be searched, Elmyr’s inner alarm bells sounded as well. The pounding at his chalet door heralding Fernand’s unannounced arrival at four o’clock in the morning had frightened any remaining impulse to sleep from his body. To make things worse, Fernand informed him that he might be in trouble too. It seems the art community in New York was once again invoking the name of L. E. Raynal. His past was coming back to haunt him as sure as a rising miasma over a low-lying graveyard.

  It was February 1965. Construction of La Falaise was not yet finished. Fernand reminded him of this and in the same breath asked, “How would you like to go to Australia?” Elmyr replied, “Can I have breakfast first?” Fernand’s face remained serious, and Elmyr then realized he was not joking. “Why would I want to go to Australia,” he asked, “all they have there is kangaroos!” He objected further when Legros wanted to ship him off with only a one-way ticket. “OK,” he responded, “I’ll get you a two-way ticket. You can take the Mustang with you since you’ll need to stay a while. You could open a gallery in Sidney. Anyway, you can’t go back to Ibiza. The police might be watching the house.”

  Elmyr was again no match for his partner’s insistence. He flew from Austria to Madrid and stayed at the Hotel Ritz. Fernand’s friend arranged the car’s shipment to Gibraltar, where Elmyr boarded the liner Canberra for Australia. What he discovered later upon his return home was that Fernand destroyed all his artwork and sketchbooks—not any Matisses or Modiglianis, just Elmyr’s own work.

  Even though Fernand manipulated him with less resistance than wet clay on a potter’s wheel, it was surprising how quickly he agreed to go to Australia. His resentment once more percolated to the surface in conveying this story. Legros again placated his reluctance by stuffing $3,000 in his pocket while they concluded planning the trip in Madrid. Short of his ship sinking en route, his voyage to the southern hemisphere could hardly have been more disastrous.

  Two unforeseen details set the tone for his visit. First, Elmyr’s body hosted an unwelcome visitor. A food-borne microbe commonly transmitted in goat’s milk or cheese called Malta fever, incubated in him during the tedious voyage. He most likely contracted it in Ibiza, so the nasty little bug had been using him as its personal amusement park for a number of weeks already. Its symptoms include sweating, muscle and body aches, weakness, fever, and depression. He told me that if it is untreated, paralysis occurs in its advanced stage. During the years I spent with him, he strongly believed in the ameliorative value of pharmaceutical drugs, so I do not know if that viewpoint preceded or followed his tendency toward hypochondria. His doctors never properly diagnosed his illness during his sojourn on the Australian continent, so I have no doubt he was dismayed that any pill offered did not cure him. His general listlessness and concurrent side effect of depression, along with his coerced departure from Europe for a destination that seemed to him at the end of the earth, dispirited him.

  I have already established that Elmyr was no raving democrat. His idea of egalitarianism was, for instance, the generous notion that luxury hotels allow anyone to stay there if one can afford it. I’m sure he expected to hobnob with other open-minded patricians like himself among Canberra’s first-class passengers. As he recounted this episode, the pucker factor appeared in his face, as though he just swallowed a dose of alum. “I wasn’t disappointed with the accommodations,” he claimed, “it was the other people I was stuck with. They were retired shopkeepers from Brighton or Manchester, and boring. The only one I found interesting to talk to was a Jesuit priest. We played chess every day.” I suspect his physical malaise may have influenced this opinion, or there might just have been a dearth of titled aristocrats and tiarawearing dowagers onboard. He knew they all had not vanished with the Titanic. For once his bohemian instincts prevailed over his natural snobbism when he recounted that he could not enter second- and third-class areas. This, he suspected, was where all the fun-loving people were hiding.

  The other glitch in the hasty travel arrangements he did not discover until the ship docked in Sydney. No one told him in advance that Australian customs required a large cash deposit on his imported vehicle before he could bring it into the country. While this unpleasant surprise most likely prompted an angry rebuke even in his physically diminished condition, one can only imagine the kind of profanity-laced tantrum that would have had Fernand ricocheting off the walls if this had happened to him. Port officials seized his sporty Mustang convertible the instant it was off the ship. He was feeling weak and distraught. It was not a propitious beginning to his newest adventure.

  Elmyr rented a house in Sydney, where he had only enough energy to paint and draw as his debilitating fatigue encroached on his withering stamina and psyche. Fernand came out to visit him in April, only to find a weaker, sicker, and more forlorn painter. The new supply of artwork produced by his lethargic and unhappy partner, however, considerably buoyed his spirits. As Legros crated the oils, watercolors, and gouaches for shipment to Paris; Elmyr’s complaints and deteriorating health went unnoticed. Fernand insisted on attending to business and seemed annoyed by conversation that had nothing to do with him. He was astounded that Elmyr had not even acknowledged that he just made a long trip there and did not adequately appreciate the trouble he went to just to see him. Fernand probably thought the self-pitying Hungarian was the most self-absorbed person on earth.

  During Elmyr’s stay in Sydney, he managed to venture out to some of the city’s art galleries. According to Elmyr, “They were all very happy to make my acquaintance.” Without much difficulty, he sold some works from his private collection to “eager buyers.” By June, he
realized if he did not get back to Europe for the medical care he needed, the land Down Under would be six feet over his coffin. Although his condition nearly warranted his return on a stretcher, he boarded a flight to Spain, looking half-alive with the pallor of an anemic Kabuki actor. When he reached Madrid, he checked himself into a hospital. His doctors there were more familiar with his disease, as it is common in countries around the Mediterranean. This time he received the medications he needed and slowly regained his health.

  That same month, workers completed La Falaise. He moved into his villa with renewed vitality and hope. To prove that his mood was still fragile and easily dashed like dishware hurled against a wall, Fernand promptly announced that he and his “guests” were arriving for a twoweek stay in July. Given the fact that the house was in his name, Elmyr could not very well object. While his private contract guaranteed him lifetime use of the home, it actually meant that the two business associates would have to share the domicile. It was yet another instance of his lack of vision to see future consequences of present or past actions. All he had to do was threaten to withhold the artwork Fernand wanted until he signed over the ownership of the house to him. He did not, and the consequences played out dramatically when I was there to witness the turmoil. For the moment, no matter how unpalatable the prospect of Legros’s visit was, he had no recourse to his fait accompli. He could, however, leave for that period, and that is what he elected to do. Elmyr also concluded that he found Legros increasingly unbearable and disliked being even in the same room with him.