Meindert Hobbema “Village Near a Pool” / nail file

(In 1966, a woman used her nail file to damage this work while it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The work was able to be restored.)

Graham Sutherland “Portrait of Sir Winston Churchill” / Mrs. Churchill

(In 1954, painter Graham Sutherland was commissioned by British Parliament to produce a portrait of the Prime Minister, which was presented to him on his 80th birthday.

Churchill himself did not like the portrait - he felt it depicted him as a querulous old man instead of the bulldoggish statesman who had faced down Hitler. His wife, Clementine, felt the same way, and upon accepting the work and shipping it home, she immediately hired workers to destroy it.)

various works / 20 cent coins, ballpoint pens

(In 1988, a series of painting were vandalized by unknown perpetrators who used 20 cent coins to scratch and ballpoint pens to puncture the works while they were on view at Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria. Among the works damaged were a still-life by Bernard Hall and a landscape by Louis Buvelot. In all cases, the damages were minimal and easily repaired.

It is believed that the acts were carried out by members of the Australian Cultural Terrorists, who had claimed responsibility for the theft of Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” from the museum in 1986.)

Enrique Chagoya “The Misadventures of Romantic Cannibals" / crowbar

(In 2010, a woman named Kathleen Folden destroyed this lithograph while it was on view at Denver’s Loveland Museum. While Chagoya’s work consisted of 12 connected panels, Folden had apparently been offended by one in particular, which depicted Jesus Christ with a woman’s body, reclining while a man buried his face near the crotch. Folden was arrested and charged; the work was destroyed and removed from the exhibition.)

Pablo Picasso “Femme Nue Devant Le Jardin” / knife

(In 1999, a 41-year-old man identified only as “Paul G.” used a knife to cut a large, ragged hole into this painting while it was on view at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art. After slashing the work, the man went to a newspaper office, where he boasted of his crime to a reporter, and was arrested soon after.

The same man, an escaped mental patient, had attacked Rembrandt’s painting “Night Watch” nine years earlier. In 1977, he’d also unsuccessfully attempted to hijack a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight using a toy gun.)

Chris Ofili “The Holy Virgin Mary” / paint

(In 1999, a 72-year-old man named Dennis Heiner smeared white paint on this work while it was on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Heiner had apparently smuggled the paint into the museum using a small hand lotion tube. He later told police he’d attacked the work because it was “blasphemous.”

The work, which had caused a great deal of controversy due to Ofili’s chosen materials (which included elephant dung and collaged pornographic images), was able to be restored.)

Neil Simmons “Margaret Thatcher” / cricket bat, stanchion

(In 2002, a man named Paul Kelleher decapitated this marble statue of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher while it was on display at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.

After chopping at the neck of the statue with a cricket bat he’d concealed in his pants, Kelleher used a metal stanchion to complete the act. Once finished, he waited to be arrested by the police. He later said that his actions to do with “artistic expression and my right to interact with this broken world.” He also told police, “I think it looks better like that.”

The statue was able to be repaired.)

Dror Feiler “Snow White and the Madness of Truth” / electricity

(In 2004, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, tried to destroy the artwork by unplugging lights and throwing one of them into a pool causing a short circuit.

Mazel claimed the work - a long pool of dyed water, upon which floated a small white boat carrying a portrait of a female Palestinian suicide bomber - was antisemitic. Upon entering the gallery space of Stockholm’s Museum of National Antiquities, he disconnected the electricity powering the installation and tipped one of its lights into the water. Mazel had to be escorted out by museum security; the work was able to be restored.

A week later, Thomas Nordanstad, who curated the exhibition in which this work was shown, was attacked by an unidentified man who pushed him down a staircase. It was later revealed that Nordanstad had also received over 400 e-mails containing various threats. The attacker was not found.)

Edvard Eriksen “Little Mermaid” / various

(This open-air bronze statue, installed in Copenhagen in 1913, has been damaged and defaced on several occasions, but has been successfully restored in the wake of each incident.

a) On April 24, 1964, the statue’s head was sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the Situationist movement. The head was never recovered and a new head was produced and placed on the statue.

b) On July 22, 1984, the right arm was sawn off and returned two days later by two young men. It was able to be reattached.

c) In 1990, an aborted attempt to sever the statue’s head left a cut in the neck 7 inches deep.

d) In 1998, the statue was decapitated again. The culprits were never found, but the head was returned anonymously to a nearby TV station. It was able to be reattached.

e) In 2003, the statue was knocked off its base with explosives and later found in the harbor’s waters. Holes were blasted in the mermaid’s wrist and knee.

f) In 2004, the statue was draped in a burqa as a statement against Turkey joining the European Union. In May 2007, the statue was again found draped in a Muslim dress and head scarf.

g) In 2006, a dildo was attached to the statue’s hand, green paint was dumped over it, and the words “March 8” were written on it. It is suspected that this vandalism had something to do with International Women’s Day, which falls on March 8th.
Paint has also been poured on the statue several times, including one instance in 1963 and two in 2007.)

Bartholomeus van der Helst “Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Munster” / fire

(In June 2006, serial vandal Hans Joachim Bohlmann splashed lighter fluid on this painting and set it on fire while it was on view at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam. Most damage was done to the varnish layer, which was able to be restored.)

Rembrandt “Jacob Blessing Joseph’s Second Son” (pictured above) and Willem Drost “Noli Me Tangere” / acid

(These two works were both vandalized by Hans Joachim Bohlmann on October 7, 1977 while on view at the Schloss Wilhemlshohe in Kassel Germany. In his attacks, Bohlmann was primarily targeting the faces of the personages, trying to inflict maximum damage.)

