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

  The pace of entertaining at La Falaise accelerated, and he reveled in the attention of those around him. I now better understood Elmyr’s whirling social life was as essential as oxygen to him, and that it also had as much to do with his aversion to being alone as it did with his naturally friendly disposition. I came to believe that my company and that of others was his remedy for the sense of abandonment that plagued him from childhood. He made no distinction between solitude and loneliness. Either left him unplugged, feeling isolated. When I went to visit friends, his face assumed the look of a child lost at the mall. I knew this ever-present need for companionship was the portal that allowed me into his world, but it also dismantled the judgment filter that allows one a self-preservation instinct. The absence of this defense mechanism let the barbarians through the gate at will, and I could not always protect him from repeated pillaging of his unwary nature. How did he remain impenetrable to the lessons of misplaced trust? Furthermore, how could a man be guileless and consistently cunning enough to fool others at the same time? These contradictions made this new father figure in my life a daily source of wonder and endearment. I came to believe those close to him, whose friendships he clutched with a terrier-like tenacity, felt the same depth of love for him.

  In many ways it felt like an out-of-body experience to simultaneously participate in and witness my own conscientiousness-raising transformation. Elmyr became the guru overseeing my education. He found an eager pupil in me, one ready to accept his tutelage and absorb the knowledge that seemed to gush from him. I often felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, attending a private academy, privy to arcane bits of information whose usefulness or purpose were not immediately apparent but would give me the social graces of aristocrats. It was, after all, this rarefied world of the landed gentry in which he demonstrated an obsessive interest and claimed his own genesis. Furthermore, his skill at negotiating the thinnest limbs of obscure family trees with the deftness of a ring-tailed lemur was mystifying. Pointing out the significance of incestuous alliances, marriages, and titles of people I had never heard of, nor cared to, he shared these facts as though they were as meaningful and important as knowing the alphabet.

  I recall standing before Rafael’s portrait of Pope Julius II in London’s National Gallery, with Elmyr expounding on the painterly qualities of the picture. His enthusiasm then seemed to increase as he explained the sitter’s genealogical connection to a noble Italian family Elmyr counted among his friends. “Julius the second was a Della Rovere, duke of Urbino.” He continued, “The Della Rovere family actually produced two popes, Sixtus IV, who had the Sistine Chapel built, and then his nephew, Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling.” History, art, literature, everything had its place on a living tapestry, and he loved knowing how all the threads were connected. Sharing his knowledge came easily, and it was through these private lessons that education assumed a dimension it never possessed in my formal schooling, all for my benefit.

  Stories flowed endlessly. He recounted his adventures and hardships. I marveled at his endurance. From the comfort of those leather easy chairs his life unfolded before me, narrated in Alistair Cooke erudition for his audience of one. Lest I lend some mythic proportion to his anecdotes, he was quick to dismiss this inclination. I once said in response to his tale, “You’re so wise.” He shrugged, adding, “If that were true, I wouldn’t have made so many stupid mistakes.” Unfortunately, the clarity of hindsight had a short shelf life for him.

  La Falaise was much more than a cultural sanctuary. It was the School of Elmyr. There, he showed me the love a father shows a son, a bond and depth of commitment I never knew with my own father. He taught me that relationships were the foundation of true happiness. Consequently, the love and trust he invested in others were his greatest source of validation and vulnerability. While he was eager to give me a unique education, and provided me a safe harbor, I became his sentinel, wanting to protect him from those who might take advantage of him. Somehow, I eased into this role, not in the daunting way of some no-neck bouncer, but more the ear-whispering counselor, simply because I could spot the sharks’ fins surfacing before he did. It was odd, an unlikely responsibility for a twenty-year-old from the Midwest, to advise someone worldly, a couple of generations removed from me. The difference, I think, was that he came to rely on my observer’s perspective. Moreover, experience showed him that sound judgment did not come easily to him and that the insights of his own self-awareness were of limited value.

