BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE – The Forger’s Apprentice (21/06/2025)
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 paintings that had been sold as works 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.
But does it matter if I believe it’s a Picasso and I 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 seven 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 that featured in the extraordinary Orson Welles film ‘F For Fake’.
Mark came to the Bureau to tell us about it and to muse on whether the products of Elmyr’s undeniable genius were any more fake than the art world itself.
