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Notorious Lives

Clifford Irving

Tom Keating

Gaston Bullock Means.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Elmyr de Hory

by Grove Koger

Hungarian art forger

Cause of notoriety: De Hory forged more than one thousand works of art, including paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani; in some cases his forged art was evaluated as superior in quality to that of the imitated artist.

Active: 1946-1976

Locale: Europe, South America, North America

Early Life

According to Elmyr de Hory (el-MEER dih HOHR-ee) himself, he was born into a wealthy family in Hungary in 1906. His parents divorced when he was sixteen, at which time the young man began attending art school in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. He enrolled in a German school two years later and went on to study at the Académie la Grande Chaumière in Paris.

In the late 1930’s, de Hory returned to Hungary, where he was imprisoned briefly as a result of his contacts with suspect foreigners. He was later arrested as a Jew and sent to a concentration camp in Germany. After escaping and returning to Hungary, de Hory discovered that his parents had been murdered during World War II and the family fortune confiscated. Hoping to make a living as a painter, he made his way back to Paris in 1945.

These and other details about de Hory’s life must be treated with caution, as the standard biography (by Clifford Irving) was written with de Hory’s cooperation and may not be reliable. A later researcher has found evidence that the artist may have been born Elemér Horthy in 1905 in very modest circumstances.

Criminal Career

De Hory’s life of crime apparently began in 1946 when a friend mistook an unsigned de Hory drawing for the unsigned work of Pablo Picasso. De Hory did not disabuse the woman in question and instead sold her the drawing.

Subsequently, de Hory began producing other “Picassos,” as well as works ostensibly by Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani. He toured Europe with a young companion who handled all the selling, visited South America briefly, and in 1947 turned to the United States, where he remained for twelve years. There he tried unsuccessfully to live as a legitimate artist but soon reverted to forgery on a large scale.

By 1959 de Hory believed that he was in legal jeopardy and returned to Europe, where he made an arrangement with shady “art dealers” Fernand Legros and Réal Lessard. By now de Hory had added forgeries of many more nineteenth and twentieth century artists to his repertoire, and although his partners kept most of the profits, de Hory lived comfortably on the Spanish island of Ibiza. However, his actions had drawn the attention of Spanish authorities, and in 1968 he was imprisoned for two months—for homosexuality, consorting with criminals, and having no visible means of support—and exiled for two years.

De Hory returned to Ibiza in 1969, but during the following decade he was investigated by French authorities. Upon learning on December 11, 1976, that he was to be extradited to France to face multiple charges of forgery, de Hory killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates.

Impact

Elmyr de Hory is regarded as the most successful known art forger of the twentieth century. He is thought to have forged more than one thousand works, defrauding dealers, collectors, and art galleries of as much as one million dollars. He remains a fascinating figure, as art forgery is regarded by many as a glamorous crime, and de Hory was by all accounts a genial and even generous man. Some experts have declared his works as good as or even better than the works of the artists he copied, and such a market developed for his forgeries (identified as such) that other forgers began to produce their own “de Horys.”

Further Reading

1 

Irving, Clifford. Fake: The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. New York: McGraw Hill, 1969. Entertaining, if unreliable, biography by a writer later jailed for faking a biography of Howard Hughes.

2 

Jackman, Ian, ed. Con Men: Fascinating Profiles of Swindlers and Rogues from the Files of the Most Successful Broadcast in Television History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Includes a chapter about de Hory based on material from the television program 60 Minutes.

3 

Kleiner, Carolyn. “Artful Dodgers.” U.S. News and World Report 133, no. 8 (August 26, 2002): 54-56. Discusses de Hory, his involvement with Clifford Irving, and Irving’s later notoriety.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Koger, Grove. "Elmyr De Hory." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1278.
APA 7th
Koger, G. (2007). Elmyr de Hory. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Koger, Grove. "Elmyr De Hory." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.