Do you have my genuine fake Derain?

By STEPHEN NOHLGREN

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

The painting was propped against a wall in the musty reaches of a Goodwill store in Miami. It was an original oil landscape with bold brush strokes and outlandish colors.

I was fresh out of college, where I had studied a little 20th century art -- enough to know that the right garish painting could produce big bucks. And this one had an intriguing signature. It started with a "D" and ended with an "N" with four or five mushy letters in between.

"This could be a Derain," I told my then-wife. Derain had painted in the wild Fauve style at the beginning of the century. "This could be worth $100,000 or $200,000."

The year was 1971, way before the Florida lottery. Discovering a valuable painting in a second-hand store was a Big Score fantasy of mine, right up there with stumbling across a suitcase full of untraceable drug money.

We paid $5 for the painting and raced to the Miami Public Library to look up Andre Derain's signature.

Alas, an art book ended that dream. Derain signed his paintings with childlike simplicity, every letter distinct and unmistakeable.

Still, I really liked the painting. It was colorful, whimsical and could turn moody when you wanted it to. As my wife and I first set up housekeeping, it fit nicely with the used furniture, tie-dye wall hanging and concrete block bookcases that passed for decorations in our early, frugal, living quarters.

I would introduce it to visitors: "Do you want to see my $200,000 Derain?"

When we matured and moved to a tonier house, the painting became a bone of contention. I thought it still deserved prominent display. My wife thought it loud and undignified. The old wooden frame was unquestionably ugly. It ended up where our dogs slept, in a guest bedroom next to a detached garage.

Finally, in a move befitting I Love Lucy, my wife and her mother sold it at a garage sale while I wasn't looking.

Now I'm not here to tell you this loss of a favorite painting seared my psyche, but I find it more than a coincidence that after my divorce I was inexorably drawn to weekend garage sales, always on the lookout for original artwork -- the funkier the better.

I covered an entire family room wall with atrocious artwork. I had a Madonna and child, in which Mary had a halo, red lipstick and red fingernail polish. I had a huge, hooked-rug banana split. I had a wood carving of a sailing ship, with flags that flapped directly into the wind.

While foraging at one garage sale, I paid a few bucks for a book called FAKE!, a biography of Elmyr de Hory, perhaps the greatest art forger of all time.

De Hory was a Jewish Hungarian aristocrat and would-be artist who lived in Paris in the 1920s. He hobnobbed with Picasso, Matisse, Van Dongen, Modigliani, Vlaminck and Derain.

During World War II, De Hory's parents were killed and the family riches confiscated. He was stranded in Paris with no allowance -- but an undiminished taste for high living.

According to his account, a rich friend mistook one of his line drawings on his wall for a Picasso. She offered him 40 British pounds for it and resold it to a London art dealer for 150 pounds.

That launched a 20-year forgery career. Never successful with his own work, De Hory cranked out a prodigious body of fakery. He could mimic almost all of his old acquaintances. To sell his fakes, he'd drop hints that his father had amassed a private collection in the 1930s that was later smuggled out of Hungary.

He sold to art dealers and museums. His work started showing up in art books as originals. He forged so many Dufys that an expert once rejected two real Dufys as fraudulent because he mistakenly assumed that De Hory's hand and style were the correct ones.

He finally was caught in 1967 and spent a few months in a Spanish jail.

I was halfway through this fascinating tale in FAKE! a few years ago when the text gave way to color photographs of De Hory's work. Smack in the middle, there it was. My painting. My Goodwill beauty. The caption read: "Andre Derain: Les arbres. Painted by Elmyr in 1964."

The only difference between my painting and the book's painting was the signature. In the book, Derain is spelled out plain as can be.

The way I figure it, whoever owned my painting when De Hory was unmasked must have scratched over the signature to avoid future misunderstandings, given it away and taken a tax write-off.

But how did it end up in the Miami Goodwill?

I tried to contact FAKE!'s author, Clifford Irving, but he was traveling out of the country. (Yes, that's the same Clifford Irving who later wrote an elaborate but totally bogus autobiography of billionaire Howard Hughes, collected a $500,000 advance and was imprisoned for fraud.)

Trying to trace the history of my painting is not just an idle exercise. De Hory became such a cause celebre that his fakes became valuable in their own right. A California gallery held a De Hory exhibition in 1985, asking $10,000 to $15,000 apiece for his fakes.

Fake fakes even started appearing on the market, artists pretending to be De Hory pretending to be Picasso or Derain or whomever. I've considered whether mine is one of those, but I don't think so. I stared at my painting for hours over the years. Every line is perfect.

So I put it to you. Take a look at the photograph with this story. Does anyone out there have my genuine fake Derain?

When you bought it at that fateful garage sale, did you think you had scored big? ("Pssst, honey, I think this is a Derain. This could be worth $200,000").

Or did you just need an ugly piece of art to dress up your dog's sleeping area?

I'd like to hear from you, if for no other reason than closure. If the painting is truly worth something, that would be fun to find out. If not, I'll give you $5 for it. Okay, make it $10, or double whatever you paid at the garage sale.

To assure that you have my genuine fake and not a fake fake, here's a little quiz: Roughly when and where did you buy it? And what color was that awful frame?

Do you have a story to tell?

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