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Elmyr de Hory and the Business of Being Believed

By prove.art Editorial · · 5 min read

Most art forgers are remembered for one masterful fake, or for the single mistake that ended their career. Elmyr de Hory is remembered for scale. By his own account — and accounts are the one thing his story has never had much of in reliable supply — he sold well over a thousand forgeries to galleries, dealers, and museums across the United States and Europe over roughly three decades, and he was never convicted of forgery itself.

An unreliable narrator by design

Born Elemér Albert Hoffmann in Budapest in 1906, de Hory’s early biography is genuinely difficult to pin down, because nearly everything known about it comes from what he told the American writer Clifford Irving, who turned it into the 1969 bestseller Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. Irving himself later admitted the account should not be taken entirely at face value — a caveat that became darkly ironic when Irving was convicted a few years later for fabricating an entirely fictitious authorized biography of Howard Hughes. A forger’s biographer turned out to be a forger of a different kind.

What is well documented is the pattern of the work itself. After settling in New York in 1947, de Hory painted a Modigliani and sold it to the Niveau Gallery. It was well received, and he kept going — expanding into Matisse and Renoir, refining a repertoire rather than a single trick. In 1955, one of his Matisse forgeries was purchased by Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum; authorities discovered it was fake shortly afterward and opened an investigation, but de Hory had already moved on.

Selling the story alongside the object

What separates de Hory from a purely technical forger is how much of his success depended on persona rather than paint. As suspicion started following him from city to city, he began selling work under a rotating cast of pseudonyms — Louis Cassou, Joseph Dory-Boutin, Elmyr Herzog, “baron de Hory” among others — spreading risk across identities the way a different kind of criminal might spread money across shell companies.

In 1959, he formalized this into an actual business, partnering with dealers Fernand Legros and Real Lessard, who spent nine years selling his work on five continents. Their methods went well beyond painting technique: they cultivated relationships with the same experts who might otherwise authenticate — or debunk — the work, and they produced supporting documentation and reproduced gallery stamps to give each piece a plausible paper history. It’s a detail worth sitting with: even in the 1960s, before any of today’s due-diligence infrastructure existed, sophisticated forgery rings understood that provenance, not just brushwork, was what closed the sale.

A conviction that wasn’t about forgery at all

De Hory’s legal troubles eventually caught up with him, but in a way that underscores how difficult forgery itself was — and often still is — to prosecute. In August 1968, a Spanish court convicted him not of forgery, but of “consorting with criminals” and related charges, sentencing him to two months in prison. He was never directly charged with forging paintings, because prosecutors could not prove he had created any forgeries on Spanish soil — a jurisdictional gap, not an exoneration.

He returned to Ibiza after his release and, by the early 1970s, had become something the art world hadn’t planned for: a celebrity forger, one whose own name started to carry market value independent of whoever he was imitating. Orson Welles’ 1973 essay film F for Fake, built around de Hory, Irving, and the porous line between authenticity and performance, turned him into a genuine cultural figure rather than merely a fraud under investigation.

The end, and the afterward

By 1976, France was pursuing his extradition from Spain — a process slowed by the fact that Spain and France had no extradition treaty in force at the time. When de Hory learned that Spain had finally secured permission to extradite him, he took his own life on 11 December 1976, at age 70.

His death did not end the market for “Elmyrs.” A secondary trade in forgeries of his forgeries emerged afterward, and pieces he gave to friends — some signed in his own name rather than a master’s — are now collected in their own right. Mark Forgy, de Hory’s longtime companion and assistant in his final years, later wrote what is generally regarded as the most carefully sourced account of his life, a useful corrective to the Irving-shaped legend that made de Hory famous in the first place.

Why the story still matters

De Hory’s case is a reminder that forgery is rarely just a technical achievement. What let his fakes travel five continents and sit in respected collections for years wasn’t only skill at the easel — it was a supporting infrastructure of pseudonyms, cultivated experts, and fabricated paperwork built specifically to survive scrutiny. The Fogg Art Museum, the Niveau Gallery, and dealers on multiple continents were not fooled by brushwork alone; they were fooled by a story that the object arrived already wrapped in. Any system meant to prevent the next de Hory has to account for that — verifying the object is necessary, but it has never been sufficient on its own.

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