  In retrospect, the odder life became in Elmyr’s world, the more normal it seemed. My own evolution resulted from his showering influence on me, which was most apparent when I returned to the States after living in Europe for a year. I wore ascots, talked about wine, dropped names unknown to most. My friends viewed me as they would a nudist at a Baptist bible camp: stunned and surprised. They could barely understand my new British accent. The doctrine of Lutheran humility drummed into me in my youth vanished completely. I knew I couldn’t remain long in Minnesota. I had to return to the island, breathe the salubrious air of Ibiza, and regroup once more with my inner snob. After two weeks, everyone probably awaited my departure with the same relief as the end of a cholera epidemic. To my mind, the reason for the newly noticed disparity between us was simple. They weren’t growing, and I was. This wasn’t true, of course, but our life paths were diverging. Looking back, it was unsurprising how much I had become Elmyr’s alter ego or that I was oblivious of my transformation. I suppose it was akin to the “Stockholm syndrome,” only being held captive in a Swiss finishing school. Twelve months earlier, this metamorphosis would have been unimaginable. However, if one subscribes to the idea that there is no such thing as happenstance, and that everything occurs for a reason and by design, then I am comfortable calling this chapter in my life—destiny. And telling the entire saga as I experienced it is part of that destiny.

  Elmyr’s Story

  Anyone would notice the meager size of Elmyr’s bedroom, where his bed hugged a corner of the room. “I had to have it specially made because it would have been too big and partially blocked the doorway to the bathroom,” he explained. A narrow pathway separated the end of the bed and a dresser opposite. I can visualize his autocratic German architect, Irwin Brauner, a student of the Bauhaus school of design, arguing that it only needed to accommodate a bed to sleep on. So, why make it bigger? Bauhaus minimalist theories of design were immutable and often a landscape for battle when Elmyr suggested changes he thought might make his home more suited to his liking. Off the bedroom there was a sitting room that he used as his studio, with a view overlooking a bay. Here, finished or partially completed canvases leaned against the walls. Two palettes and tubes of oil paints rested on a table beside the color-splattered easel. This was where he created his art.

  No room in the house, except the kitchen, was devoid of artwork. Oils, gouaches, watercolors, pencil, and pen and ink drawings in Elmyr’s own style were displayed, as well as a collection representing Ibiza’s sizable colony of artists. Their styles ranged from figurative to contemporary abstract art. Facing his bed hung a gouache by one of the island’s resident painters. It was a turbulent watercolor of horses and riders in reds, browns, and ochre. When I questioned him about the artist, he said, “It’s by a Dutch painter, Leiss…very talented. He lived here for some time, but ultimately died of a heroin overdose. It was sad. He died so young.” It may sound cliché, but at that time in my life I hadn’t yet heard a story of an artist whose life was not measured in mile markers of tragedy. Around that time Elmyr gave me a copy of Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography to read. It, too, was full of storm clouds, perpetually raining on a trend-bucking iconoclast. What else should I have suspected from Elmyr’s own stories? Still, on his bedroom dresser underneath the Leiss was a framed family photo. It suggested a time in his life before war, loss of innocence, and a career of artful deception.

  Elmyr, shown as a young boy, dressed in summer white, stands behind his sea
ted mother and aunt. “There was a large country house behind that row of trees,” he told me. All the adults are elegant, with serious demeanors. Elmyr, perhaps due to his childhood exuberance, smiles amid the sobriety of his family members. His mother casts a distracted, melancholy gaze, almost prescient of their impending sadness and devastation. I can’t forget how his upbeat mood quickly changed when I said to him, “Tell me about this photograph.” His expression turned wistful, his tone somber, recalling a distant, bittersweet time. From that solitary photo, no one could guess Elmyr’s destiny.

  “It was at my grandmother’s summer home,” he began. “She was a very cultured woman, very elegant, and I remember that she collected some drawings I had done at the age of six or seven that she thought good enough to frame. She was intelligent and knowledgeable about art and knew exactly what was good or bad. This was my earliest recollection of anyone thinking my artwork worthy of displaying, although I was mildly surprised when I did see them on the walls in her home.” Although I’m not certain what effect this gesture of family pride had on him—it may have been memorable as an isolated demonstration of approval.

