Elmyr de HORY

Elmyr de Hory (born Elemér Albert Hoffmann; April 14, 1906 – December 11, 1976) was a famed Hungarian-born painter and art forger. It is claimed he was responsible for producing over a thousand forgeries that were sold to reputable art galleries all over the world. His activities garnered celebrity from a Clifford Irving book, Fake (1969), and a documentary essay film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1974).De Hory claimed that he was born into an aristocratic family, that his father was an Austro-Hungarian ambassador and that his mother came from a family of bankers. However, subsequent investigation has suggested that de Hory childhood more likely had a middle-class childhood; he was born Elemér Albert Hoffmann on April 14, 1906. (An acquaintance, Fernand Legros, said that de Hory was born in Budapest (Hungary) 14 April 1905, but that de Hory would change the date to 1914 to appear younger) Both his parents were Jewish. His father's occupation was listed as "wholesaler of handcrafted goods." His parents did not divorce when he was sixteen, as he had asserted in the Clifford Irving biography. At the age of 16, he began his formal art training in the Nagybánya artists' colony (now in Romania). At 18, he joined the Akademie Heinmann art school in Munich, Germany, to study classical painting. In 1926 he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he studied under Fernand Léger. By the time he concluded his traditional education in Paris in 1928, the focus of his studies in figurative art had been eclipsed by Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism and other nontraditional movements, all of which made his art appear passé, out of step with new trends and public tastes. This harsh reality and the economic shock waves of the Great Depression dimmed any prospects of his making a living from his art. New evidence (Geneva police records) indicates charges and arrests for minor crimes during the late 1920s and '30s. He returned to Hungary at the outbreak of t Show more