Objets d'Artifice

FAKE! by Clifford Irving. 243 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

For every credibility gap, there is an equal amount of gullibility fill. This is particularly true in the art market, where the stampede for status and dollar appreciation has helped to enrich art forgers and unscrupulous dealers.

Last year in Texas, 44 paintings in the collection of Dallas Oilman Algur Hurtle Meadows turned out to be phonies. Most duped collectors are usually so sore in their pride that they say nothing or try to recoup quietly. Others, who have unwittingly donated forgeries to museums for big tax write-offs, discover that discretion is the better part of value. Not A. H. Meadows. After publicly calling himself "Mr. Sap," he pressed charges. Investigations led to the discovery of one of the most successful art swindles in modern history.

Delicious Deception. Journalists had a field day. How delicious is the deception of the rich! What a blow for aesthetic egalitarianism! And what a cast of characters! Front men for the operation were a pair of homosexuals named Fernand Legros and Real Lessard. Legros, a French-Egyptian given to wearing snug suits lined in red silk, jetted around the world with his counterfeit wares while maintaining a lavish Paris apartment and an all-male harem. Legros's partner, Lessard, was a young Canadian with a handsome, honest face. On the road he was a cool con man too, but back home he became the frightened victim of Legros's infidelities and rages.

The most interesting member of the ring, however, was hardly more than a phantasm of pseudonyms: Von Houry / Herzog / Cassou / Hoffman / Raynal / Dory-Boutin. Actually he was a man named Elmyr de Hory, the artist responsible for counterfeiting the countless drawings, gouaches, watercolors and oils sold as Picassos, Matisses, Modiglianis, Braques, Derains, Monets, Legers, Dufys, Renoirs, Vlamincks and Van Dongens. Fake! is basically Elmyr de Hory's story as told to Novelist Clifford Irving (The Valley, The 38th Floor). It is an exuberant collage of skillful innuendo, succulent gossip, bitchery and elusive truths.

Born into a rich and landed Hungarian family, De Hory cruised Europe's capitals as a playboy artist during the '20s and '30s. He studied with Fernand Leger in Paris and brushed elbow patches with artists whose works he was to fake in years to come. Life was an amusement that ended abruptly with World War II. Totally apolitical, Elmyr was nevertheless shipped off to a Transylvanian concentration camp. "I was," he says with Magyar flair, "obviously too colorful a person for the safety of the state." He survived the Carpathian winter by painting the commandant's portrait--very slowly.

Penniless and stateless at the end of the war, Elmyr returned to Paris for some serious painting. In 1946, an English friend visited his studio and mistook one of his unsigned sketches for a Picasso. Fancying herself a bit of an expert, she offered to buy it. "Well, why not?" said Elmyr.

He was on his way. His sophisticated presence and strategic name-dropping, combined with the quality of his forgeries, quickly added up to a thriving yet surprisingly casual business. Whenever he was short of cash, De Hory would dash off a small portfolio of sketches or water colors, put on his one expensive suit and saunter into a gallery. A few dealers were suspicious. One threw Elmyr out of his gallery and chased him down the block.

Faced with the possibility of exposure De Hory migrated to America. The U.S.--especially Los Angeles--soon proved a land of bilk and money. He lived in the best hotels, drank at the smartest cocktail parties. Friends and acquaintances included Averell Harriman, Stanley Marcus, Jacques Path, Fanny Brice, Tennessee Williams, Wiley Buchanan and the Gabors. Elmyr prospered, bagging not only dealers and collectors but even Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, which bought a "Matisse" drawing.

It took the satanic charm and infernal appetites of Fernand Legros to transform Elmyr's gentlemanly one-man racket into a worldwide industry. Legros persuaded Elmyr to devote all his time to forgery and leave the selling to him. He soon turned the forger into an underpaid filler of rush-order masterpieces. The fringe benefits weren't too bad, however. Legros set Elmyr up in a clifftop villa with a pool and secret studio on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where the English-speaking colony included Clifford Irving. The setting was so attractive that the U.S. State Department tried to rent it briefly for Lynda Bird Johnson. Elmyr was willing until he learned that the party included four Secret Service men. "What do they think I am running here on Ibiza," he exclaimed, "some kind of flophouse for the fuzz?"

In the end, Legros's commercial and private indiscretions proved too much even for the art-market world, where many dealers and experts are often willing to be discreet for a price. The last days of the ring saw a cycle of brawls over who was cheating whom, Keystone-cop chases, indictments, Spanish jails and swift departures. Legros fled back to Egypt where, for all anyone knows, he has already sold a phony Chagall to Nasser. As for Elmyr, he is last seen in Fake! bound for Portugal, leaving his paint set behind.

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