Lucas Cranach the Elder “Martin Luther and his wife Katharina von Bora” (diptych) / acid

(On 16 August 1977, these works were attacked by Hans Joachim Bohlmann, who poured sulfuric acid on them while they were displayed at the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover, Germany.)

Doris Salcedo (various works) / US Customs

(In 1995, four sculptures by Columbian artist Doris Salcedo were destroyed by U.S. Custom Service officials at NYC’s JFK airport. Pieces of the sculptures - which consisted of furniture molded in concrete - were hammered off as the custom officers searched, unsuccessfully, for narcotics. The sculptures were en route to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, which filed a claim for the damages with the federal agency.)

Greg Taylor “Down by the Lake with Liz and Phil” / saw, sledgehammers

(In 2010, a series of vandals attacked this controversial sculpture, which depicts Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip sitting together naked on a park bench. The work, installed by a lake near Canberra Australia’s High Court, had been on view for only a week before vandals repeatedly attacked the work, successfully beheading and severing legs from both sculptures and caving in Philip’s chest. The sculpture was permanently removed as a result.)

Henry Moore “King and Queen” / saw

(In 1995, vandals sawed off the heads of these open-air bronze sculptures, installed on a hillside in Dumfries, Scotland. Though the perpetrators were not caught, the decapitated heads were able to be reattached.)

Portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong / paint-filled eggs, burning object

(In May 1989, at the height of ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, three men - Yu Dongyue (a journalist), Yu Zhijian (a schoolteacher), and Lu Decheng (a truck mechanic) - threw eggs (which had been emptied and refilled with red, blue and yellow paint) at the large painted portrait of Mao Zedong displayed prominently near Tiananmen Square. According to news reports, other demonstrators seized the three men and turned them over to police.

The damage to the painting was able to be repaired. The three men were sentenced to life in prison; each served at least ten years before being separately released.

The painting was attacked again in May 2007, when a 35-year-old unemployed man from Xinjiang hurled a burning object at the portrait and damaged it. The man was arrested; the painting was restored.)

Paul Klee “Golden Fish” / acid

(In 1977, a man threw acid at this work while it was on view at Germany’s Hamburg Kunsthalle museum. Though damaged, the work was able to be restored.

This was the first of many acts of vandalism made by Hans Joachim Bohlmann, who damaged over 50 different artworks between 1977 and 2006.)

Hans Haacke “And You Were Victorious After All” / firebomb

(In 1988, this work was included in “Bezugspunkte 38/88 (Points of Reference),” a city-wide exhibition which highlighted sixteen loci of Nazi activity in the city of Graz, Austria.

Haacke’s temporary installation recreated a Nazi victory column that had been erected over a public statue in 1938, when Hitler honoured Graz as an early Nazi stronghold, calling it the ‘City of the People’s Insurrection.’ Haacke’s memorial, produced on the original site, included an additional text which commemorated those killed locally by the Nazis. Nearby, 16 posters inscribed with ‘Graz - City of the People’s Insurrection’ featured facsimiles of pro-Aryan and anti-Semitic documents Haacke culled from local newspaper reports, want ads, and university course listings printed in 1938.

The column was firebombed by neo-Nazis a week before it was to come down. The work was destroyed beyond repair.)

David Smith / his estate

(While curator Clement Greenberg was a long-time champion of sculptor David Smith’s work, he never approved of Smith’s experimentation with colored paint. Painted sculpture challenged Greenberg’s dictum of medium purity: “It seems to be a law of modernism that the conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they are recognized,“ he said, and Smith’s paint was decidedly non-essential to the sculptures, merely interrupting "the raw, discolored surfaces” of the welded steel. In a letter he sent Smith in 1951, Greenberg went so far as to request permission to paint over the multicolored surface of a sculpture given to him by the artist. “It should be black,” Greenberg insisted, adding, “We can always scrape it off again.”

When Smith died in 1965, Greenberg became an executor of his estate. In that capacity, he stripped the paint from five of Smith’s outdoor sculptures, all of which had been painted white. Greenberg had some of the works rusted and sealed, while others he let deteriorate or fade as a result of weather.

It was a controversial move, particularly because Smith’s own wishes were not entirely clear. He’d never explicitly given (or denied) his executors the power to alter his works. For his part, Greenberg insisted that Smith’s intention was never to leave the works white: the white paint was simply a primer, a mid-way point in a process that had been halted by the sculptor’s death. Better to alter the works, he argued, so that they resembled other finished works. Doing so, it was also noted, would improve their resale value considerably.

The question, as writer Beverly Pepper framed it, boiled down to this: “Should we not value phases of the artist’s research as much as the conclusions he came to?” In this case, the answer from the estate seemed to be no.)

Diego Rivera “Man at the Crossroads” / the Rockefellers

(In 1933, the Rockefellers commissioned muralist Diego Rivera to create a mural for the ground-floor wall of the Rockefeller Center. The artist was given a theme: “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.”

Nelson Rockefeller was outraged by the finished mural, which included images of society women drinking alcohol, a portrait of Leon Trotsky, and a prominent depiction of Vladimir Lenin. Rockefeller asked Rivera to change the face of Lenin to one of an anonymous laborer. When Rivera refused, Rockefeller paid the artist and immediately had the work draped over (never to be shown to the public). Soon after, workers demolished the mural, hauling pieces of the work away in wheelbarrows.

One of Rivera’s assistants had taken a photograph of the mural before it was destroyed. Using that photo as reference, Rivera eventually recreated the mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where it was renamed “Man, Controller of the Universe.”

Rockefeller later hired muralist Jose Maria Sert to replace Rivera’s work with a new mural with Abraham Lincoln as its focal point.)