  Elmyr, with his mother and aunt – circa 1916

  His family stared back at me from a bygone era. Another group photo showed ladies in plumed hats, pearls, lace-frilled dresses, men in round-collared shirts, tiepins, mustaches, and slicked hair, all in rigid poses. This image attested to what I learned from our fireside chats, suggesting that he came from a background of means and social status. Still, I was more eager to climb aboard his train of thought than he was to travel again across that terrain of haunting remembrances. At times, I had to coax these souvenirs, as I suspected there was no shortage of psychic scar tissue associated with his past, so I felt I was sometimes prying off a bandage on an unhealed wound.

  I knew he was born to a life of prestige and wealth in Budapest in 1906, in the twilight of Central Europe’s Austro Hungarian Empire. No one in his family or in the rest of Europe had any reason to believe their lives of privilege would not assume the same predictable continuity as the Danube’s muddy waters. That blush of cherubic innocence disappeared with the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a disgruntled anarchist in Sarajevo, Bosnia on June 28, 1914. His nihilistic snit catapulted the continent (and far-off parts of the globe) into a bloody morass of war that heralded the demise of a way of life captured in those early family photos.

  As a child, he felt the love he wanted from his mother was never forthcoming. Instead, that emotion radiated from his wet nurse and surrogate mother, a servant in his family’s employ, he told me. They enjoyed the warmth and bond his maternal parent seemed incapable of showing. His diplomat father spent long periods away from home, according to Elmyr, posted to various embassies throughout Europe, which also suggested a distance in his parent’s marriage not only measured in kilometers.

  “My mother was a very beautiful woman, and I remember that she was always surrounded by men,” he said. “My parents were having a party one night. I watched from behind the stair balusters, but for some reason I wanted to go downstairs to my mother. I was probably four or five years old at the time. I ran to her and wanted to kiss her, but, telling me that I would disturb her makeup, she turned her head away.” There is no way of measuring the ramification of his rejection. It may be just coincidental that the desire for validation and love that I witnessed seemed to be an unending quest throughout his life. What his parents could not offer him in demonstrative affection they substituted with material comfort. This bourgeois inclination and indulgence also featured prominently in his worldview and casual acceptance of a privileged lifestyle.

  By the time the Armistice of 1918 concluded, Europe was a ghost of its former glory. The monuments to hubris and folly were seemingly endless fields of grave markers, which in a macabre way resembled a surreal crop sewn and harvested by the grim reaper. This moment was also the death knell of centuries’-old empires, and with their demise, new countries and borders emerged. Elmyr’s well-to-do family lost substantial land holdings in Transylvania, now located in newly established Romania.

  Gaunt and pale faces of this lost generation reflected the tireless and ever-inventive obsession with their own self-destruction. Edvard Munch’s eerie figure featured in The Scream might have best captured the revulsion to Europe’s nightmare. To prove Voltaire’s insight into human nature when he said that history never repeats itself but people always do, a little more than twenty years would elapse before the Second World War would try to eclipse the madness and calamity of the previous one. Despite the staggering shock of war that left an entire world reeling, dazed, and with a profound sense of despair, those who had not succumbed to its devastation and misery attempted to reclaim their lives and normalcy. Elmyr’s family was perhaps more fortunate than many. His mother came from a long established line of Jewish bankers from Szeged, Hungary’s second-largest city after Budapest. Despite their diminished fortune by the four-year-long cataclysm, they retained the means to live comfortably amid a drastically changed Europe.

  It was easy to see in Elmyr’s face and hear in his voice the personal pain of living through the disintegration of a life he had known and memories that would not let him forget. It was an unusual occurrence when he recounted these souvenirs, and he would not dwell on them. It was up to me to thread together this oral history. These intimate snapshots of his life were vivid, poignant, like something reluctantly revealed within a clenched fist when slowly relaxed. The texture, detail, flavor, odors of a faded epoch filled my senses and allowed me to understand him better, his past and present heartache.

