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Stuart Little leads art historian to long-lost Hungarian masterpiece | Stuart Little leads art historian to long-lost Hungarian masterpiece |
(about 4 hours later) | |
A long-lost avant garde painting has returned to Hungary after nine decades thanks to a sharp-eyed art historian, who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film Stuart Little. | |
Gergely Barki, 43, a researcher at Hungary’s national gallery in Budapest, noticed Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Róbert Berény as he watched television with his daughter Lola in 2009. | |
“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Bereny’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie. I nearly dropped Lola from my lap,” said Barki. “A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home.” | |
The painting disappeared in the 1920s, but Barki recognised it immediately even though he had only seen a faded black-and-white photo from an exhibition in 1928. | |
He sent a flurry of emails to staff at the film’s makers, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, and received a reply from a former set designer on the film – two years later. | |
“She said the picture had been hanging on her wall,” Barki said. | |
“She had snapped it up for next to nothing in an antiques shop in Pasadena, California, thinking its avant garde elegance was perfect for Stuart Little’s living room.” | “She had snapped it up for next to nothing in an antiques shop in Pasadena, California, thinking its avant garde elegance was perfect for Stuart Little’s living room.” |
After leaving Sony, she sold the painting to a private collector who has now brought the picture to Budapest for sale by auction. | |
Berény, the leader of a pre-first world war avant garde movement called the Group of Eights, fled to Berlin in 1920 after designing recruitment posters for Hungary’s short-lived communist revolution in 1919. | |
In the German capital, he had a romance with the actor Marlene Dietrich, and – according to Barki – is also rumoured to have had a fling with Anastasia, the mysterious daughter of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II. | |
Berény’s painting will be sold on 13 December, with a starting price of around €110,000 (£87,000), staff at the Virag Judit auction house said. | |
According to Barki, the buyer at the 1928 exhibition, who was possibly Jewish, is likely to have left Hungary before or during the second world war. | |
“After the wars, revolutions and tumult of the 20th century, many Hungarian masterpieces are lost, scattered around the world,” he said. | “After the wars, revolutions and tumult of the 20th century, many Hungarian masterpieces are lost, scattered around the world,” he said. |
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