1. PABLO PICASSO GOES POP!
One day after informing them he'd just agreed to sell Le Reve for a record US$139 million to a hedge fund manager, Las Vegas casino kingpin Steve Wynn invited guests to view it in his office. While explaining the painting's provenance, he put his elbow through it, exclaiming: "Oh no, oh shit!"
A conservator charged US$90,500 for rissverklebung (thread reintegration) and then Wynn put in a claim to Lloyds for US$54 million, based on a post-restoration valuation of US$85 million. "Picasso used the cheapest thin canvas - and it went 'Pop!' like shrink-wrap," noted Wynn. I almost made the biggest mistake of my life selling that painting, but I got lucky and poked a hole in it.'
PHOTO: EPA
2. DIEGO VELAZQUEZ GETS SLASHED
After repeatedly slashing the naked back of the woman in the Rokeby Venus at London's National Gallery in 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson explained: "I tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst. Justice is as much an element of beauty as color and outline." Thirty-eight years later she gave a different explanation for her actions: "I didn't like the way men gaped at it all day long." In 1918 three suffragists attacked 13 paintings in Manchester City Art Gallery with hammers - three of the works were by Victorian painter George Frederic Watts, the worst damaged being his Prayer.
PHOTO: AP
3. RODIN IS DYNAMITED
In 1970 one of Auguste Rodin's original casts of his world-famous sculpture The Thinker, situated outside the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, was dynamited by members of the radical group The Weathermen, who later accidentally blew themselves up. The lower parts of the legs of The Thinker were annihilated, its base expanded, twisted and contorted. Since the decision was made to re-mount it in its damaged form, a generation has grown up in Cleveland believing that the sculpture was conceived that way by Rodin. At Tate Britain in 2003 Rodin's The Kiss was (with permission) wrapped in a mile of string by artist Cornelia Parker, prompting outraged artist Piers Butler to cut the string.
PHOTO: AP
4. MONDRIAN IS VOMITED ON
The head conservator at New York's Moma says that decisions to undertake restoration, such as pigment work-ups, are often based on whether the thrill has gone from a painting. Similar motivation was claimed by artist Jubal Brown, who ate blue cake icing and blue Jell-O before entering Moma in order to projectile vomit on to Piet Mondrian's Composition With Red and Blue - to liven it up. "I found its lifelessness threatening," said Brown who had months earlier vomited red onto Raoul Dufy's Harbour at le Havre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the head conservator said: "Fingerprints can be much more difficult. Touching - of abstracts especially - is chronic here."
PHOTO: AFP
5. REMBRANDT IS SLASHED, SLASHED AGAIN AND THEN SPRAYED WITH ACID
PHOTO: NEW YORK TIMES
The Nightwatch holds the dubious honor of being attacked three times in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. In 1911 an ex-navy chef, disgruntled by discharge and considering it the state's most valuable possession, attacked it with a knife "to cool my anger." In 1975 an unemployed teacher, declaring "Jesus sent me," slashed it repeatedly, later explaining: "Rembrandt was the master of light, but when he painted The Nightwatch he was under the influence of the dark." In 1990 an escaped psychiatric patient sprayed sulfuric acid on it. Released nine years later, the same attacker cut a large circular hole in Picasso's painting Nude in Front of the Garden.
6. ANDRES SERRANO IS GIVEN A GOOD KICKING AND THEN GETS HAMMERED
In 1997 the director of the National Gallery in Melbourne closed down an exhibition after two attacks in two days upon Serrano's Piss Christ. In the first attack, Christian John Allen Haywood wrenched the photograph - of Christ on the cross submerged in urine - from the wall and kicked it; in the second, a youth hammered the photograph eight times while another youth distracted guards by jump-kicking a juxtaposed Serrano portrait of a Ku Klux Klan member. Last year, hooded neo-Nazis broke into the Kulturen Gallery in Skane, Sweden, to attack photographs in Serrano's The History of Sex, then posted film of it on YouTube.
