Arte Developing Series on the Hunt for Art Con Man Fernand Legros, Starring Guillaume Gallienne

The art market continues to provide fertile ground for television drama. Arte has announced the development of a series chronicling the manhunt for Fernand Legros, the Franco-Egyptian art dealer who became, in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most flamboyant figures in the history of art fraud. French actor and director Guillaume Gallienne, a longtime associate of the Comédie-Française, has been cast to play the charismatic swindler.

According to reporting by Beaux Arts Magazine, the Franco-German channel has greenlit the project, though no broadcast date or episode count has been disclosed yet. The series will focus on the international pursuit mounted by investigators to catch Legros, whose schemes shook the Western art market to its core.

Fernand Legros became notorious for selling hundreds of forged paintings falsely attributed to modern masters such as Matisse and Modigliani over nearly two decades. The works were in fact painted by Hungarian forger Elmyr de Hory, for whom Legros acted as chief accomplice and dealer. Together, the pair deceived collectors, galleries and experts across Europe and the United States before the scandal broke in the early 1970s, triggering criminal proceedings and an international manhunt.

The affair has already inspired several books and Orson Welles's 1973 documentary "F for Fake," which examined Elmyr de Hory's career as a forger. By telling the story from the perspective of the chase, Arte taps into a wider trend of dramas exploring the murky underside of the art trade, a genre enjoying renewed interest from both audiences and broadcasters. Gallienne's casting, given his knack for portraying ambiguous and larger-than-life characters, suggests a treatment that will be both dramatic and satirical of this little-known chapter in 20th-century art history.

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Written by the ADM desk based on Beaux Arts Magazine. Read the original article for the full story.