A long-lost avant-garde painting has returned home 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.
In 2009 Gergely Barki, a researcher at Hungary’s National Gallery, noticed Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Robert Bereny (1888-1953) in the 1999 kids’ movie about a mouse as he watched TV with his daughter Lola.
“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,” Barki, 43, told AFP on Thursday.
Photo: AFP, Ferenc Isza
“A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home,” he said.
The painting disappeared in the 1920s but Barki recognized it immediately even though he had only seen a faded black-and-white photo dating from a 1928 exhibition archived in the National Gallery.
Barki sent a flurry of emails to staff at the film’s makers Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, receiving a reply from a former Sony employee, a set designer — two years later.
“She said the picture was hanging on her wall,” Barki told AFP.
“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, the set-designer sold the painting to a private collector who has now brought the picture to Budapest for auction.
Bereny, the leader of a pre-World War I 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 actress Marlene Dietrich, and, according to Barki, a rumoured fling with Anastasia, the mysterious daughter of Russia’s last tsar Nicholas II.
Bereny’s painting goes under the hammer Dec. 13 with a starting price of around 110,000 euros (US$137,350), staff at the Virag Judit auction house told AFP.
According to Barki, the buyer at the 1928 exhibition, possibly Jewish, probably left Hungary in the run-up to, or during, World War II.
“After the wars, revolutions, and tumult of the 20th century many Hungarian masterpieces are lost, scattered around the world,” he said.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and