Bureau of Lost Culture23 Juni 2025

The Forger's Apprentice

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 works that had been sold as by Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Derand, Duffy, and various other modern masters, and many of which remain undetected in institutions and private collections around the world. But does it matter if we believe it's a Picasso and we enjoy it as such? Mark Forgy came to Europe as a 20-year-old backpacker in 1969, bumped into Elmyr on a quayside in Ibiza, and lived with him for seven of the years between his exposure as the greatest art forger of all time in 1967 and his suicide in 1976. It was a whirlwind life of culture, glamour, intrigue, Hollywood stars, dodgy writers, and psychopathic villains, all of which can be glimpsed in the extraordinary Orson Welles film ‘F For Fake’. Welles visited Elmyr in Ibiza and used his life for a meditation on the poetry of what 'fake' means, of what truth means, of what facts mean in comparison with a good story, a great image, an extraordinary performance. Mark came to the Bureau to tell us all about it and to muse on whether the products of Elmyr's undeniable genius were really any less authentic than the art world itself. In our time of fakery, epic frauds, fake news, fake gurus, fake identities, deep fakes, 'my truth not THE truth', feelings over facts, a time when the distinction between Reality and AI-generated content is getting very difficult to spot, this story seems very prescient.. Mark's book The Forger's Apprentice Orson Welles' 'F For Fake' Photographs courtesy Mark Forgy/

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