Elmir de Hori

Elmyr de Hory , present The name Elemer Albert Hoffmann ( Elemér Albert Hoffmann , April 14, 1905 - December 11, 1976) is an artist of Hungarian descent, who became famous for numerous falsifications of modern art. Unlike Khan van Meegeren , he was not put on trial and did not disclose the list of his falsifications.

De Hori claimed that his parents were an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and the daughter of a banker. According to the publication of one of the biographers, he was actually born in the Jewish quarter of Budapest . He received an art education in Munich and Paris , studied for some time with F. Leger at the Grand-Chaumière Academy, but he did not give much hope. Only once, in 1926, he managed to put a couple of his works in galleries. However, no one ever bought them.

In 1932, for family reasons, he returned to his homeland, to Hungary, and was first imprisoned for calling for a change in the political system in Transylvania , and then to a concentration camp for homosexuals. All property of the de Hori family was first confiscated by the Germans, and after the war by the Communists ^[2] .

At the end of the war, Hoffman appeared in France, changed his name to "de Hori" and began to earn a living by fakes under Picasso . The implementation of fakes involved his roommate and agent Jacques Chamberlain. In 1947 he moved from France to the USA, where he changed several pseudonyms. Having settled in Miami , he carefully studied the style of the most sought-after artists and tried to reproduce it. After copying Picasso, he learned to copy Gauguin , Renoir , Matisse and Modigliani . Several times I tried to make a name for myself with original works, but to no avail.

In 1955, one of de Horie's fakes was discovered in a museum at Harvard University , and an investigation began. De Hori was taken into custody in Mexico City , but was soon released (according to his own assurances, he bribed the servant of the law to one of his fakes). After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, he found a new distribution channel in the person of entrepreneur Fernan Legra, who in 1962 helped him disappear from the field of view of law enforcement agencies by placing at his disposal a secluded villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza .

In the mid-1960s, de Hori became depressed , which affected the filigree of his "stylization". Accordingly, selling his work became increasingly difficult. After the Texas millionaire Meadows discovered that all the pearls of his art gallery were fakes sold to him by Legra, Interpol resumed its search for the elusive fraudster, who had left for Australia for a while. In August 1968, he was sentenced by a Spanish court for two months in prison on charges of sodomy .

In 1969, American journalist Clifford Irving published the bestselling book Fake! Where he made public the story of de Horie, partly based on his own stories, where the truth coexisted with fiction. The scandalous glory of de Hori attracted the famous director Orson Welles to his phenomenon; in 1974, he shot the tape “ F Like Fake ” about him. Both in the book and in the film, de Hori insisted that he was not a fraud, since he had never signed works in the style of this or that artist with their names, and imitation of the style of famous masters was not prohibited by law.

The growing fame of de Hori turned into a resumption of criminal prosecution. In 1976, the Spanish authorities met the demands of the French government and agreed to the extradition of de Hori. Upon learning of this, the artist took a lethal dose of sleeping pills. In 2012, his cohabitant and bodyguard, Mark Forge, published a memoir about the last years of the life of the venerable falsifier.