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

  Copyright © 2012 Mark Forgy

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1470193086

  ISBN 13: 9781470193089

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62345-184-4

  To Elmyr and Alice

  Contents

  Part One

  Elmyr’s Story

  The Making Of An Artist

  Paris At War’s End

  Elmyr Discovers The New World

  Elmyr Returns To Europe

  Elmyr Builds His Villa

  Part Two

  La Falaise

  Island Life

  Café Society

  Elmyr—The Artist

  Money Barks

  Madrid

  Palacio Liria

  The Grand Tour

  The Other Side Of The Mirror

  Elmyr’s Madrid Exhibition

  Palma

  Friday, December 10

  Saturday, December 11

  Aftermath

  Part Three

  The Research Trail

  The “De Laszlo” Portrait

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  In the summer of 1969 college was little more than a bulletproof vest giving me a deferment from the draft and Vietnam. The previous year saw hope and sanity burn on the funeral pyres of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Chicago’s Democratic Convention captured the mood of the country: tear gas, riot police, batons beating protesters, and organized resistance. American society had not been as divided since the Civil War. By April of ’69 more than thirty-three-thousand bodies in black zippered bags came home from the Tropic of Hell. I knew I wouldn’t let myself be inducted or induced “to just sign up and get it over with,” as my father urged me to do. It was an immoral war, indefensible and unwinnable, I thought. Drugs and the spirit of rebellion carried me and millions more in their currents. Rather than going to beautiful Southeast Asia, I elected to go to Europe. It would be an escape from my flirtation with higher learning, although the consequences of my decision would change my life in ways I could not have imagined.

  On the Spanish Mediterranean island of Ibiza, I discovered a refuge friendly to the ’60s counterculture. There, I met an artist named Elmyr (pronounced el-MEER). “De Hory,” his family name, he declared “is Hungarian.” The inflection in his voice elevated the ordinary to extraordinary, as in “I would like a steak,” lending a piece of meat the uniqueness of a jellyfish soufflé. He had an impresario’s flair about him I came to accept as normal, and this infectious enthusiasm was apparent to anyone around him. His appearance, like his manner, was best appreciated in a mirror, or the eyes of an adoring audience. “People,” he told me, “will always judge you by their first impression, so it is important that you look your best and make a favorable impression.” He imparted such pronouncements as though reading them off a stone tablet. It was therefore unsurprising that his silver hair was neatly parted, and often by the tortoiseshell comb he always kept in the pocket of his crisply creased pants. Shirts made from Egyptian cotton, cashmere sweaters, wool suits tailored by the same hands as those made by appointment to some member of the British royal family, and polished leather shoes—preferably Italian—all had their assigned places in his drawers or bedroom closet. Refinements such as these went with the polished silver, rows of books, and the paintings and sculptures that graced his hilltop villa, all part of the careful stagecraft intended to impress others. The charm, ready smile, and the twinkle his brown eyes unleashed reflexively made him a human magnet—attracting his victims who, succumbing to an irresistible allure, welcomed their fate. I, like so many others in his company, fell under his spell. I sensed something special about Elmyr when I spotted him the first day I arrived on the island. It was a sun-filled autumn morning when the ship docked in the port of Ibiza town. Towering above the clustered white stucco buildings, like irregular, vertically stacked dominoes, the sand-colored ramparts of the Old City suggested this small island had been a once-important landmark along an ancient seafaring trade route between the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean coast. Leaning over the rail, I watched as two men pushed a mobile stairway next to the ship while two others looped thick ropes around steel-knob hitching posts. It was Sunday, the first of November, and though still warm, the crowds of summer had vanished. I noticed Elmyr standing alone on the quay; he wore a cardigan sweater, open-collar shirt with an ascot, and Hollywood sunglasses. Inspecting this new brigade of hippies who disembarked, he searched our faces, looking for one familiar to him. I approached him and asked if he spoke English. He smiled. “Like they do in Kansas City!” he responded, although his accent was something other than Midwestern. I then asked if he could recommend any hotels. He pointed to a narrow cobbled street. “You’ll find several inexpensive pensions in that direction,” he said. I thanked him and left. When I discovered nothing available, I resigned myself to another night sleeping on a beach. That evening, after weaving in and out of some portside bars, I ran into Elmyr again. “Did you have any luck finding a place?” he asked. I told him no. He said “Well, I have a guest room in my house you’re welcome to use, if you like.” It was a spontaneous offer, I thought, one I couldn’t refuse. My overnight stay drifted into days, then a week. I tried to make myself useful, offering to help with whatever needed to be done during that time. He then asked if I cared to stay on, working as his assistant. His home had a swimming pool, a housekeeper he’d fashioned into an amazing cook, and Elmyr was generous and entertaining. There was no down side that I could see. Nor could I guess the secrets in Elmyr’s past. All I knew was that he disappeared into his studio each morning and that I wasn’t supposed to bother him during that time. Curiosity only once prompted me to ask what might warrant knocking on that door. He glared at me as though I’d forgotten my mother’s name, turned without replying, entered his sanctum, and closed the door.

