Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers was the most recent well-known paintings on Friday to be targeted by vandals, when environmental activists at London’s National Gallery doused it in tomato soup to demand an finish to fossil gasoline manufacturing.
Here are another instances of artworks being attacked:
Custard pie for Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci’s beloved Mona Lisa had a custard pie thrown in her face on the Louvre museum in Paris in May however the paintings’s thick bulletproof case ensured she got here to no hurt.
Her 36-year-old attacker mentioned he was taking goal at artists who are usually not focusing sufficient on “the planet”.
She has been behind glass since a Bolivian man threw a rock at her in December 1956, damaging her left elbow.
In 2009, a girl threw an empty teacup on the portray, which barely scratched the case.
Banksy murals vandalised
Celebrated British road artist Banksy has had a number of of his iconic murals vandalised around the globe.
In August 2021, a piece that includes a rodent sipping a cocktail in a solar lounger, half of his Great British Spraycation collection, was smeared in white paint shortly after he left it on a wall in Suffolk.
A 12 months earlier, a Valentine’s Day work displaying a younger woman firing a slingshot of flowers was defaced after showing on a constructing in western England.
Ivan the Terrible ripped
In May 2018 a Russian builder attacked a work by 19-century artist Ilya Repin of the Sixteenth-century tsar often known as Ivan the Terrible, ripping it in three locations.
The man used half of a safety barrier at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery to interrupt the glass overlaying the portray.
He mentioned the portray, which depicts Russia’s first tsar killing his son, was “a lie”.
He was despatched to a penal colony for 2 and a half years.
Delacroix defaced
In February 2013, a girl defaced Delacroix’s Liberty Leading The People, one of France’s most iconic work, with a black marker at a provincial satellite tv for pc of the Louvre, within the northern French metropolis of Lens.
Her inscription, “AE911”, was a reference to conspiracy theories swirling across the September 11, 2001 terrorist assaults within the United States.
She was given an eight-month suspended jail sentence.
Indelible ink on Rothko
In October 2012, a Polish artist scrawled his identify and a slogan promoting his personal inventive manifesto in indelible ink on US artist Mark Rothko’s 1958 portray Black On Maroon in Britain’s Tate Modern gallery.
Conservation specialists mentioned it took 9 months of microscopic evaluation to seek out a chemical solvent that would dissolve the ink, which had in some areas soaked by to the again of the canvas.
The man was given a two-year jail time period for the assault.
Red lipstick on Twombly canvas
In July 2007, a Cambodian artist was arrested after planting a lipstick-infused kiss on a panel of US artist Cy Twombly’s tryptich Phaedrus, in a modern artwork museum within the southern French city of Avignon.
She was fined over the kiss mark on the pure white canvas and ordered to pay for the restoration.
She defended it as “an act of love”.
Monet bridge fisted
In October 2007, a group of drunken revellers break into the Musee d’Orsay museum in Paris in the course of the night time and assault a work by Impressionist grasp Claude Monet.
One of them sticks a fist in The Argenteuil Bridge leaving a gap practically 4 inches lengthy.
Petrol on van der Helst
In June 2006, a identified artwork vandal sprays Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Celebration Of The Peace Of Münster within the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with lighter fluid and makes an attempt to set fireplace to it however causes solely minor injury.
In 1990 the museum’s best-known portray, Rembrandt’s Nightwatch (1642), was sprayed with hydrochloric acid however solely the varnish layer was broken. – AFP
