The Spanish Forger

Examines how four volumes of invented "truths" about Sp[anish sacred histiory radically transformed the religious landscape in Counter-Reformation Spain. Explores the history, author, and legacy of the Cronicones, alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 and not definitively exposed as forgeries until centuries later.

An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor. José Federico Burgos is a failed painter turned forger trapped in surreal, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins—Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque.

In the late 1960s Elmyr (pronounced el-MEER) de Hory was the world's most talented-and most successful art forger-ever. For over 20 years his bogus masterpieces filtered into prestigious collections on five continents. In 1967 his chicanery ended in a scandal that rocked the art world, although this monocle-wearing charmer's artful deception did not end there. He seduced most everyone he met, counting Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth, and Orson Welles among his friends. As a young American Midwesterner, I fell under his spell when I met Elmyr in 1969 on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, becoming his personal assistant while he became my mentor and closest friend. His hilltop villa was my university where, beyond the glamour of the rich and famous, the people I met seemed to spring from the mind of Lewis Carroll, and life appeared LSD-inspired in its strangeness. Elmyr also had deeper secrets than anyone knew.This memoir is a coming-of-age journey of discovery providing the most personal account of this "famously infamous" faker that finally untangles the longstanding mythology about his life. It is a story marked by outrageous humor, tragedy, love, and search for the truth as seen through the eyes of his prot�g�-the Forger's Apprentice.