  My chores around his house entailed helping out at his frequent parties, keeping his garden weed-free, cleaning the pool, driving for him, and secretarial duties, helping with his correspondence; his English vocabulary was larger than mine, but his handwriting looked as cryptic as a doctor’s prescription. I also had a slightly better grasp of punctuation. There was no heavy lifting, just mostly indulging a need I recognized—companionship. Here was a man who was lonely despite the flurry of social activity surrounding him. Within a few weeks of our meeting, he told me that if I wanted to live in Europe, I needed to speak two or three languages. He then enrolled me at the local Alliance Française for private French lessons.

  He recommended books he deemed essential. He urged me to read Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Thomas Mann, along with art books, biographies, and history—everything that would give me a well-rounded education. Yet it was daily life that provided the most remarkable learning experiences of all, and meeting Prosky made clear the chasm between the life I had known and what it had become.

  While it would have been easy to dismiss Prosky as an archetypal thug, I tried to avoid that impulse of first impressions, one Elmyr indulged with a nonchalance he learned from a lifetime of habit. I wanted to be more generous in my assessment of others. Still, it was hard not to notice that Prosky’s nose had been at odds with others’ points of view more than once, and how his early-man features stretched over Bigfoot’s chassis. Underneath his black leather jacket and half-buttoned shirt, shocks of black chest hair intertwined with gold chains. A neat shave line encircled the base of his neck, where the forest began. He possessed the coarseness of a wood rasp, but he and Elmyr shared an interest in art and money, and both were Hungarian. Moreover, Pr
osky could sell you cold dishwater and make you feel good about buying it.

  One day I glimpsed, from the second-floor window of Elmyr’s home, Prosky’s black Mercedes convertible with its red leather seats. A talc of off-road dust dulled the car’s sheen. He parked in the shade of the house, got out, and walked up the stone steps to the front door. The steel doorknocker announced his unexpected call. His six-year old daughter waited with his Doberman pinscher in the car. (Elmyr quipped, “in case the dog got hungry.”)

  On this occasion Prosky brought him an auction catalog from Sotheby’s in Geneva. Inside, he proudly pointed out a painting featured in its sale of twentieth-century art, a scene of Nice in southern France. Palm trees lined the harbor and street-lamped promenade; swaths of pinks, blues, and greens were backdrops for people, buildings, and horse-drawn carriages. What was unusual about this painting was the signature in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. Elmyr and I examined the reproduced picture and instantly recognized it as one he had done a few months before. Only now, it bore the name not of Elmyr, but of the French artist Raoul Dufy.

