Elmyr de Hory

Elmyr de Hory (born Elemér Albert Hoffmann; Budapest, April 14, 1906 - Ibiza, December 11, 1976) was a Hungarian-born painter and art forger who is said to have sold over a thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. His forgeries garnered celebrity from a Clifford Irving book, Fake, (1969), a documentary essay film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1974), and a biography by Mark Forgy, "The Forger's Apprentice: Life with the World's Most Notorious Artist" (2012).

Most of the information regarding de Hory's early life comes from what he told American writer Clifford Irving, who wrote the first biography about him. Since Elmyr's success was reliant upon his skills of deception and invention, it would be difficult to take the facts that he told about his own life at face value, as Clifford Irving himself admitted, Irving himself being convicted of the crime of forgery for his fictitious biography of Howard Hughes that he attempted to pass off as genuine. Elmyr 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 Elmyr's childhood was, more likely, of a middle class variety.

Research done in 2011 by Mark Forgy, Colette Loll, Dr. Jeff Taylor, and Andrea Megyes dispelled some of the longstanding myths surrounding Elmyr, most notably definitively establishing his true identity from marriage and birth records at the Association of Jewish Communities in Budapest. He was born Elemér Albert Hoffmann on April 14, 1906. Both his parents were Jewish. His father's occupation was listed as "Wholesaler of handcrafted goods." His parents did not divorce when Elmyr was sixteen as he asserted in the Clifford Irving biography. An updated account of de Hory's life appears in Mark Forgy's memoir, The Forger's Apprentice: Life with the World's Most Notorious Artist.

At the age of 16, he began his formal art training in the Hungarian art colony of Nagybánya (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 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 Elmyr's 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.

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