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Exactly 5 years ago Clifford Irving died, he was a writer and journalist sentenced to 2.5 years for falsifying the biography of Howard Hughes.
Clifford Irving, born in New York, lived for several years in Ibiza, where he met the famous painting forger Elemer Albert Hoffmann, then wanted by Interpol. Irving published a book of conversations with Elmyr entitled “Fake” which went on to become a bestseller list.
In Majorca Irving met Richard Suskind, a long-time friend and author of children’s books. They conceived the idea of writing a supposed autobiography of the entrepreneur Howard Hughes, who led a secretive and reclusive lifestyle. Hughes was originally a popular public figure, pursuing high-tech projects on behalf of the US military industrial complex (mainly aviation), he received a lot of media attention, and generally occupied a social niche similar to the one in which Elon Musk now finds himself. In the last decades of his life Hughes avoided any contact with the outside world.
Irving contacted his publisher and said that Hughes had corresponded with him, saying that he admired Irving’s book about Elmyr and expressed an interest in Irving taking dictation to write an autobiography of the millionaire.
The publisher contracted Irving for $765,000, they paid by cheques made out to “H. R. Hughes”, which Irving’s Swiss wife Edith transferred to a Swiss bank account she had opened in the name of “Helga R. Hughes”.
Hughes soon unexpectedly organised an audio conference with journalists, during which he claimed that the entire contents of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes had been fabricated from beginning to end. Irving questioned the authenticity of Hughes’ voice during the audio conference and tried to flee to Switzerland, but was detained and spent a total of 17 months behind bars. Soon after his release, Irving co-starred with Elmyr in the pseudo-documentary “F for Fake“, Orson Welles‘ last lifetime work.
Some time later, Irving laid out his version of events in the book “The hoax“, according to which: Hughes provided him with authentic material compromising Richard Nixon, among other things. But when Nixon complied with Hughes’ terms, buying into the blackmail when a future bestseller was already in print, the entrepreneur devalued the potential compromise with his audioconference. Allegedly, the autobiography itself was originally authentic.
Sixteen years ago this book was adapted into a Hollywood movie. Like the book, the film’s ending hints that the searches and wiretapping of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel were linked to President Nixon’s fears of additional discrediting evidence by Hughes. Notably, 20 years after the events, Samuel Dash, senior legal adviser to the congressional committee investigating the Watergate scandal, stated that the president’s administration was primarily interested in what Democrats might know about Nixon’s ties to billionaire Howard Hughes.
If this fake version of this events is true, then it turns out that The Autobiography of Howard Hughes was the original reason for the exposure and capture of Brother-in-law, also known as Howard Hunt, the fifth member of the Discordian Society
Exactly 46 years ago Elemér Albert Hoffmann (better known as Elmyr de Hory), a man who had been hunted by Interpol for many years, committed suicide on the island of Ibiza.
In August 1968 the Spanish government imprisoned a man on the island of Ibiza for creating a long series of sketches and paintings-beautiful, intensely lyrical works that Art Experts had universally proclaimed as masterpieces.
The imprisonment of this Maker of Masterpieces did not represent censorship in the ordinary erotic or religious sense. Nobody even accused the artist of Political Incorrectness. He got jugged for a technical matter-namely, that he had signed the wrong name to his works ... or several wrong names, in fact. Names like Picasso and Van Gogh and Modigliani and Matisse, for instance. He later collaborated (with Orson Welles, no less) on a film - F For Fake.
In fact, Fake! says Elmyr had painted over a thousand of the classics of modern art. Every time you walk through a museum and see a Picasso or a Matisse that you particularly like, you should stop and ask, “Now did Picasso or Matisse do that, or did Elmyr do it?”
Of course, not everybody believes that Elmyr committed quite as much great art as he gleefully confesses in the biography. Many Experts claim Fake! (a title to ponder, and ponder again) engaged in shameless bragging and exaggeration, to make Elmyr seem cleverer than the facts warrant.
Unfortunately, these Experts had-many of them-authenticated some of the fakes that Elmyr undoubtedly did paint. As Elmyr’s co-author, Cliff, says, these Experts do not want their cover blown-they don’t want us to know how often, and how easily, they have gotten duped by Elmyr and other skilled forgers.
We simply do not know the extent to which Elmyr has entered the canon. Maybe 2 per cent of the masterpieces in modern museums emanated from his wizard’s brush, as virtually everybody now admits. Maybe the figure (at least for post-impressionism, fauvism and early cubism, Elmyr’s specialties) runs as high as 25 per cent, or 50 per cent. … An ouvre of “more than a thousand” paintings might make up something in that percentage range of canonical 20th Century Classics. These implications appear heavily suggested in Irving’s Fake! and even more stressed in the Welles-Reichenbach film…
At the end of Welles’ F For Fake, after we have suffered prolonged doubt about how many Picassos should get reclassified as Elmyrs, one character cries passionately “I must believe, at least, that art is real!”But this voice of Faith and Tradition belongs to another art forger, one who allegedly faked even more of the canonical Renaissance masterpieces than Elmyr had faked of the canonical Modems. We cannot have faith in this faker’s faith …
In recent years appeared so-called "Fake Elmyrs", that is, paintings written by a new generation of falsifiers who forged Elmyr's fake paintings: http://web.archive.org/web/20180220053621/http://www.elmyr.net/fake-elmyrs.html
Here you could to watch Orson Wales's latest lifetime film "F For Fake", which captures the footage of Elmir's work on his fakes: https://archive.org/details/f-for-fake
Used Pope's Bob "Cosmic Trigger III" quotes: https://diasp.org/posts/14066336