Page 85 - Studio International - July August 1970

movement was a point in time. It was laughed Réal Lessard and Fernand Legros, for huge
at by the public, rejected by aesthetes, used sums, only a small proportion of which he
by the mass media as a useful source of easy managed to retain. Between 1961 and 1967
shock-effects. Yet despite my reservations as for instance the trio apparently disposed of
to its non-poetic activities, its practitioners some sixty million dollars worth of paintings
showed courage in their rejection of the mores to a variety of clients ranging from gullible
of their age. They were numerically few, millionaires to shrewd art dealers and
thought to be mad, and yet for the most part scholarly museum directors—the Japanese
resolutely bit any hand that tried to pin a National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo
medal on them. I have called the protesting spent, with the approval of André Malraux,
young 'their heirs', but only a comparative who happened to be there at the time, nearly
handful of the revolutionary students are a quarter of a million dollars on acquiring
aware of their progenitors. Surrealism has works by Derain, Dufy and Modigliani, which
worked like a virus. It is this book's perverse de Hory had produced in a Spanish hotel
refusal to acknowledge the separation bet- bedroom some two years previously. Modig-
ween the movement's conscious hermetic liani's daughter, Van Dongen himself and the
period, and its contemporary flowering on a experts of the Parke-Bernet Galleries all
world-wide scale, which makes it seem no provided certificates of authenticity for
more than a nostalgic snapshot album. q forged works.
GEORGE MELLY Yet these forgeries were produced with the
minimum of expertise. Not for de Hory the
Faux de mieux painstaking skill of a Van Meegeren, with all
his technical ingenuity and stylistic adroit-
Fake! by Clifford Irving. 243pp. Illus.
ness. Most of these Picassos and the like which
Heinemann. 45s.
found their way onto the art market were
For anyone who has a strong literary stomach based merely on a close inspection of colour
this is a rewarding, a significant, a baffling slides and reproductions in art books. A few
and a provocative book. The stomach is were actual reproductions with the printer's
needed to digest the style in which it is stamp cunningly removed. All of them seem—
written. If one can imagine the author of The though perhaps hindsight is a great teacher—
Prisoner of Zenda collaborating with Godfrey obvious pastiches, flabby and overpopularised
Winn to produce what the subtitle describes versions of those elements in the work of the
as 'The story of Elmyr de Hory, the greatest artists which they parody which appeal to the
Art Forger of our time' as a novelette for most debased elements in current taste.
serialisation in Woman's Own one would get a The real problems involved however are
fairly accurate notion of Mr Irving's prose. connected with the motivation of the forger
A predilection for the historic present, a and of those who are deceived. And both are
resolute avoidance of oratio obliqua (`Fernand connected with those concepts of 'the personal
looked genuinely concerned, "You are a touch' and of private copyright which so
maitre, now" he went on, "a master" ') ; a many developments in contemporary art are
penchant for the cliché-ridden sentence seriously undermining. When people buy
(` "Mon cher, you'll get into terrible trouble", works of art they seem to feel that they are
Fernand explained, tapping his fingers ner- buying something of the person of the artist;
vously on the table') and a passion for the arch the anonymous has little appeal, and even
and the whimsical (` "What do they think?", though Rubens, for instance, produced paint-
Elmyr exclaimed to some young friends— ings on a kind of assembly line in which he
with hauteur proper to a Hungarian baron and was often only minimally involved, it is
lingo appropriate to a man who had been essential that everything which bears the hall-
wanted for ten years by the FBI — "I am run- mark of his style should be certified as
ning here on Ibiza some kind of flophouse authentic. Money has become the sanctifying
for the fuzz ?" ') make the reading of this book agent which gives an artifact its meaning and
an almost exquisite torment. But it is worth its relevance to the person who buys it. Paint-
it, for the story it tells touches us all; it involves ings are the cult-objects of our time—like the
the very nature of contemporary art. Elmyr relics of the Middle Ages—and it is inevitable
de Hory is a man of our time. A homosexual that they should attract the attention of the
half-Jewish artist, born in Hungary in the cultural con-man, the aesthetic spiv. Every
early years of this century, forced by historical act of appreciation involves the Petrine cry
and personal compulsions to live on his wits, of anguish, 'Lord, I believe, help thou my un-
virtually stateless, uncertain of his personal as belief'. The duped and the duper are linked
well as of his national identity, he moves in a in a curiously intimate relationship and a
strange half-world of pimps, confidence character such as Algur Hurtle Meadows
tricksters, Dallas oilmen and art dealers like who endowed the Southern Methodist Uni-
a Genet of the jet set. In the course of some versity in Dallas with 15 Dufys, 7 Modigli-
twenty years he has produced forgeries of anis, 5 Vlamincks, 8 Derain, 3 Matisses,
paintings and drawings by practically every 1 Chagall, 1 Degas, 1 Marquet, 1 Laurencin,
modern artist of economic repute selling 1 Gauguin and 1 Picasso all painted by de
them through the agency of two 'friends', Hory, goes far to forfeiting our sympathy
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