  For more than twenty years, Elmyr made a career of creating fake masterpieces—not only Dufys but also many better-known impressionist and postimpressionist artists. His long trail of chicanery earned him the title of the “world’s greatest art forger,” a label that always made him wince, as he believed it demeaned his dignity. However, the specter of those years and evading the consequences of his illegal activities still troubled him. Every knock at the door might be an Interpol agent and a moment of reckoning. Furthermore, he was weary of constantly looking over his shoulder to see if a Damoclean sword was waiting to fall. Now he was trying to emancipate himself from his past and establish a reputation as a fine artist in his own right, but Prosky, among others, was more interested in passing off his fakes as originals—again. That was where the big money was, and people knew Elmyr’s reputation as an easy mark.

  Despite his efforts to sell his own work, people still wanted his Picassos, Matisses, Modiglianis, and Renoirs. He also understood the likelihood of others trying to profit from his talent, but did not have the stamina or will to police their intentions. I recall how his suntan could not disguise the blood loss in his pallor that afternoon as he gazed in silent déjà vu at the catalog’s Dufy. Its pages trembled in his hands. Prosky remained oblivious of the growing storm in Elmyr’s face. Instead, unable to contain his joy, Prosky began moving with the gaiety and weightlessness of a marionette. His little secret burst. “It fetched thirty-five-thousand dollars,” he chortled.

  Visibly upset at the surprise news, Elmyr went off on a tirade in Hungarian. His stiffened forefinger bounced repeatedly off Prosky’s sternum, backing up a man whose shadow easily swallowed him. Moving with not-seen-before speed, he began frisking Prosky in a ticklish way. Elmyr’s hands darted into Prosky’s trouser pockets one after the other like a striking serpent, emerging with fists full of cash. Then, pushing him into an easy chair, lifted one of his legs like a professional wrestler, and removed his shoe and sock to reveal a neatly folded wad of money, repeating the surprise move with his other leg. Disarmed by Elmyr’s slapstick assault, Prosky lay supine in paroxysms of laughter; tears trickled down his cheeks while his naked feet rested on a small table in front of his chair. Their comic ballet ended as abruptly as it began.

  The booty from his money-yielding piñata lay on the floor: Swedish kroner, dollars, and Swiss francs. Collecting them on his hands and knees did little to salvage Elmyr’s dignity, but the glint in his eyes signaled his triumph. No matter how long removed from the antics of these two men, the memory remains imperishable. At the time, I didn’t know if this spectacle was typical of gypsy bargaining techniques, but was happy it became an entertaining ritual each time they did business. Fernand Legros, Elmyr’s former dealer, had not acted as brazenly as Prosky had. In essence, he declared to Elmyr, “See, I can exploit you and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  My life by this time had evolved into an otherworldly existence that in its strangeness often seemed LSD-inspired. I know the sort of dance of the two silverbacks I witnessed that afternoon would never occur back in Minnesota. Outrageous behavior like that would be grist for Sunday’s sermon and community indignation. However, this small island of Ibiza was a universe away from a quiet life that often comforts Midwesterners. “Don’t draw attention to yourself,” was a constant reminder from my parents. In Elmyr’s world humility had its place—say, reposing in a casket. In his mind, it was a vapid attribute, like the word nice, which I quickly dropped from my vocabulary after using it once in his presence to describe someone. Elmyr had looked annoyed, shooting back, “What do you mean, nice? He wouldn’t pee on your dining room table?”—an image forever linked to that word. His response was less a rebuff than a catalyst realigning my view of a world order, one that conformed more to his oft-repeated adage: kalt odor heiss, aber nicht warm—cold or hot but not warm—meaning he had little tolerance for anything in half measure. “Nice” was therefore tepid and uninteresting.

  It was clearer to Elmyr than to me that my job was migrating into other areas I hadn’t anticipated. Elmyr was becoming my mentor, before I knew what a mentor was. I only later realized his willingness to provide an open door to an unknown world carried with it other expectations.

