A museum guard in Russia decided to make his mark on his first day on the job. He has been charged with vandalism after allegedly drawing eyes with a ballpoint pen on an avant-garde painting from the 1930s, worth about $1 million.
“Three Figures,” by Soviet artist Anna Leporskaya, was on display at the Boris Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg, Russia, for an exhibition running though Feb. 20. It was on loan from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
The defacement was first reported by the Art Newspaper Russia. Visitors alerted gallery staff last month of “small, crudely rendered eyes scribbled on two of the painting’s figures in ballpoint pen,” according to the Russian publication’s British edition.
The security guard in question was a contractor, the executive director of the Boris Yeltsin Center said in a statement to the Art Newspaper.
The 60-year-old guard, who has since been fired, is accused of using a Yeltsin Center-branded pen to draw the beady eyes. “His motives are still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity,” said Anna Reshetkina, the exhibition’s curator.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/10/russia-painting-defacement-eyes-security-guard/