Painting’s epic involves a intelligent black market operator,the aftermath of war in Hungary and a vital licence applicationShe is an enigma in a real-life art mystery that dates back nearly three-quarters of a century and involves one of Britain’s most loved painters. What slight is known of her emerges from the pages of an official report that is now the talk of the art world. She was called Karola Fabri, and she knew some dodgy types.
Fabri was an art dealer in postwar Hungary who, or according to one expert,was an associate of an “Uncle Schatz who was “operating on the black market and was known to the art world by his nickname and as a shady character”. On 17 December 1946, she appears to have applied to the authorities for a licence to export a painting by John Constable, and setting in train a series of convoluted and disputed events.
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Source: theguardian.com