Elmyr de Hory - Early Life

Early Life

Most of the information regarding de Hory's early life comes from what he told American writer Clifford Irving, himself a fraudster, who wrote the first biography about him. Since Elmyr's success was reliant upon his skills of deception and invention, it would be difficult to take the facts that he told about his own life at face value, as Clifford Irving himself admitted. Elmyr claimed that he was born into an aristocratic family, that his father was an Austro-Hungarian ambassador and that his mother came from a family of bankers. However, subsequent investigation has suggested that Elmyr's childhood was, more likely, of an ordinary, middle class variety. His parents left him to the care of various governesses and were divorced when Elmyr was sixteen.

Elmyr moved to Budapest, Hungary to study. At 18, he joined the Akademie Heinmann art school in Munich, Germany to study classical painting. In 1926 he moved to Paris, and enrolled in the Académie la Grande Chaumière, where he studied under Fernand Léger and became accustomed to fine living.

Shortly after his return to Hungary, he became involved with a British journalist and suspected spy. This friendship landed him in a Transylvanian prison for political dissidents in the Carpathian Mountains. During this time, de Hory befriended the prison camp officer by painting his portrait. Later, during the Second World War, de Hory was released.

Within a year, de Hory was back in jail, this time imprisoned in a German concentration camp for being both a Jew and a homosexual (while his homosexuality was proven over time, investigation into his past has shown the likelihood that Elmyr was not Jewish, but instead was christened as a Calvinist). He was severely beaten and was transferred to a Berlin prison hospital, where he escaped and later slipped back into Hungary. It was there he learned that his parents had been killed and their estate confiscated. With his remaining money de Hory bribed his way back into France, where he tried to earn his living by painting.