COURTESY WIKIPEDIA
Over at the Financial Times, Georgina Adam reports that a New Zealand auction house has withdrawn two lots said to be forged Monets by legendary forger Elmyr de Hory (subject of Orson Welles’s F For Fake), which were in fact forgeries of De Hory forgeries.
Confused? See below, from her story:
This month a New Zealand auction house was forced to withdraw two “Monets” by the renowned forger Elmyr de Hory from sale – because they turned out to be “fake fakes”. The two soft-focus impressionist paintings, “At Giverny” and “In the Woods at Giverny” were catalogued as by Elmyr de Hory and estimated at a gentle NZ$1,000 each (about £500). They had reportedly come from the estate of bookmaker Ken Talbot, who supposedly owned hundreds of “genuine” De Horys. But according to Mark Forgy, De Hory’s bodyguard and heir, speaking to the New Zealand Herald, Talbot wasn’t above ripping off his hero’s work himself.
Adam writes that a geniune De Hory Cézanne sold for $11,000 in 2005. Read more at the FT.