Masterpiece painted by celebrity chef’s father that led to ‘a lot of heartache’ found abandoned amid rubbish on a New York street 53 years later
- Chef Chris Bianco says his artist father was never paid the handsome sum promised for painting a wealthy Manhattan woman in 1970 and didn’t get the artwork back
- Bianco has been reunited with the masterpiece after an Instagram post showing it dumped among rubbish in New York saw him quickly link up with its rescuer
The woman in the brightly coloured shawl is beautiful. But she does not look happy. Or, at the very least, she wears a wry expression, one that suggests something in between boredom and belligerence.
Chef Chris Bianco long remembered that look. For years, he wondered what happened to the portrait his father sumptuously rendered in oils over the course of several months starting in late 1969.
Leonard Bianco was an accomplished New York artist who enjoyed a varied career: Barbra Streisand commissioned him to paint her portrait, and he created a depiction of Christ for the historic St. Mary’s Basilica in Phoenix, in the US state of Arizona. He even painted US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s two beagles.
But the painting of the 30-something woman in the shawl may have been his masterpiece, says Chris, the James Beard Award-winning force behind Pizzeria Bianco and Pane Bianco at Row DTLA, a commercial district in Los Angeles, and four other restaurants in Phoenix.
For Leonard and his family, though, the portrait was a source of pain, and a kind of stubborn psychic baggage that hovered at the edges of his career. This was the case long after the painting disappeared more than 50 years ago amid an acrimonious dissolution. And it remained so after Leonard died in 2021 at 94.
Then something remarkable happened. Sitting in a brown leather chair at his Phoenix home on a Sunday in April 2022, Chris was scrolling through his Instagram notifications when one caught his eye. He clicked the link.