Martin Porkay

Martin Porkay (born March 4, 1890 in Murányalja Hungary , † April 8, 1967 in Feldafing ) was a Hungarian art expert.

Life

He was the son of the timber merchant Karl Porkay and Katharina Böhm, he was married to Clementine Haas. He was particularly interested in the works of Rembrandt . After dropping out of art history studies , he drew attention to himself by discovering overpainted and lost paintings by Rembrandt.

He ran his own gallery in Budapest from 1918 until the inflation in 1923 . Here he made the first discovery of a painted over Jacob Jordaens “The Fall of Man”. This painting was then donated by the banker Simon von Krausz to the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts ( Szépművészeti Múzeum ) and hangs there in a hall with the works of Rubens.

An example from Martin Porkay's book Rembrandt, other people and me : In 1937, the former American Chancellor of the Exchequer Mellon bought a Madonna by the Italian painter Masaccio for $ 395,000. The picture Mellon bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington seemed beyond doubt. But Porkay exposed it when it came into being in the 1920s in a Viennese counterfeiting workshop disguised as a “restoration studio”.

The weekly newspaper Die Zeit wrote in 1956 that “Porkay's opinion had already found the approval of many other professional art experts for years”. In the obituary of the Spiegel , however, it is implied that he sometimes prematurely committed to a judgment without closer examination.

In Josef von Sternberg's last silent film " The Case of Lena Smith " (1929, USA , Paramount Pictures ) he was hired as assistant director.

The Scourged Rembrandt Self-Portrait

Fake "self-portrait"

"The Flagellation of Christ" by Rembrandt

Martin Porkay discovered one of the most sensational Rembrandt forgeries. The well-known Swiss collector Emil Georg Bührle showed Porkay a “Rembrandt self-portrait” from 1658, which had come from an English private collection and which he had bought for almost a million Swiss francs. Porkay discovered signs of a forgery, but well-known experts voted for a real Rembrandt. The owner made the necessary examinations difficult. But Porkay identified what was generally thought to be “a workshop apron smeared with colorful paint stains” in the lower right corner of the picture with the stooped executioner figure from a Rembrandt scourging composition. So there were two pictures on the canvas. But now the owner claimed that two real Rembrandt pictures were lying on top of each other. Porkay also denied that. In painstaking research he contributed proof after proof that the "self-portrait" could only have been created by the upper class around 1800, in the vicinity of the English painter Joshua Reynolds . And finally, he recognized the flagellation of Christ as a copy of the real "Flagellation of Christ" that hangs in the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt . The Katz gallery, which had sold the picture at the time, tried in vain to refute Porkay. He published the "Scourged Rembrandt picture" in a book. A few days after the publication of this work, the forgery was confirmed by X-ray and color-chemical tests in the central laboratory of the Belgian museums.

Discovered forgery “Jan van Eyck” / Lord Rothermere Collection

Martin Porkay discovered a forgery in Lord Rothermere's private picture collection , which was loaned to the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts in 1938. This fake Jan van Eyck was immediately removed from the museum and sent to him at the request of Lord Rothermere.

Publications

• The adventures of two fake Rembrandts , Munich, Lama Verlag, 1963
• Der Drost -lose Rembrandt , Munich, Munich book trade house, 1961
• Rembrandt, other people and me , Wetzlar, Pegasus Verlag, 1959
• On the carousel of art , Munich, self-published, 1956
• The flagellated Rembrandt picture and other small studies on errors about Rembrandt , Stuttgart, self-published 1951

literature

• The scourged Rembrandt picture . In: Die Zeit , No. 2/1956
• Died . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1967 ( online - short obituary).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Martin Porkay: Rembrandt, other people and me. Pegasus, Wetzlar, second chapter
2. ↑ The Scourged Rembrandt Picture . In: Die Zeit , No. 2/1956
3. ↑ The case of Lena Smith, cast list (accessed January 9, 2019)
4. ↑ Martin Porkay: Rembrandt, other people and me. Pegasus, Wetzlar, sixth chapter