Fake! A Story from the Archives

So, there was Old Ken in a certain library the other day. This library was hosting a book sale where my eye happened to fall upon the book represented above: Fake by Clifford Irving. Price? $2! Now, as you must know by now, forgeries and faking is a topic of no small interest to Old Ken, so I had to have a look.

You can imagine my delight as I read the opening paragraph of the first chapter, which goes like this:

"In the summer of 1961, ... a dapper, middle-aged, expatriate Hungarian bachelor gentleman calling himself Elmyr Dory-Boutin rented a comfortable suburban house on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Ibiza. His hair was dyed an apparently ageless jet black, he sported a monocle on a gold chain, all his sweaters were of cashmere, and during his seven-year residence on the island he came to wear a wristwatch from Cartier and drive a red Corvette Stingray convertible." (p. 3)

Obviously, you can imagine that Old Ken would like the cut of this man's jib!



Well, it turns out that our bachelor gentleman is less Hungarian royalty than a forger of Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro and others named Elmyr de Hory who was hiding out on Ibiza to avoid extradition.



As if that were not enough, it turns out that stuffed into this particular copy of Mr. Irving's fine book is a packet of documents including a letter from one Kendrick Talbot of London. Basically, the story is this: Talbot was a London book-maker who had made a fortune in the gambling business before retiring to Ibiza in the 1960s. There, he met de Hory, a compulsive gambler and spendthrift. Because De Hory was constantly losing money to Talbot, he would give Talbot the supposedly-authentic modernist paintings he claimed to be collecting as collateral against his debts.



Well, after de Hory's hoax was exposed in the 1970s, Talbot who claimed not to "know a painting from a bar of soap" sought to bring the paintings to market as "authentic fakes" or real de Horys.



As you can see, some of these are more convincing than others. While the "Modigliani" at upper right here is fairly respectable, the supposed Toulous-Lautrec below it is hopeless.



Anyway, the photos reproduced here were attached with the letter as Talbot was trying to hawk the paintings represented to one Mr. Jack Glenn of Long Beach at the prices denoted above. The epigraph to the book by our Mr. Clifford Irving - - who, interestingly enough, was put in jail for writing a libelous biography of Howard Hughes - - says it all: "If fools did not go to market, cracked pots and false wares would not be sold."