Artwork may be damaged or destroyed as a result of various types of accidents. Damage accidents sometimes occur during exhibition or transportation. Attempts at restoration have also damaged artworks, either by expert restorers using techniques that are found decades later to be unsuitable or harmful, or simple botches by unskilled people.
A large body of work by the German Renaissance master Mathis Nithart Gothart, called Grünewald, was captured by the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War but was lost when the ships transporting war booty were sunk in the Baltic by Imperial forces. [1]
Other examples lost during sea transport include the 19th century painting La Circassienne au Bain, which was lost with the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912.
On 2 September 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed near Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, killing 229 people. Pablo Picasso's 1963 work Le Peintre (The Painter) was part of the flight's cargo and was destroyed in the crash. [2] [3]
In October 2006, business magnate Steve Wynn agreed to sell the 1932 painting Le Rêve by Picasso. The painting was the centerpiece of Wynn's art collection and was displayed at his Las Vegas casino. The arranged price of $139 million would make Le Rêve the most expensive art sale of the time. The day after the price deal, while showing the painting to reporters, Wynn accidentally elbowed it, creating a significant tear. [4] [5] After a $90,000 repair, the painting was evaluated to be worth $85 million. Wynn claimed the price difference from his Lloyd's of London insurers, [6] [7] and the case was eventually settled out of court in March 2007. [8] In March 2013, Wynn sold the repaired painting to the original buyer Steven A. Cohen for $155 million, a price approximately $5 million lower [9] than the inflation-adjusted value ($160 million in 2013) of the painting before the accident. [10]
In 2006, a man fell after stepping on his loose shoelace at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and shattered three Chinese vases of the Qing dynasty (17th century). The man was not injured and not charged with damage; however, he was banned from visiting the museum. The museum managed to restore the vases, which are one of its most valuable exhibits; they are back on display but in a protective case. [11] [12]
On 22 January 2010, a woman accidentally fell into The Actor (L'acteur), a 1904 painting by Pablo Picasso on exhibit at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fall created a rip of about 15 centimeters (5.9 in) in height in the lower right corner of a 196 cm × 115 cm (77.25 in × 45.38 in) painting. The painting is considered one of Picasso's most important works and has an estimated value of $130 million. [13] The damage was restored in April 2010 after three months of work. For six weeks, the painting lay flat, loaded with small silk sand bags in order to realign the mechanical stress caused by the fall. After that, a Mylar patch was placed on the back of the canvas and the front was carefully retouched. Mylar was chosen because of its transparency – the canvas contains another painting on its back. The painting was placed behind Plexiglas after the accident. [14]
Several artworks of contemporary artist Tracey Emin were damaged by accident. Her Self Portrait: Bath (a neon light tangled in barbed wire), while exhibited in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, sustained almost $2,000 worth of damage when a visitor's clothes got caught in the wire. In the same gallery, another visitor backed into her work Feeling Pregnant III. My Uncle Colin was accidentally damaged by the staff of the National Gallery of Scotland but was later repaired. In May 2004, a warehouse fire destroyed several of her works, including the embroidered tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 . [15]
In 2015, a 12-year-old boy visiting an exhibition at Huashan 1914 Creative Park, Taipei, tripped and ripped a hole in Paolo Porpora's Flowers. [16] The painting was valued at $1.5 million (£950,000). Neither the boy nor his parents were blamed or asked to contribute to the cost of restoration, which was covered by insurance. [16] [17]
In 2000, porters at Sotheby's auction house in London disposed of a box using a crushing machine. They were apparently unaware that the box was not empty but contained a painting by Lucian Freud worth about $157,000. [18] [19]
Some contemporary exhibits were damaged as a result of diligence of museum staff who tried to clean up the museum area of what they perceived as a foreign or unclean object:
In 1654, a gunpowder explosion in Delft destroyed the studio of Dutch artist Carel Fabritius along with most of his paintings. The artist himself died in the explosion. [22]
On 24 December 1734, a fire in the Royal Alcázar of Madrid destroyed over 400 paintings, uncountable sculptures and thousands of documents, including the music collection of the royal chapel. Among the paintings, were works by Luca Giordano, El Greco, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, José de Ribera, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, Massimo Stanzione, Tintoretto, Tiziano, Velázquez, and Paolo Veronese. [23] [24] [25]
In May 2004, a fire destroyed the Momart warehouse in east London, together with more than 50 paintings by abstract artist Patrick Heron, as well as the works of nineteen other artists. [26]
Methods of restoration used in the past by reputable restorers have caused serious damage to artworks. For example, in the 19th century it was usual to coat an ancient painting in wood ash, then wash it off with water in order to remove dirt built up over the centuries, but this would end up damaging the work. Sometimes more modern restoration techniques have difficulty distinguishing the original work from changes made by earlier restoration. [27] Other restoration attempts by unqualified amateurs are simply botches, some of which have become infamous.
Several examples of failed restoration, some commissioned by or carried out by widely-respected organisations such as the Louvre and the British Museum (with respect to the damage to the Parthenon Marbles), and others by amateurs, are included in articles on the Artnet website [28] and elsewhere. [29]
Examples of botched amateur restoration include:
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge. It is located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge. It was founded in 1816 under the will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Viscount FitzWilliam (1745–1816), and comprises one of the best collections of antiquities and modern art in western Europe. With over half a million objects and artworks in its collections, the displays in the museum explore world history and art from antiquity to the present. The treasures of the museum include artworks by Monet, Picasso, Rubens, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Van Dyck, and Canaletto, as well as a winged bas-relief from Nimrud. Admission to the public is always free.
