Róbert Berény & the Supine Woman
Robert Bereny, Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase, 1927-28, © Estate of Robert Bereny, oil on canvas, photograph Virag Judit Gallery, Budapest
November 2018
As a muse to her husband, the famous Modern artist Róbert Berény, Eta Berény was as inspirational as Gala was to Dali and Alma was to Mahler. Berény painted his wife obsessively, but only once was she depicted as a dynamic woman (see Poetic Boost, October 2018, Róbert Berény & the Cellist). In all of his other work Eta appears passive. Berény painted her supine, sleeping, resting, reading, stretched out, lounging, on the divan, in bed, with vases, leaping foxes and purring cats. The choice and placement of every object, of every animal and their actions, all of it was deliberate and carefully considered. Berény was not interested in being decorative, he was interested in mining the symbolism of psychoanalysis which he had undergone in Berlin in the ‘20s. For example in “Girl on a Sofa (Eta with a Cat)”, Eta wears a slinky red dress and sits curled up on a couch. Opposite her sits a tabby cat in the same position. The rounded haunches of the woman are mirrored exactly by the feline. In another painting Eta sits propped up in bed against a pillow in a flimsy white nightgown. The bed covers rise up in front of her like swelling waves. A lush emerald green background and sapphire blue blanket add to the sense of being adrift in an ocean. Berény’s paintings were deeply personal, but they were also fashionable and sought after. His creative powers and success would continue to shine until the 1930s when Nazism metastasized and WWII shattered their lives forever.
Robert Bereny, Girl on a Sofa with Cat (Eta with Cat), circa 1925, © Estate of Robert Bereny, oil on canvas, photograph Kieselbach Galllery, Budapest
Robert Bereny, Yellow Quilt, 1928, © Estate of Robert Bereny, oil on canvas, photograph Virag Judit Gallery, Budapest
Robert Bereny, Woman Sleeping with a Fox, circa late 1920s, © Estate of Robert Bereny, oil on canvas, photograph Virag Judit Gallery, Budapest
Being Jewish, the Berénys were forced into hiding in order to escape the hell of Auschwitz. When they came out of hiding in 1945 it was to find their city in ruins. More than eighty percent of Budapest’s buildings had been destroyed or severely damaged. All seven of the bridges that connected Buda to Pesht had been bombed. Most of Róbert’s work had either disappeared or been laid to waste. The Berénys tried their best to pick up their lives again, but not only was the city unrecognisable, so too was post-war Hungarian society. Róbert eventually found work teaching art, but tastes and fashion had changed. Where once these had been led by dealers and collectors, now they were dictated by the State. Sex and psychoanalysis were out, Socialist Realism was in. The State did not need Róbert Berény’s work. In 1953 the artist died of stomach cancer. He was 66, but his widow Eta would live on for another 25 years without him.
Among the many missing Berény paintings was “Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase” (1927-28). It had last been seen at a 1928 exhibition at the Ernst Museum in Budapest where it is likely to have been sold. The painting was next seen 71 years later, in an “antique” store in Pasadena, California. It was bought by an assistant art director for 500 bucks to be used as set decoration on the 1999 children’s film “Stuart Little”. Can you guess what happened next? Or maybe you’ve already heard the story? It made international headlines. It’s the kind of story that lovers of Antiques Roadshow could only dream of.
From the 1999 film “Stuart Little”, in the background can be seen Robert Bereny’s lost masterpiece Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase, photograph from, you guessed it, Vanity Fair
In 2009, Gergely Barki, an art historian at the Hungarian National Gallery was watching “Stuart Little” with his daughter when he noticed something extraordinary about the Little’s lounge room wall. Barki immediately recognised the missing Berény painting “Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase”, even though he’d only seen a faded black and white photograph of it from the 1928 exhibition. So began Barki’s long and frustrating search to track down the painting. The art director from “Stuart Little” didn’t know what had happened to the painting. It would be another two years before the assistant art director, who’d originally bought the painting for the film, contacted Barki. Apparently she liked the painting so much that when filming ended she’d bought it from Sony Pictures. It had been hanging on her bedroom wall ever since. The painting was then bought by a private collector (I would dearly love to know who, how, and how much) and finally returned to Hungary 85 years after its disappearance.
“Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase” is a painting of Eta Berény lying on a couch with her eyes closed. Her face exudes great calm, as indeed does the entire painting. It stands in stark contrast to the dynamism and vibrant palette of “Woman Playing the Cello”, which was also painted in 1928. It is a mysterious, secretive painting and not just because of its unbelievable resurrection. The colours are sombre, even masculine, yet the overall affect is one of softness and femininity. There is a tension in the composition, an almost jarring awkwardness in its many angles, yet these are all balanced out and resolved by the supreme serenity and quiet of Eta. See how the angles of the table intersect with Eta’s supine body, how the lines of her folded arms in the centre of the painting serve as counterpoints to the almost garishly striped sofa fabric. And most striking of all, the placement and off-kilter angle of the black vase. Knowing what we know about Berény the obvious thought is that the vase is a phallic symbol, but I see also a sentinel, watching over his beloved as she rests and recovers from the drama and trauma of that other painting.
On December 13, 2014 “Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase” was auctioned off at the Virág Judit Gallery in Budapest with a starting price of 136,000USD. It sold for a quarter of a million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a Róbert Berény painting. Sadly it is now once again in private hands and tucked away on a wall in someone else’s home, far from the public’s eyes. In the end it was not the dynamic Eta who caught the world’s attention, it was the quiet, supine, sensual Eta who could no longer play the cello but who knew how to play the muse.
Last October when I began Poetic Boost I started with a blog about muses, about my muse the avenging angel. I wrote about a painting called “The Great Siren” (2001) by the brilliant Russian-Hungarian artist El Kazovszkij. Next month I’ll return to his work when I write about artistic obsession. ◊