  One evening, we sat reading in his café-au-lait leather chairs. Beethoven’s triple piano concerto accompanied our winter night ritual. Olive wood burned on the stone hearth fireplace behind us. A furrowed V above the bridge of his nose signaled the gravity of his thoughts. “Is something bothering you?” I asked. He was reading a biography of one of his favorite painters, Caravaggio, a brawling, precocious genius with an unerring compass for finding trouble. The sway between success and sorrow was a persistent pattern in Elmyr’s own life. The tribulations of the great artist and inventor of the dramatic use of light and dark called chiaroscuro, possibly dredged up memories he tried to suppress. Elmyr, like Caravaggio, had been a fugitive from the law, his talent underappreciateated and at odds with prevailing tastes, and both men forced to bear the risks of being homosexual. “This is disturbing. His life was so hard,” he breathed with the spent energy of a marathoner. Neither artist was a stranger to poor choices and their lamentable consequences. Elmyr was about to share with me one mistake that changed his life.

  “I appreciate your help around here, and your company. I’m glad you’re interested in other things, not hanging out at the bars, and that you want to learn about art and languages. You also know about my past and my association with Fernand Legros. I know there is nothing Legros would like better than to see me dead.” This made sense, as no one else could incriminate Legros as Elmyr could, knowing he personally handed off hundreds of his artworks to Legros. These were secrets he would rather see Elmyr take to the grave.

  I then began to grasp the drift of our evening’s chat. I could see my role expanding. Beyond chauffeuring, garden and pool chores, and secretarial duties, it seemed my job description would now include… bodyguard! Just then I wondered if this would entail a weapon of some sort. What might that be? A knife? I’d surely cut myself. A gun? Oh, I once found my brother’s small handgun and shot three holes in the apartment wall before figuring out how the safety worked. Elmyr may have thought my presence as a witness was deterrent enough to thwart any assassination attempt on his life, although the logic of this rationale remained elusive. If Elmyr were in harm’s way, I could offer the resistance of a turnstile. This was a leap of misplaced confidence since any snarling lapdog would back me down in a fight. Given my willowy physique, most observers would probably mistake me for one of those underfed, melon-eyed urchins on the verge of tears, immortalized on velvet by equally famished artists. Visions wallpapered my imagination of some baboon-jawed thug, with a finger’s breadth between his eyebrows and hairline, repeatedly smacking a tire iron into his other hand. Despite a mental picture of our lifeless bodies stuffed in a steamer trunk, my fondness for
Elmyr made me sputter, “I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  The morbid notion of our gangland-style murders was a striking contrast to the life I had come to accept as normal. For me, life in his villa, La Falaise, was an enchanted existence. Nor could I see any signs of the danger he feared that evening. To the contrary, he appeared enveloped in adulation from friends, a bad-boy media darling in the world’s press, newly conferred folk hero and giant killer for exposing the fallibility of art experts.

  On the other hand, the experts’ embarrassment still glowed red. This was apparent from an article about Elmyr appearing in Life magazine early in 1970. Their Paris bureau chief, Rudolph Chelminski, came to interview Elmyr. During his three-day visit, he and Elmyr seemed to establish an immediate rapport. Within two weeks of Chelminski’s departure, he sent Elmyr a draft of his article. It was a sympathetic view of the artist. When it appeared in print, its tone was substantially different, suggesting Elmyr was an amateur, a “dilettante.” Chelminski wrote him an apology, stating he couldn’t account for the changes but would find out why it bore no semblance to the piece he submitted. Elmyr later discovered it went to one of the senior editors of the magazine who was connected to the Annenburg family of Philadelphia. Their art collection and reputation epitomized those deeply rooted interests that could not support any praise of a man they viewed as the Antichrist. Therefore, it was as counterintuitive for anyone with stakes in the art establishment to say anything complimentary about Elmyr, as it would be to throw salt in an open wound.

  Despite Elmyr’s yearning for approval, he knew he would always have his detractors. While this backlash possessed a sting, it amused him to be riding a swell of notoriety. Since his history was now out in the open, he thought, perhaps his life of stealth and deception was finally past. People wanted to meet this “famously infamous” man, as he newly described himself, always with a smile and ring of irony.