Announcement: Closing soon: Elmyr de Hory, Artist and Faker, at the Hillstrom Museum of Art
Give a gift to Hillstrom Museum of Art
The Hillstrom Museum of Art's current, popular exhibition Elmyr de Hory, Artist and Faker is on view for only a few more days, through Sunday, Apr. 18. The exhibit received a positive review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/art/87403012.html) and has been quite popular. The exhibition is accompanied by a free, illustrated catalogue. The Museum's regular hours are 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. weekdays and 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. weekends. Admission is free. For further information, see below or visit the Museum website at gustavus.edu/finearts/hillstrom.
EXHIBITION SUMMARY:
Elmyr de Hory, Artist and Faker features works by one of the most notorious art fakers of modern times, Elmyr de Hory (1906-1976), who is believed to have created hundreds of fakes of modern masters such as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) or Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) that were accepted into museums and prominent collections in the U.S. and abroad. Mark Forgy, who formed a close friendship with de Hory in the final years of his life, will lend works that the artist gave or bequeathed to him. Some of these were done in the style of other artists but signed with de Hory's own name, while others were in the artist's own style.
Forgy is collaborating with filmmaker Jeff Oppenheim to create a documentary, to be released in 2011 and titled Chasing Elmyr, on de Hory, who has been the subject of earlier significant biographies that include a 1969 study titled Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time, written by Clifford Irving (just before his own forgery, the spurious biography of Howard Hughes). Film studies on de Hory include Orson Welles' F for Fake (1972), a BBC documentary titled Elmyr, the True Picture? (1970), and a recent film by Norwegian Knut Jorfald titled Masterpiece or Forgery? The Story of Elmyr de Hory (1997).
In addition to around seventy paintings, drawings and prints by de Hory from Forgy's collection, the exhibition will also include a large portrait of de Hory and his brother Stephen as young children, painted by Hungarian Philip de L??szl?? (1869-1937), the highly popular portraitist whose other clients included Pope Leo XIII and many European royals and aristocrats. Also on view will be genuine works by two of the artists de Hory frequently forged (Matisse and Modigliani), lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, plus a fake Matisse from the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, to which it was donated for study purposes as a recognized de Hory forgery.
The exhibition is supported with a generous grant from the Carl and Verna Schmidt Foundatio