Please Provide Provenance

Following World War I, and the collapse Austro-Hungarian Empire, the country of Hungary went through a couple of years of chaos as the Hungarian people searched for a stable form of government.  Since the Empire had been on the losing side of World War I, this is not really surprising.

What is surprising is that an Empire ruled over by the Hapsburgs—a royal family far more noted for its enthusiastic inbreeding than for any exhibition of brains—lasted so long.  While Austria exiled the Hapsburgs, Hungary didn’t have to as even Charles I of Hungary realized he had become redundant and needed to leave.. 

Note.  To be fair, Charles I of Hungary (also known as Charles IV in Austria) was not nearly as inbred as his relative, Charles II of Spain.  The inbreeding coefficient of Chuck I/IV was only 0.03125 (3%)—a level definitely high enough to significantly increase the risk of certain conditions like congenital anomalies, developmental problems, and even medical vulnerabilities.  The population on non-royal people generally have a coefficient around .02 or 1% Charles II, on the other hand, had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254 or 25%, meaning he was more inbred than if his parents had only been brother and sister.  That level of inbreeding produces congressmen, university administrators, and TSA agents.

Hungary struggled to set up a stable government—establishing a brief republic that fell after only a few months to an equally brief communist regime that was so radical that Romanian troops crossed the border and set up a rather strange monarchy.  For a little over a year, there was a monarchy that lacked a king, but had an authoritarian regent.  By November 1920, the regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, dropped all pretense and just ruled as a dictator, remaining in power until the Soviet occupation at the end of World War II.

Naturally, all the political upheaval had a profound effect on the established art world of Hungary.  Royal patronage was dead and even the national identity was in question.  Societal upheaval and disillusionment with pre-war ideals fueled the rise of avant-garde movements like Expressionism and Activism in Hungary.  These artists challenged traditional aesthetics and embraced social commentary in their works, often criticizing the post-war political and economic situation.

One group of Hungarian artists is of particular interest:  The Eight, who were a group of avant-garde artists whose inspiration was derived primarily from French painters and art movements, including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Fauvism.  (To oversimplify, the Fauvists were impressionists who used strong, bright color.  Matisse’s Woman With a Hat, at right, is a perfect example.)

The members of The Eight, Róbert Berény, Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi, were (besides being desperately in need of buying a few vowels) all going to suffer during the next twenty years leading up to second world war.  Of the eight, all but one had to flee Hungary sometime between 1918 and 1939 for political reasons.  The one artist who didn’t emigrate, Dezső Czigány, suffered severe depression that eventually led to a psychotic break and the artist’s committing suicide after murdering his family.

Róbert Berény was actually part of the government during the brief Hungarian Democratic Republic, so he naturally had to flee the country as the communists took over.  Settling in Berlin, Berény continued to work and achieved international recognition.  In 1926, just as the Nazi Party was becoming increasingly visible in Germany, Berény and his wife returned to Budapest.

By this time, Berény was painting in the Cubist style and experimenting with the Art Deco.  In 1927-28, he produced a painting of his wife, Eta.  She was wearing a blue dress and reclining next to a table upon which was set a black vase.  Generally considered to be one of his best works, the painting, Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, was sold to a Jewish patron.  

With the start of the war, exactly what happened to the Jewish patron and the painting are unknown.  It is possible that the buyer fled the country taking the painting with him, that he sold the painting to raise funds for the trip, or that the painting was seized by the Nazis when they occupied Hungary.  Since Berény’s studio was destroyed during the war, it was even considered possible that Berény had reacquired the painting and had stored it in his studio.  Whatever the circumstances, it vanished.  The last time the painting was seen in public was at an art show in 1928.

Berény remained in Hungary for the rest of his life.  Under the communist regime that took over Hungary after the war, he was an art teacher at the Hungarian University of Fine Art and passed away in 1953.

Fifty-six years after his death, Gergely Barki, an art historian at the Hungarian National Gallery, was forced by his three-year-old daughter to watch the 1999 Sony movie, Stuart Little.  If you are unfamiliar with this work, in the tale, a successful urban family, the Littles (played by Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis), go to an orphanage to adopt a child and for reasons that are never quite explained, adopt a talking mouse named Stuart.  

Several scenes in the movie take place in the living room of the Little home.  Barki thought he recognized the painting hanging over the Littles’ fireplace.  Now, since the Berény painting had been relatively unknown, it was unlikely that this was a copy or a print.  In fact, in Barki’s opinion, it had to be the original, long-lost painting.  Barki had no method of pausing the movie or of obtaining a print from it, so he sent an email to the production company.

Actually, over a period of two years, Barki sent off dozens of emails to the production company and various cast members hoping that someone would pay attention to him.  Finally, after years of effort, a set designer met with Barki in a Washington DC park to examine the painting.  Using a screwdriver borrowed from a hotdog vendor to remove the frame, Barki was able to verify that the painting was indeed the long-lost Berény original.

Trying to piece together the provenance of the painting during the missing years has proven a little difficult.  The painting sold at a charity auction for $40 to an art collector in the mid 1990’s.  He, in turn, sold it to an antique store for $400, who then sold it to a Sony set designer for $500 who thought it would look perfect in a house where a mouse lived.  When the movie was over, she bought the painting back from Sony for $500 and hung it in her bedroom.

The painting was eventually returned to Hungary, where it was sold at auction in 2014 to an unnamed Hungarian collector for $285,700.