Description
Elmyr De Hory was the greatest art forger of all time. By the time he was exposed in 1967, it's estimated he had created over 1000 works that had been sold as being by Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Derand, Duffy, and various other painters, and many of which remain undetected to this day in institutions and private collections around the world.
Does it matter if I believe it's a Picasso and enjoy it as such? Mark Forgy came to Europe as a 20-year-old backpacker in 1973, bumped into Elmyr on the quayside in Ibiza, and ended up living with him for 7 of the years between his exposure as the greatest art forger of all time in 1969 and his suicide in 1976. It was a whirlwind life of culture, glamour, intrigue, Hollywood stars, dodgy writers, and psychopathic villains, and it featured in the extraordinary Orson Welles film ‘F For Fake’. Mark came to the Bureau to tell us all about it and to muse on whether the products of Elmyr's genius were really any more fake than the art world itself.
