Elmyr de Hory was probably the 20th century's most successful art forger. A Hungarian homosexual who survived the Nazi concentration camps, despite having his leg broken by the Gestapo, he began by faking Picassos and progressed to turning out drawings by Matisse and Renoir. A Modigliani self-portrait, which de Hory ran up in one hour during the 1950s, sold for $200 to the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery. One month later, a Chicago art collector named James Alsdorf paid almost $4,000 for it.
Between 1961 and 1967, in conjunction with the FrenchGreek conman Ferdinand Legros, about $60 million worth of de Hory oil paintings were sold, 32 alone to a Texan oilman named Algur H. Meadows. Eventually, Meadows became suspicious and invited experts to examine his collection, which proved to consist entirely of fakes. The discovery, naturally enough, put an end to de Hory's painting business and, in 1976, he committed suicide.
The gullibility of certain sections of the art world - made up of equal parts greed, arrogance, snobbery and humbug - was revealed again recently when William Boyd published his fictional biography of the non-existent artist, Nat Tate.
Joke may be lost
Boyd used a number of paintings he created himself and a selection of photographs found in jumble sales. The resulting book, Nat Tate, American Artist, is essentially a single extended joke at the expense of art critics, a hoax which is simultaneously both literary and artistic. The book itself costs £10, a lot to pay for one joke, especially a joke that will probably be lost on most readers. Essentially, the trick of being a great con artist is to find something in which people want to believe, and then give it to them, preferably at the highest possible price. Perhaps the greatest example is the Shroud of Turin which, despite carbondating evidence that it was constructed in the 13th or 14th centuries, still has its adherents. In 1935, the grandson of the French painter Millet was himself convicted of art forgery. "You can sell anything to Americans and Englishmen," he remarked upon his conviction. "They know nothing about art. Even their experts know nothing. All you have to do is ask a fabulous price." Thus, in 1911, the forgers Yves Chaudron and Eduardo de Valfierno, sold forgeries of the Mona Lisa to six different Americans for a total of $1.6 million. They were aided by the fact that the Mona Lisa itself had been stolen earlier in the year. In fact, Chaudron and de Valfierno were responsible for the theft, although the gang was jailed later that year when they tried to sell the original to a Florentine art dealer.
In a similar vein, the British painter Eric Hebborn claims to have produced at least 1,000 drawings which have ended up on the open market. His forgeries have ended up in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Denmark. As Hebborn himself put it, "only the experts are worth fooling".
Hitler opera
Gullibility is not, of course, a trait limited solely to the art world. In 1983 the Sunday Times, Stern and Newsweek were among the journals taken in by Konrad Kujau, creator of the "Hitler Diaries". Kujau had already been jailed for forging luncheon vouchers and later made a tidy sum by faking Hitler paintings and forging false certificates of authenticity for Nazi memorabilia. When the German magazine Stern began showing interest in the "Hitler Diaries", Kujau informed them that he also had a third volume of Mein Kampf and an opera that Hitler had written in his youth. Stern took the bait, and bit hard: a fee of DM 85,000 (about £34,000) was agreed for each diary volume. There were - or would be, as soon as Kujau could find the time to write them - 58 volumes. Despite a police investigation which revealed the presence of paper whitener not available at the time the diaries were supposedly written, the Times went ahead with publication. The diaries were revealed to be fakes almost immediately and Kujau was jailed for four years. Stern alone lost DM 19 million in the scam.
Kujau's deception was lavish and ambitious, rivalled only by that of William Henry Ireland. Ireland is largely forgotten now, but he is notable because he was the only schoolboy ever to successfully forge an entire Shakespeare play and have it performed on a London stage. Ireland, born in 1777, was influenced by the literary forgers Chatterton and Macpherson and started out by forging the Bard's signature on a lease using blank sheets of paper taken from folios and quartos of the Elizabethan period and a special ink which had been treated to simulate age.
Flushed with success, he produced a Protestant Profession of Faith by William Shakespeare, the original manuscript of King Lear and a considerable portion of Hamlet. His crowning glory, at the age of 18, was a previously undiscovered blank verse play by Shakespeare, Vortigern, which Richard Sheridan presented at the Drury Lane theatre on April 2nd, 1796. It was its one and only performance. The play was so terrible that, as Ireland later wrote in his Confession, one prominent MP "was so exasperated by the pointed ill-conduct and buffoonery of Mr Phillimore, as to make several attempts to seize him by the robe..." The performance was also interrupted for 10 minutes when the audience collapsed into hysterics at the line "and when this solemn mockery is over..." Ireland's father was blamed for the creation of the forgeries, although his son eventually wrote a public confession admitting his own responsibility.
Lessing rejection
More in keeping with the spirit of Boyd's work is Doris Lessing's The Diary of a Good Neighbour, which Lessing submitted to her British publisher Michael Joseph in 1983 under the name `Jane Somer', only to have it rejected. When she revealed her authorship, both Michael Joseph and Knopf in the USA published the book, again retaining the name of Jane Somer as the author. Reviews and sales were poor, although a reappraisal was conducted when the true identity of the author was revealed.
William Boyd, therefore, is part of a long tradition of hoaxers, although Nat Tate, American Artist belongs to a select body of work which wears its dishonesty on its sleeve. It will be filed alongside my beloved, well-thumbed copy of The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew which contains a title page, the school motto of Agnew's high school, followed by 100 completely blank pages. Like Nat Tate, the book has only one joke but that joke only cost me a dollar. Nat Tate costs £10. Now who, exactly, is being conned here?