  This ability to make his stories and insights come alive is what I remember most when I accompanied him to many of the great art museums of Europe. I just stood back, listened, and watched. Entering a gallery, he looked around, leading me to a painting he thought significant. His arms gathered momentum as he conducted a symphony—retracing the brush strokes in a visual staccato, andante, allegro, or adagio—then asking me to come closer to examine some detail, as though peaking through a knothole to reveal something remarkable. These visits animated my education. When, for instance, we stood in the Prado before a painting of Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicting the torments of hell, he had a special talent of translating the artist’s peculiarly tortured visions in an earthy way. “Mark,” he would command, “come look at this, you see the detail of these creatures. You can easily see how Dali was influenced by him and borrowed ideas for his work, that phantasmagoria of surrealism.” Bosch’s religiously inspired depiction of hell, I surmised, was perhaps less gruesome than the reality of war with which Elmyr was too well acquainted. The painting’s horrific nature, however, resonated with his personal recollections of cruelty, death, crushed innocence, and human frailty.

  His visceral upset was again apparent when viewing Goya’s visually compelling series of etchings, The Horrors of War. They were at once a hypnotic and disturbing testimony to man’s inhumanity to man. We viewed this important part of the Prado’s great collection on every visit to the museum. Goya’s visions are haunting, yet his masterly draftsmanship is riveting. Elmyr showed me how a savage subject matter can be both repellent and something that lifts the soul. We might otherwise have fled this splendid gallery for the preponderance of images of Christ enduring crucifixion.

  Elmyr made frequent trips to Madrid, partly because he had friends there, partly because it was the nearest European capital offering those refinements he enjoyed—good restaurants, upscale department stores, nightclubs, his favorite art supply store, Macaron, and the Prado. It was an easy cure for island fever, that sense of sameness that sets in among residents living in a relatively confined area. Not as chronic as for those inhabitants of Devil’s Island, I imagine, but still giving one the desire to get away. I understood this restlessness. In Minnesota we called it “cabin fever.” After being holed up all winter, inside, with uncommunicative Norwegians, and eating colorl
ess food spoiled by too many spices, like salt or pepper, you’d just want a change of scenery.

  I found it exciting to see those masterpieces from Elmyr’s art books, up close at the Prado. Today, as I look through some of his sketchbooks, populated with people, it is easy to see his fascination with their faces. He said to me once while leafing through a book on Modigliani, the artist whose style I thought Elmyr captured best in his illicit mimicry, “You know Modigliani painted only a handful of landscapes in his life.” He also was a people painter, a searcher of souls. “If you look at Rembrandt’s portraits, the humanity of his sitters pours out,” he declared. Elmyr also succeeded in mapping out psychic depth in the topography of those faces. He demonstrated penetrating insight of others in his art, but outside his medium, he was clueless. I remain unable to explain that disconnect. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to say to him, “If you really want to understand a person, get to their core, do their portrait.” It would have provided him the most effective border patrol imaginable.

  Nevertheless, we returned to the Prado’s collection of Flemish and Dutch art, the life-size, mid-Renaissance portraits, especially Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait as a young man. Painted in 1498, Dürer, like his contemporary Michelangelo, who created his Pieta a year later, reminds us that talent occasionally justifies egotism. Wavy tresses rest on his shoulders; he strikes a foppish pose of self-possessed confidence. This talented dandy glares back at us, inviting praise for his sartorial splendor and awesome skill. Elmyr told me, “Dürer once met the great Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini. He asked Dürer how he achieved such fine detail in his work, if he painted with one-bristled brushes. Standing in the Italian’s studio, Dürer grabbed the nearest brush and said ‘With one of these.’”

  Whenever we examined the works of the great masters there—Velasquez, Rubens, Goya, and others—especially their graphic work, I saw a similarity between their drawings and Elmyr’s. It was the result of a time-honored tradition, little changed for five hundred years. All these artists through the centuries received similar training, following techniques common to figurative art. “Drawing,” Elmyr said, “is the foundation of everything.” And he was opening my eyes. I was learning to see what he was teaching me, beginning to understand principles of draftsmanship, design, composition, color—the foundations of his world—enabling me to better appreciate all that was important to knowing the value of art, its influence on him, and, consequently, his influence on the world of art.