Art rediscovered in ‘Stuart Little’ goes under hammer
'Sleeping Lady with Black Vase,' which may have belonged to Jewish owner before WWII, goes on auction block
BUDAPEST — A long-lost avant-garde painting was to go under the auction hammer Saturday in Hungary, years after a sharp-eyed art historian rediscovered it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film “Stuart Little”.
Following intense media coverage, the sale of “Sleeping Lady with Black Vase” by Hungarian artist Robert Bereny was being held in the Budapest Convention Centre.
Its reserve price was set at 110,000 euros ($137,000), with bidding set to begin at 1700 GMT.
The painting’s emergence from obscurity began in 2009 when Gergely Barki, a researcher at Hungary’s National Gallery spotted it in the 1999 children’s film about a mouse as he watched with his daughter Lola.
“I could not 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, told AFP previously.
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.
Bereny, the leader of a pre-World War I avant-garde movement called “The Eight”, fled to Berlin in 1920 after designing recruitment posters for Hungary’s short-lived communist revolution in 1919.
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.