How Stuart Little Found a Missing Painting
Sorry, the title is a little click bait-y but it was too cute to resist! In 1928 a painting done by an avant-garde Hungarian painter vanished, leaving no trace behind. It wasn’t until Christmas 2009, and one very important movie viewing, that this mystery started to be unraveled.
Róbert Berény
So, first we have to go back and talk about this painting and who the heck Róbert Berény is (PSA, he’s the artist) before we talk about how Stuart Little comes into this. So for those who don’t know, myself included before this research, Róbert Berény was a huge deal in Hungary. He was one of the core members of the pre-First World War avant-garde movement known as The Eight. They were inspired by impressionists while also being influenced by cubists and expressionists.
In the early 1900s Berény studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris and he was surrounded by famous names. He exhibited alongside Matisse and was friends with Gertrude Stein. Eventually he brought this wealth of experience and knowledge back home to Budapest and this is when The Eight was born.
In 1920 Berény, along with other writers and artists associated with the regime, fled their homeland when the short-lived communist state collapsed. It only lasted 133 days. He first moved to Berlin where it’s rumoured he had an affair with Marlene Dietrich and even one with Princess Anistasia (daughter of Tzar Nicholas II of Russia). Berlin is also where he met his second wife, and muse, cellist Eta Breuer.
Berény painted Eta obsessively, she features as the subject of a large number of his paintings. Because of the avant-garde style and the intimate feelings his paintings exuded they were highly fashionable and therefore very in-demand.
In 1926 Berény and Eta moved back to Budapest and Berény stayed there for the rest of his life. In 1941 they were evicted from their house by Nazis, because they were Jewish, and they went into hiding for the duration of the war. After it was over Berény worked as a teacher at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, dying in 1953.
That’s a broad overview of his life. Throughout it, of course, he created many many paintings but the one that we’re interested in today is Sleeping Lady with Black Vase. Not a lot is known about its origins but it’s believed that Berény painted it between 1927 and 1928. It naturally features his wife and was most likely painted in their home. The painting was exhibited a few times, the last time it was known to be exhibited was at the National Salon at an exhibition run by the Munkácsy Guild (that detail is important so stick that in your back pocket). After this exhibition the painting seems to disappear. There’s no paper trail to indicate a sale, there are no records of where it goes, it just seems to vanish.
Gergely Barki and Stuart Little
Now let’s fast forward to 2009. Sleeping Lady with Black Vase has been forgotten about by society in general, no one is searching for this obscure painting. It was Christmas time in 2009 and Gergely Barki, a researcher at the Hungarian National Gallery, sits down to watch Stuart Little with his young daughter Lola.
They’re enjoying the movie together when Barki sees something that nearly makes him drop Lola off his lap. It only appears for a second in a few scenes of the movie but he’s sure that the painting hanging over the fireplace in the Little’s living room is Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Róbert Berény. Barki has only ever seen a black and white photo of the painting before it went missing but the more times they show it in the film the more certain he becomes that it’s the real painting, it’s too obscure of a piece for the movie to have commissioned a recreation.
Barki said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Berény’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie…A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home” (The Guardian, 2014). Immediately Barki went into detective mode, sending emails to everyone he could find that was connected to the movie. He never got a response.
UNTIL two years later. The former set designer’s assistant from Stuart Little finally responded to his email and told him that after filming wrapped she had purchased it from the studio for next to nothing and it had been hanging in her apartment in Washington D.C. since then. She told Barki that she had originally purchased the painting for $500 from an antiques shop in Pasadena, California because she thought the elegant aesthetic fit the Little’s house. After the movie was finished filming the painting made the rounds on a few soap operas before the assistant purchased it from the film studio.
A year after this initial conversation, Barki went to meet the assistant and view the painting for himself. He traveled from Hungary to Washington D.C. and they met up in a park at a hot dog stand. Barki told the assistant all about the painting and the artist and said there was just one more thing he needed to do to confirm its authenticity. He borrowed a screwdriver from the hot dog stand owner and removed the protective backing from the frame. Underneath was the 1928 stamp from the Munkácsy Guild (remember, who ran the last exhibition the painting was ever seen at). This confirmed that the lost painting had been found.
Not only was the painting found, it eventually made its way home. The assistant sold the painting to a private collector who brought it back to Budapest where it was sold through the Judit Virág Gallery on December 13, 2014, for $285,700. Because of how this painting was rediscovered, it’s now one of the most famous Hungarian paintings.
But Where did the Painting Disappear To?
So it’s great that the painting was recovered, and that it’s back in Hungary, but people were still extremely puzzled by its long disappearance. Where could it have gone for so long and then just randomly popped up in California. Well, there are some theories.
The first theory is simple, when the Nazis evicted Berény and his wife from their home in 1941 they also seized and kept Sleeping Lady with Black Vase like they did to some of his other paintings. However, this is deemed as the least likely theory because the painting was last seen in 1928 so where had it been for the intervening 13 years?
The next idea that some people believe is that Anna, Berény and Eta’s daughter had the painting smuggled to her, in the United States, by her mother after she left Hungary. This theory also doesn’t have much backing because there’s no evidence of this and Anna was living in poverty in the US so why wouldn’t she have sold the painting if she truly had it. And if she had sold the painting the paper trail would have resumed at that point.
The final theory I came across, which Barki deems as most likely, is that the painting was sold at the 1928 exhibition run by the Munkácsy Guild. Likely, if the buyer was Jewish, they would have fled the country before or during WWII taking the painting with them. Therefore it would have ended up somewhere else in the world amid the chaos of that time period.
Through his investigations the only thing that Barki was able to determine for certain was that in the mid-1990s (before the painting was purchased for Stuart Little) an art collector named Michael Hempstead purchased it for $40 at a charity auction at the St. Vincent de Paul auction house in San Diego, California. The price was so low because someone had donated the painting. He owned it for a while until he learned that Berény paintings were selling for $400-$500 so he sold it to the antique shop in Pasadena for $400 where the set designer assistant would later purchase it.
So we still don’t know anything about where the painting was for almost 100 years and maybe we’ll never know. But Barki says that now he watches movies VERY differently.
Works Cited
Locker, Melissa. “Lost Painting Discovered by Art Historian while Watching Stuart Little”. Vanity Fair. 2014. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/11/stuart-little-leads-to-lost-painting
“Stuart Little Leads Art Historian to Long Lost Hungarian Masterpiece”. The Guardian. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/27/stuart-little-art-historian-long-lost-hungarian-masterpiece
Walker, Jennifer. “How Stuart Little Uncovered an Avant-Garde Masterpiece Missing for Almost a Century”. Messy Nessy. 2023. https://www.messynessychic.com/2023/05/12/how-stuart-little-helped-recover-a-missing-masterpiece-lost-for-almost-a-century/#:~:text=It%20appears%20to%20be%20a,a%20paper%20trail%20in%20sight