7. MARCUS HARVEY IS SPLASHED WITH INK
In 1997, at the Sensation show at London's Royal Academy, artist Peter Fisher threw red and blue ink at Harvey's Myra, hours after another artist, Jacques Role, had thrown eggs at it. Sensation, which also included Tracey Emin's Everyone I Ever Slept With (later destroyed in a US$119 million warehouse fire) subsequently moved to Brooklyn's Museum of Art. There, Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary (portraying an African Virgin decorated with dung and pornography) was sprayed with white paint by retired teacher Dennis Heiner, whose blind wife found it blasphemous. When then-mayor Giuliani withheld the museum's grant, 200 art lovers threw dung at a painting of Giuliani as the Virgin Mary.
8. CLAUDE MONET IS PUNCHED
One midnight last year, five drunks somehow accessed the rear of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, wherein one of them punched a hole in Monet's prized painting of the Seine. Following the attack, the minister of culture promised to seek stronger sanctions against the painting's desecrators.
A week later, having visited Avignon's Museum of Contemporary Art and kissed an all-white abstract painting by Cy Twombly, a woman appeared in court and heard the owner's lawyer declare her lipstick stain as aggressive as a punch. She insisted that she loved Twombly's work, had been overcome with passion in its presence and thought he would understand.
9. LEONARDO DA VINCI IS BLASTED WITH A SHOTGUN
In 1987, for reasons he couldn't explain, ex-soldier Robert Cambridge drew a 12-bore shotgun from under his coat and fired at the Virgin's breast in Da Vinci's Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist at London's National Gallery, resulting in cauliflower-like damage. In 1962 an artist had thrown an inkbottle at the same painting, asking afterwards: "Would you be prepared to die to protect it?" Also at the National, in 1990 Federico Barocci's Madonna and Child was slashed by Martin Came, an art lover experiencing subconscious distress in relation to the painting due to recent separation from his wife and child.
10. PABLO PICASSO IS GRAFFITIED
During an anti-war protest at NY's Moma in 1974, "KILL LIES ALL" was sprayed on Guernica in red by Tony Shafrazi - then an artist, now a top art dealer. He explained: "I wanted to retrieve Guernica from art history and give it life. I wanted to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; to dwell within the act of the painting's creation, put my hand within it."" The following year Guernica was moved to Spain, where it was exhibited in a bullet - proof container with armed guards on either side. Picasso, noted Shafrazi, once painted over a Modigliani.
11. DAMIEN HIRST IS RUBBISHED AND INKED
Art not recognized as art has often fallen prey to cleaners. The most celebrated case is cleaner Emmanuel Asare's bin-bagging at London's Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 of Damien Hirst's installation Painting by Numbers, a representation of his studio and its detritus. "I didn't think for a second it was art," explained Asare. Hirst found this hysterical. Less so the pouring of black ink into his sculpture Away From the Flock during an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. The perpetrator, artist Mark Bridger, re-labeled the piece Black Sheep. "I was providing an interesting addendum to his work," said Bridger in court.
12. MICHELANGELO TAKES A HAMMERING
In St Peter's in Rome in 1972, geologist Laszlo Toth attacked the Virgin cradling Jesus in Michelangelo's Pieta, removing her arm at the elbow and most of her nose, and chipping her eye. He explained: "Today is my 33rd birthday, the age Christ died. I did it because the mother of God does not exist. I am Christ. I am Michelangelo. Now I can die." And in 1991, an unsuccessful artist hammered a toe off David, leading conservators to discover the origins of Michelangelo's marble.
13. TRACEY EMIN'S BED SPRINGS ARE TESTED
In 1999, at Tate Britain, artists Yuan Cai and JJ Xi intervened in Tracey Emin's installation My Bed. "Although they got on the bed for a few seconds, mostly they just threatened guards with kung-fu kicks," said witness Harry Pye. "They realized we were serious artists - doing it purely from a creative point," said Xi. "Don't take seriously Emin saying we were 'like failed artists threatening to jump off Waterloo Bridge unless given a gallery' - probably she got drunk." In 2000, Cai and Xi urinated on Marcel Duchamp's La Fontaine to alleged cheers from Tate Modern visitors.
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