It’s Christmas 2009. Ten years after the family movie Stuart Little was released, a Hungarian art historian named Gergely Barki is watching the film on television with his daughter Lola.
Gergely Barki worked at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest and was writing a biography of the famous Hungarian painter, Róbert Berény. Berény was part of The Eight, an avant-garde group of painters active in Budapest in the early 1900s. “They essentially formed the core of modernist experimentation, and were part of radical intellectual currents in music and literature, as well.” (Wikipedia)
Berény moved to Berlin in 1919, where he allegedly had a romance with actress Marlene Dietrich. According to The Guardian, he was also rumoured to have had a fling with Anastasia Romanov, the mysterious daughter of the last Russian Tsar. Given she died in 1918 at the age of 17, and I couldn’t find a record of Berény being in Russia or Anastasia in Hungary, I’m not sure that anecdote can be true. (Does The Guardian need more fact-checkers?) Perhaps he had a fling with one of the women who claimed to be Anastasia? That’s more likely. He was also 14 years her senior, so: gross.
Anyway Berény returned to Hungary in 1926, and sometime during 1927-1928 he painted Sleeping Lady with a Black Vase. It was exhibited at the Ernst Museum and was then sold. So far a fairly standard path for a piece of art.
Except it then wasn’t seen or properly recognised for nine decades, until Barki spotted it on the wall of the Littles’ home in Stuart Little. Barki was far too young to have seen the painting in real life; he recognised it from a mere faded black and white photograph of the 1928 exhibition.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Berény’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie. I nearly dropped Lola from my lap,” said Barki [in an article in The Guardian]. “A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home.”
Barki wasn’t able to pause or record the movie, but it appeared in several scenes so it wasn’t just a fleeting glance, luckily. Because the painting was not well known, Barki believed it was likely to be the original rather than a print.
I sometimes wonder what it might be like to have that level of expertise in something. To be able to spot a painting in the background of a kid’s film, and recognise it from a small black and white image. Was he on the alert for this painting, and perhaps several others, too? Or was he simply that knowledgeable that he was able to identify the Sleeping Lady? I don’t have that sort of expertise in anything, so I find it a marvel, an impressive feat of recognition and knowing, to be able to identify something from a glimpse in the background of a movie, while watching television at Christmastime. Set designers would no doubt be thrilled someone paid such close attention.
Barki immediately went into detective mode, contacting Sony and Columbia to try and track down the painting. It was two years befoe he received a reply, from one of the assistants on the film who’d purchased the painting from an antique store in Pasadena, California, for $500. It was sold as a Berény, just not valued very highly. The assistant who bought it for the movie liked it so much they bought it back when filming ended. The painting had also, during it’s time as a movie prop, appeared in some soap opera episodes. One theory is that the original buyer, back in 1928, viewing it at the Ernst Museum exhibibtion, was Jewish, and had fled Hungary with their belongings either during or leading up to World War II.
Barki travelled to the United States to identify the painting. It was then sold to an art collector who sold it by auction to a Hungarian collector, for €229,500 in 2014. Because the discovery of the painting was so unusual (I mean, Stuart Little? Of all films.) it’s now one of the most well-known Hungarian paintings.
It’s a strange and particular kind of fantasy, impossible to resist when you hear stories like this, somehow coming into possession of something rare and valuable. We’re not all Barki’s, but many of us have shopped in thrift shops or garage sales or antique stores. Who knows if a painting or a vase we have picked up could be worth something. It’s the entire premise of the Antiques Roadshow, which has been running for forty-five seasons. This article has a few such examples of miracle antique finds.
I don’t know that I would ever be likely to find such a thing. I don’t particularly like Sleeping Lady with a Black Vase, neither expressionism or cubism are really my thing, so I wouldn’t have bought it off my workplace to hang in my apartment like that set assistant did. I’m not the avant-garde type. I wouldn’t pay anything for a Pollock, except for the fact of it being a Pollock. Perhaps investing in a little art history knowledge or secondhand shopping would be wiser than buying a lotto ticket.