Elmyr de Hory

Elmyr de Hory (born Hoffmann Elemér) (1905 – December 11, 1976) was a Hungarian-born painter and art forger who claimed to have sold over a thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. His forgeries garnered much celebrity from a Clifford Irving book, Fake!, and from F for Fake (1974), a documentary essay film by Orson Welles. Most of the information regarding de Hory's early life comes from what he told American writer Clifford Irving, himself a fraudster, who wrote the first biography about him. Since Elmyr's success was reliant upon his skills of deception and invention, it would be difficult to take the facts that he told about his own life at face value, as Clifford Irving himself admitted. Elmyr claimed that...