Imagine that you are writing a book. Not just any, beware, you are immersed in telling the story of an artist surrounded by mystery and to whom myths are attributed as having been a couple of the even more mythical Anastasiathe daughter of the last Russian tsar.
Consider that you are writing a chapter on one of his latest works, a lost painting that disappeared without a trace, and that while you rest from typing so many keys you start watching a movie to disconnect. And suddenly, in the parlor of a talking mouse, there is the lost painting you were researching about the artist you are writing about.
Las obras perdidas de Róbert Berény
With something less fantasy but an equally surreal situation, the historian came across Gergely Barki from the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. The artist he wrote about was the Hungarian Robert Berenya painter recognized worldwide for his contribution to expressionism and cubism.
Never ask a Hungarian what he was doing between 1939 and 1945, but in this case Bereny he was one of those who was not too happy with the rise of fascism and World War II. After supporting the communist revolution of the 1920s and becoming a poster artist, much of his work was destroyed in 1945 in retaliation for being a Jew, shortly before the end of the war.
In that attack it was assumed that we had lost forever “Sleeping woman with a black vase“, a picture of Bereny which had been lost track of in 1928 after being exhibited on a couple of occasions.
But there was a historian who had another theory about the painting. She believed that in that last art show someone had been sold to pay for the busy life of Bereny. And sitting down to watch a children’s movie with her daughter at Christmas 2008, she was about to agree with him.
A sleeping woman with a black vase and a talking mouse
Resting between Geena Davis and Hugh Larie as a mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox strolls by, a tableau too similar to “Sleeping woman with a black vase” to be pure coincidence, decorate the room of the set of Stuart Little.
Far from seeming like a mirage or coincidence, the painting can be seen several times during different scenes and Barki can’t help but get more and more excited with each new appearance. She automatically tries to get in touch with everyone who had been making the film nine years before and, by chance, she manages to find its current owner.
An assistant had bought the painting at some random antiques dealer in California for 500 dollars to give the film’s set a more chic look and, in love with the painting, she bought it from the studio to hang in her apartment when filming finished.
It is unknown how the painting got to the United States, but the theory that someone bought it and fled to the other side of the world to flee from Nazism wins here several integers. After being sold to an art dealer and auctioned for $285,700“Sleeping woman with a black vase” to be exhibited, this time safe from mice and thrift shops, at the Hungarian National Museum
