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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-...ong-lost-hungarian-painting-come-home/5924194
Hungarian art historian Gergely Barki was watching "Stuart Little" with his daughter when behind Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis he spotted a stylish cubist painting of a sleeping woman by a black vase.
He immediately recognized it as a lost work by Robert Bereny, a Hungarian artist.
The painting had been last seen in a black and white exhibition catalogue from 1928. The painting's unknown buyer is believed to have fled Hungary for the United States some time around the Second World War.
A Sony Pictures assistant set designer spotted the painting for sale cheap in a Pasadena antiques shop and bought it for the film, then bought it afterwards from Sony because she liked it so much.
She then sold it to a private collector who is now offering the painting for sale at an auction in Hungary.
Hungarian art historian Gergely Barki was watching "Stuart Little" with his daughter when behind Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis he spotted a stylish cubist painting of a sleeping woman by a black vase.
He immediately recognized it as a lost work by Robert Bereny, a Hungarian artist.
Bereny, the leader of a pre-World War I avant-garde movement called the "Group of Eights," fled to Berlin 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 Mr Barki, a rumoured fling with Anastasia, the mysterious daughter of Russia's last tsar Nicholas II.
The painting had been last seen in a black and white exhibition catalogue from 1928. The painting's unknown buyer is believed to have fled Hungary for the United States some time around the Second World War.
A Sony Pictures assistant set designer spotted the painting for sale cheap in a Pasadena antiques shop and bought it for the film, then bought it afterwards from Sony because she liked it so much.
She then sold it to a private collector who is now offering the painting for sale at an auction in Hungary.