Art theft, sometimes called artnapping, is the stealing of paintings, sculptures, or other forms of visual art from galleries, museums or other public and private locations. Stolen art is often resold or used by criminals as collateral to secure loans. Only a small percentage of stolen art is recovered—an estimated 10%. Many nations operate police squads to investigate art theft and illegal trade in stolen art and antiquities.
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art, the museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 61,000 works of art from around the world. The museum provides free general admission to the public. With a $755 million endowment, it is the fourth-wealthiest art museum in the United States. With about 770,000 visitors annually (2018), it is one of the most visited art museums in the world.
The Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum is a private fine arts museum in Istanbul, Turkey, dedicated to calligraphic art, religious and state documents, as well as paintings of the Ottoman era. The museum was founded by Sakıp Sabancı, and was opened in June 2002. Aside from permanent exhibitions, the museum also hosts national and foreign temporary exhibitions and, hosts cultural events on the weekends.
The Museu Picasso is an art museum in Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain. It houses an extensive collection of artworks by the twentieth-century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, with a total of 4251 of his works. It is housed in five adjoining medieval palaces on Montcada Street in the La Ribera neighborhood in the Old City of Barcelona. It opened to the public on 9 March 1963, becoming the first museum dedicated to Picasso's work and the only one created during his lifetime. It has since been declared a museum of national interest by the Government of Catalonia.
Le Rêve is a 1932 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, then 50 years old, portraying his 22-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. It is said to have been painted in one afternoon, on 24 January 1932. It belongs to Picasso's period of distorted depictions, with its oversimplified outlines and contrasted colors resembling early cubism. The erotic content of the painting has been noted repeatedly, with critics pointing out that Picasso painted an erect penis, presumably symbolizing his own, in the upturned face of his model. On 26 March 2013, the painting was sold in a private sale for $155 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
The Opening of the Fifth Seal was painted in the last years of El Greco's life for a side-altar of the church of Saint John the Baptist outside the walls of Toledo. Before 1908, El Greco's painting had been referred to as Profane Love. The scholar Manuel B. Cossio had doubts about the title and suggested the Opening of the Fifth Seal. The Metropolitan Museum, where the painting is kept, comments: "the picture is unfinished and much damaged and abraded."
Massacre in Korea is an expressionistic painting completed on 18 January 1951 by Pablo Picasso. Picasso's third anti-war painting after Guernica and The Charnel House, Massacre depicts a scene of a massacre of a group of naked women and children by a firing squad. It has been considered to be a condemnation of American intervention in the Korean War. The painting was exhibited in the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Dusan Damian Cary Elwes is a British artist with studios in Los Angeles and the Colombian rainforest. His paintings explore themes such as the cycle of life and creativity. These artworks can be monumental and three-dimensional, such as a painting in which visitors walk from room to room on the ground floor of the "Villa La Californie" (2006–2018), to witness the extent of Pablo Picasso's creativity in April, 1956 or an immense landscape painting on the ground, Amazon (1999), on which visitors can walk above the exotic, flowering plants of a cloud forest and search for the source of the river.
The Actor is an oil-on-canvas painting by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, created from 1904 to 1905. The painting dates from the artist's Rose Period. It is housed in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Borja is a town and municipality in the province of Zaragoza, community of Aragon, northeastern Spain. As of 2014, its population was 4,931.
Vandalism of art is intentional damage of an artwork. The object, usually exhibited in public, becomes damaged as a result of the act, and remains in place right after the act. This may distinguish it from art destruction and iconoclasm, where it may be wholly destroyed and removed, and art theft, or looting.
The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art is an art gallery in the Bellagio resort, located on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. It opened along with the rest of the property on October 15, 1998. Like the resort, the gallery was owned by Mirage Resorts, overseen by Steve Wynn. The gallery's collection initially consisted of artwork owned by the company, as well as personal art pieces leased from Wynn.
The Ecce Homo in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain, is a fresco painted circa 1930 by the Spanish painter Elías García Martínez depicting Jesus crowned with thorns. Both the subject and style are typical of traditional Catholic art.
Head of a Young Woman is a 1906 oil painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts the portrait of a young woman with long, dark hair. The painting dates from Picasso's Rose Period, during a trip that he made to the Catalan village of Gósol. It was owned by Jaime Botín, a billionaire Spanish banker, until it was seized by the Spanish state in 2015. It is now housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
La Coiffeuse is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso that he created in 1911. It was painted in the early Cubist style, known as Analytical Cubism, which Picasso pioneered. The painting has been valued at $15m (£10m). It was reported as stolen from Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou in 2001, but then recovered in a shipment from Belgium to Newark, New Jersey, in December 2014. It was returned to Centre Pompidou in 2015.
La Gommeuse is a 1901 oil-on-canvas painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It dates from his Blue Period and is noted for its caricature of Picasso's friend Pere Mañach painted on the reverse. Gommeuse was sexually charged slang of the time for café-concert singers and their songs. It was offered for sale ex the William I. Koch collection at a Sotheby's, New York, auction on 5 November 2015. The painting realized $67.5 million at the sale, a record for a Blue Period Picasso, placing the painting among the most expensive ever sold.