An avant-garde masterpiece missing for nine decades has returned home to Hungary courtesy of a sharp-eyed art historian who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film .
Gergely Barki, a researcher at Hungary's National Gallery, noticed by Robert Bereny (1888-1953) while watching the 1999 movie about a mouse with his daughter Lola in 2009.
"I couldn't 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, 43, said .
"A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home."
The painting disappeared in the 1920s. Barki recognised 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 emailed staff at the film's makers, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, and received a reply from a former Sony set designer two years later.
"She said the picture was hanging on her wall," Barki said.
"She had snapped it up for next to nothing in an antiques shop in Pasadena, California, thinking its avant-garde elegance was perfect for Stuart Little's living room."
After leaving Sony, the set designer sold the painting to a private collector who has now brought the picture to Budapest for auction.
Bereny, the leader of a pre-first world war avant-garde movement called the "Group of Eights", fled to Berlin, Germany, in 1920 after designing recruitment posters for Hungary's short-lived communist revolution in 1919.
In the German capital, he had a romance with actress Marlene Dietrich - and, according to Barki, a rumoured fling with Anastasia, the mysterious daughter of Russia's last tsar Nicholas II.
Bereny's painting goes under the hammer on December 13 with a starting price of about €110,000 (HK$1.061 million), staff at the Virag Judit auction house said.
According to Barki, the buyer at the 1928 exhibition - possibly Jewish - probably left Hungary in the run-up to, or during, the second world war.
"After the wars, revolutions, and tumult of the 20th century, many Hungarian masterpieces are lost, scattered around the world," he said.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Long lost painting surfaces in movie
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