Elmyr de Hory — the forger too prolific to convict

Between roughly 1946 and 1967, the Hungarian-born painter Elmyr de Hory — born Elemér Albert Hoffmann in Budapest in 1906 — flooded the international art market with what he claimed were more than a thousand forged drawings and paintings in the manner of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Renoir, Derain and Dufy. He did not copy existing works; he invented new ones in each master’s hand, producing them at extraordinary speed and selling them to reputable galleries and dealers across Europe and the United States. His Modigliani drawings were so numerous and so convincing that they continue to complicate efforts to catalogue that artist’s genuine output.

De Hory’s method married fluent imitation to a sympathetic backstory and, eventually, a professional sales machine. He presented himself as a dispossessed Hungarian aristocrat quietly selling off a family collection scattered by war — a narrative that explained both the steady supply of “old” works and his own genteel poverty. From 1959 he worked with the dealers Fernand Legros and Réal Lessard, who moved his output across five continents, co-opted authenticating experts, and forged the certificates and stamps that turned a convincing sketch into a saleable asset. The forgeries flourished because the supporting paperwork and the salesmen’s theatre supplied everything the eye alone could not.

The exposure, when it came, ran through the buyers rather than the pictures. In 1967 the Texas oil millionaire Algur H. Meadows discovered that a large group of modern paintings he had bought through Legros were fakes; experts examining the collection condemned dozens of them, and the scandal pulled the thread that led back through Legros to de Hory. The forger was never convicted of forgery: he had created no fakes on Spanish soil, where he lived, and in 1968 an Ibiza court jailed him only briefly on unrelated charges. His celebrity was sealed by Clifford Irving’s 1969 biography Fake! and Orson Welles’s 1973 film F for Fake.

De Hory’s end was as ambiguous as his attributions. On 11 December 1976, told that Spain had agreed to extradite him to France to face fraud charges, he took an overdose of sleeping pills at his home on Ibiza and died. He left behind an unknowable number of pictures still hanging as genuine and a permanent uncertainty in the modern-art market — the rare forger whose greatest legacy is doubt itself.