4. Elmyr De Hory And The Picasso Fraud
Elmyr de Hory was born Hoffmann Elemér Albert in Budapest, April 14, 1906, and 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 much celebrity from a Clifford Irving book, Fake, and from F for Fake (1974), a documentary essay film by Orson Welles. in 1946 Elmyr de Hory sold a reproduction of a Picasso to a British woman who took it for an original. He began to sell his Picasso reproductions to art galleries, claiming that they were what remained of his family’s estate. Galleries took the paintings and paid Elmyr de Hory the equivalent of (USD) $100 to $400 (circa 1947) per painting. The forger rather than attempting to copy existing works by celebrated artists, would only paint original works in their style, which made the forgeries much harder to detect. After repeatedly evading the authorities, In August 1968, a Spanish court convicted him of the crimes of homosexuality and of consorting with criminals, sentencing him to 2 months in prison. He was never directly charged with forgery because the court could not prove that he had ever created any forgeries on Spanish soil. He was released in October 1968 and expelled from Spain.