10 revealed secrets of once-lost and newly found masterpieces of great masters

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

To this day, the location of a huge number of artistic masterpieces created by great masters remains a mystery. And it is possible that these missing paintings are in the hands of several extremely wealthy collectors who control the art market. Sometimes they sell paintings to each other in secret. There is also a flip side of the coin - rarities protected and reliably hidden by intruders, which are almost impossible to sell. And yet, from time to time, the secrets of the missing masterpieces are revealed. And sometimes in a very unexpected way.

1. The Mystery of the Talking Mouse

Stuart Little, a talking mouse invented by E. B. White for a children's book that was later filmed, helped solve the riddle of a Hungarian masterpiece that went missing more than 80 years ago. It is about the avant-garde work of Robert Bereny "The Sleeping Woman with a Black Vase". A black and white photo from the 1928 exhibition was the most recent public evidence of its existence. The painting simply disappeared in the 1920s, and the impression was that no one knew what had happened to it. Then, on Christmas Day 2009, Gerceli Barki, a researcher at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, decided to watch the 1999 film Stuart Little with his little daughter Lola. To his surprise, he saw the missing painting on the screen - it hung over the mantelpiece in the Little family home.

To find out how the valuable canvas ended up in the backdrop of a Hollywood children's film, Barkey wrote many letters to people at Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures. Two years later, a former assistant designer at Sony Pictures emailed him back. She bought the masterpiece for just $ 500 from an antiques store in Pasadena, California to decorate Little's living room on set. After filming, the designer took the painting home and hung it on the wall in the room. After a woman sold Bereny's masterpiece to a private collector, the painting was returned to Hungary, where it was auctioned in Budapest for € 229,500 in 2014.

2. The secret of the altar

The key to one of the great secrets of the great world was Jean Preston, an elderly retired woman from Oxford, England who always ate frozen meals, bought clothes from a catalog, and only traveled on foot or by bus. She led a very humble life, as if imitating the humble values of the Renaissance master and Dominican monk Fra Angelico (who believed that the true value of his paintings lay in their spiritual beauty, and not in the worldly money they could bring him). The humble Fra Angelico was blessed in 1982 by Pope John Paul II.

Fra Angelico's most delightful work, the altarpiece of the Convent of San Marco in Florence, was commissioned by his patron Cosimo de 'Medici in 1438. The main panel of the altar, depicting the Madonna and Child, is still in San Marco. But eight small panels with portraits of saints were originally lost during the Napoleonic wars. Six of them were later shown in galleries and private collections around the world. But the last two panels went missing for 200 years until they were discovered outside the door of Miss Preston's guest bedroom. Jean Preston first noticed these masterpieces in a "box of small things" when she was working at a museum in California. No one was interested in them, so she asked her collector father to buy the panels for $ 200. When he died, Miss Preston inherited them.

For most of her life, Miss Preston did not know the real value of these paintings. In 2005, she asked art critic Michael Liversidge to look at them. Upon learning that she had the missing panels of the San Marco altar, she simply hung them back outside her bedroom door. After her death, two paintings were auctioned in 2007 for approximately $ 3.9 million.

3. The mystery of careless restoration

In 1960, comic book illustrator Donald Trachte of Vermont bought a painting for $ 900 from his neighbor, artist Norman Rockwell. This painting, titled "Leaving Home," was featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1954. After Trachte died in 2005 at the age of 89, his family and art experts could not understand why the painting in Trachte's house was so different from its picture on the Saturday Evening Post cover.

At first, experts suggested that the painting had been stored in poor conditions and had been carelessly restored. But in the end they realized that the painting had not been restored. Convinced that they were dealing with a fake, the grown sons of Trachte decided to search their father's workshop. One of the men noticed a hole in the wood paneling of the room. They dismantled the fake wall and discovered a secret room with an authentic Rockwell painting. Trachte is now believed to have faked the painting around 1973 during the divorce. The original sold at auction for $ 15.4 million in 2006.

4. Mystery of Lombardy

This masterpiece could not be found for so long that some people doubted its existence. Then, in 2013, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting Isabella d'Este, the Marquis of Mantua, was discovered in a private collection in a Swiss bank vault, and the 500-year-old mystery was solved. It is believed that the painting was acquired by the owner's family in the early 1900s. Da Vinci made a pencil sketch of Isabella d'Este in 1499 in Mantua (Lombardy region of Italy). This sketch is today in the French Louvre.

The Marquis wrote to da Vinci asking him to make a painting from a sketch. Until recently, art critics believed that the artist did not find time to complete the painting or simply lost interest in it. Some experts, such as Martin Kemp of Trinity College, Oxford, even question the authenticity of the painting, pointing out some stylistic details that the artist did not use. But other experts, such as the world's leading creative scientist, da Vinci, Carlo Pedretti of the University of California, Los Angeles, disagree with Kemp.

“There is no doubt that the portrait is the work of Leonardo,” he said. Pedretti believes that da Vinci painted the face, and that da Vinci's assistants painted the palm leaf that d'Este was holding in the painting. Carbon analysis suggests a 95 percent chance that the painting was created between 1460 and 1650. The pigments and primer are the same as for all da Vinci's works. Considering that there are no more than 20 genuine da Vinci paintings in total, this work can cost tens of millions of dollars.

