It had simply vanished. Róbert Berény was one of The Eight. The Hungarian modernist’s famous portrait of Béla Bartók was not the only one to disappear into thin air. The fate of many of The Eight’s works exhibited at the Panama- Pacific International Exposition at the 1915 San Francisco World Fair turned out to be just as mysterious. The FBI is still investigating one case.
I was preparing a book on Berény (1887–1953) when Júlia Szabó drew my attention to the riddle. She was the only Hungarian art historian to have seen Berény’s Bartók portrait, in 1992; it was hung in the Florida home of the composer’s son Peter. It had turned up. But the point is that many of the Hungarian paintings that were lost after the exhibition have not. The circumstances of those that have resurfaced are equally baffling.
Almost five hundred Hungarian works had been exhibited in San Francisco. You could say that it was the overseas debut of Hungarian art. So I quickly realized the fate of those works was a hot topic. It is worth reconstructing their journey. Many were regarded as outstanding examples of their time, besides the 1915 fair was the last collective showing of The Eight as a group.
We’re in the thick of preparations for the Shanghai World’s Fair in June 2010. So it is timely to cast a glance back to the San Francisco expo, a landmark in a series of 20th-century world fairs visited by nineteen million in a single year. The idea of holding a fair in San Francisco was first raised when work on the Panama Canal started in 1904.

Róbert Berény: Béla Bartók, 1913. Oil on Canvas, 67.5 X 46 cm
Property of Peter Bartók

Róbert Berény: Golgotha, 1912. Oil on Canvas
Private Collection, ownership contested

Bertalan Pór: My Family, 1909-1910. Oil on Canvas, 176.5 X 206 cm
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Lajos Tihanyi: Self-portrait, 1914. Oil on Canvas, 56 X 45 cm
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

 

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Gergely Barki
is a researcher at the Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was one of the curators of the 2006 exhibition Magyar Vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904–1914 (Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya), also on show as Fauves Hongrois 1904–1914 in 200 in Céret, Le Cateau-Cambrésis and Dijon, France, and will be one of the curators of the centenary exhibition of the group The Eight due to open in the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs on 12 November 2010. His work in progress is a catalogue of the oeuvre of Róbert Berény.