5. The secret of the workshop worker's kitchen

In 1975, two stolen masterpieces were bought for $ 25 by an Italian auto shop worker at an Italian National Railroad's lost and unclaimed items auction. These were the paintings "A Girl with Two Chairs" by Pierre Bonnard and "Still Life with Fruit on the Table and a Small Dog" by Paul Gauguin. They were stolen from a British couple in 1970, and together were valued at $ 50 million. But the worker had no idea how valuable the paintings were. He just hung them in the kitchen, where they hung for almost 40 years. When his son tried to sell the masterpieces in 2013, art critics who evaluated the paintings realized they had been stolen. Police were warned that the man and his son were not suspects. The British couple, who originally owned the paintings, have already died, leaving no heirs. Therefore, the police must now determine who owns the paintings.

6. The mystery of the trash can

When Elizabeth Gibson went for coffee on a March morning in 2003, she saw a colorful abstract painting sandwiched between two large garbage bags in front of a Manhattan apartment building. The painting liked this painting, but she never thought it was a famous masterpiece, especially given its cheap frame. The canvas that Gibson pulled out of the trash can that day was actually Three Men, a 1970 work by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. It was stolen in the 1980s from its real owners, a married couple in Houston. Ms. Gibson first hung the painting in her apartment, but eventually looked at it and noticed the gallery stickers on the back. As a result, the woman tried to find more information for 3 years, it was only three years later that someone from the gallery told her about the loss.

When the woman called an expert from Sotheby's, he confirmed the originality of the painting, presented Elizabeth with a reward of $ 15,000 from the original owners and a royalties from Sotheby's. Subsequently, this painting was sold at Sotheby's for more than $ 1 million in November 2007.

7. The secret of a drunken reseller

At first, no one in this strange story knew that Thomas Doyle was a criminal, and in 34 years he has already been accused of theft 11 times. This time, he convinced investor Gary Fitzgerald to pay $ 880,000 for an alleged 80 percent stake in the oil painting Portrait of a Girl by 19th century French artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. Doyle paid only $ 775,000 for the masterpiece, not $ 1.1 million, as he told Fitzgerald, and also assured Fitzgerald that another buyer was willing to pay $ 1.7 million for the painting (which was also not true). In fact, Doyle supposedly knew the painting was worth no more than $ 700,000. And now the strangest thing. Doyle's alleged girlfriend, Christine Tragen, was apparently the actual primary owner of the painting, with Doyle co-owning it. She also allegedly did not know her criminal past.

On July 28, 2010, both co-owners of the painting sent one of Doyle's partners, James Haggerty, as an intermediary, to meet with a potential buyer of the painting at a hotel in Manhattan. As a result, the buyer did not come, and the middleman, while waiting for him, drank a lot of alcohol. Later, cameras detected that he left the hotel at about 12:50 pm with a painting. But he arrived at his apartment at about 2:30 am without Corot's masterpiece. The mediator claimed that he did not remember what happened to the painting because he was drunk. Christine Tragen sued the middleman, and then Doyle was arrested on charges of fraud and defrauding Fitzgerald (the man who paid him $ 880,000 for 80 percent of the painting). But no one knew where the masterpiece had disappeared until the doorman in another Manhattan building next to the hotel returned from vacation. He found a painting in the bushes. Doyle was imprisoned for 6 years, and Corot's painting was sold to reimburse the defrauded investor Fitzgerald.

8. The mystery of the flea market

As the old adage goes, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So when Marcia Fuqua of Virginia announced that she had acquired Renoir's napkin-sized painting Landscape on the Banks of the Seine for $ 7 in 2009 at a flea market, it seemed incredible. At first, the woman tried to sell the painting through an auction house, but later the painting was found stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. Marcia's brother revealed that the painting had hung in his mother's house for decades, ever since she entered the art college in Baltimore in 1951 (when the painting disappeared). Matt thought the painting was a gift from his fiance to his mother, but she never told him the details. As a result, the painting was returned to the museum.

2. The secret of the oven

Part of the mystery of these missing masterpieces of painting has been unraveled, but the other part will forever remain covered in darkness. In October 2012, seven paintings worth tens of millions of dollars were stolen from the Kunsthala Museum in Rotterdam. Among them were works by Meyer de Haan, Lucien Freud, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. According to security camera images, two men hacked into the security system and stole prey in less than two minutes. The trail of criminals led to Rotterdam, then to the poor village of Karkali in Romania, where at least one of the thieves lived.

There, the mother of one of the thieves claimed to have burned the paintings in a furnace to destroy evidence that could have caught her son. In court, she retracted this statement. “We found a lot of pigments used in professional oil paints,” said Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of the museum, who analyzed the ash. - In the end, we came to the conclusion that someone really burned oil paintings in the oven. But what kind of pictures they were is unknown. Three young Romanian thieves were convicted, so it is known who stole the masterpieces of the painting. But, apparently, no one will ever know whether the paintings were actually burned or simply hidden. The thief's mother received two years for assisting a criminal.

1. The Mystery of a Stranger

81-year-old German Cornelius Gurlitt "was a man who did not exist." He was not registered with any government office in Germany, and he did not have any pension or health insurance. But he had a lot of money when customs officers stopped him on a train in Munich. As part of a tax investigation, authorities searched Gurlitt's cluttered apartment in a Munich suburb in 2011. Among the trash, they found a collection of more than 1,400 pieces worth over $ 1.3 billion, including masterpieces by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, drawings, prints, paintings, prints and etchings. It was believed that most of the art was taken over by the Nazis.

The unemployed hermit Gurlitt lived off the money he received from the periodic sale of works of art. His father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, was an art collector when the Nazis came to power. Despite having a Jewish grandmother, Hildebrand was valued by the Nazis because he had contacts to sell the loot to foreign buyers. However, Hildebrand secretly sold some of the paintings "for himself" and hid others, claiming that these masterpieces were destroyed when his apartment was bombed during the war. Another collection of more than 200 items was discovered at the home of Cornelius Gurlitt in Salzburg.