The deliberate destruction of works of art, also known as art vandalism, is the sort of crime that rarely leaves people indifferent. In the majority of the registered cases, acts of art vandalism are committed not by outraged visitors but by aspiring artists aiming to leave their mark on pieces of history. Here are seven outrageous yet remarkable cases of art vandalism.

1. Art Vandalism Against Barnett Newman

In 1986 an unsuccessful realist artist Gerard Jan van Bladeren entered the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He then headed directly to the room where Barnett Newman’s work Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III was and slashed it with a utility knife. Van Bladeren claimed that he was acting as nature against the vicious ideologies of modern art.

But what made the case truly remarkable was not the act itself but the public reaction to it. While art professionals and conservators were fearfully assessing the damage, some visitors sent letters to the Stedelijk Museum suggesting van Bladeren as its new director.

The court sentenced Gerard Jan van Bladeren to five months in prison. Yet, nine years later, the vandal returned to finish his job. Since Red, Yellow, and Blue wasn’t on display at the time, he turned his knife against another work of Newman called Cathedra (1951). While the latter painting was successfully restored, the restorers could not reverse all of the damage caused during the 1986 attack. The original layer of paint in Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III could not be reconstructed, and the canvas was painted over several times.

2. The Artist Who Wanted to Free Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is one of the most provocative artworks ever. Since its first public exhibition in 1917, it kept offending the taste of many audience members with its simplicity and indecency. After all, a urinal is not a thing you would expect to see outside of a restroom, let alone inside an art gallery. Although the original work has been lost, numerous copies in the world’s most famous museums keep attracting vandals.

Most of the vandals tried to urinate in it. Some of them were, unfortunately, successful. These perpetrators claimed that they not only rightfully used the object but added their own artistic touch to it. In 2006, the French performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli damaged a copy of the work at the Pompidou Center using a hammer. The Fountain was only slightly chipped, however, it was immediately removed from display. A 76-year-old Pinoncelli called himself a Neo-Dadaist and claimed he wanted to save the artwork from the institution and not destroy it. The French police had been keeping an eye on Pinoncelli and his destructive performances. He even appeared as Santa Claus at a department store in Nice just to break all the toys inside his present sack in front of crying children and their outraged parents.

3. The Provocateur Who Vomited Paint on a Mondrian

In 1996, an attention-seeking aspiring artist Jubal Brown left his native Toronto to visit New York’s Museum of Moden Art. There, he vomited all over a work made by Piet Mondrian titled Composition with Red and Blue. Initially, MoMA employees believed this was an accident, yet two facts about Brown do not fit into that. First of all, the trace left by the visitor had an intense blue color. While someone’s dietary habits barely could be regarded as evidence, another fact made the situation clear: several months before the incident, Brown had the same accident happen to him in the Art Gallery of Ontario when he vomited red on Raoul Dufy’s Port of le Havre. As the investigation progressed, the mixture was revealed to be a combination of colored gelatine and cake icing.

Brown confessed that the two acts were parts of his three-stage performance. For the final act, Brown meant to vomit yellow on a third artwork, yet thankfully he never did this. The motivation behind the gross act was to demonstrate a reaction to art. The vandal claimed that both Mondrian and Dufy were so boring they needed more color in them. Thankfully, restoration teams in both New York and Toronto were able to quickly clean the paintings, preventing further damage.

4. The Drunk Who Punched a Monet

In October 2007, a group of five drunk individuals felt a sudden urge to visit the Musée d’Orsay in Paris at 1 in the morning. The museum was obviously closed at the time, so they broke in through the back door. As expected, the alarm went off right after the break-in, and the group fled. Moments before their escape, one of the perpetrators punched a work by Claude Monet called The Argenteuil Bridge. The painting was located on the ground floor of the museum. Despite being caught on the surveillance cameras, the vandals have not been arrested yet.

Unfortunately, the incident at the d’Orsay was not the only time someone punched a Monet. In 2012, an Irishman Andrew Shannon attacked Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat at the National Museum of Ireland. Originally, Shannon claimed that this was done in protest of the government, however, during the trial he insisted that the punch was accidental and caused by a fall. Yet the video of the attack helped prove Shannon’s original malicious intent. The vandal was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by a fifteen-month ban from all art galleries and museums. Thankfully, both the French and the Irish painting were successfully restored and put back on display.

5. The Vandal Who Sued His Victim

One of the most famous yet controversial contemporary artists Damien Hirst found himself in the middle of a vandalism scandal in 1994. One of Hirst’s infamous formaldehyde installations called Away From The Flock, featuring a preserved white lamb in a glass tank, suddenly turned pitch black. This was caused by the actions of another aspiring artist called Mark Bridger who poured black ink into the tank. For some reason, the top part of the tank was unsealed, allowing Bridger to open it. Although some saw this as an act of jealousy, Bridger explained his actions as provoked by the sense of mortality coming from the artwork.

Bridger’s ambitious idea to call his act an artistic collaboration did not sit well with the investigators. However, Damien Hirst was not as outraged by the vandal’s action as he was expected to be. Several years after the incident, he published a photograph of the Black Sheep (the title given by Bridger) in an album of his work. What was the vandal’s reaction? He sued Hirst for copyright infringement!

6. The Man Who Put a Price Tag on Malevich

Another case of outrageous art vandalism at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam happened in 1997 when a Russian performance artist Alexander Brener painted a dollar sign over a Kazimir Malevich painting The White Supremacist Cross. Unlike other vandals on this list, Brener was an accomplished artist, who is today regarded as one of the leading figures of the Moscow Actionist movement. His reputation, however, did not save him from serving a prison sentence and paying for the work’s restoration. Saving the work was a difficult quest for the restoration team since the green paint used by Brener leaked deep into the cracks of the original layer.

Brener claimed that his work was a social commentary on the commodification of art and the loss of the immaterial. The court did not agree with his best intentions, but this act of vandalism still sparked a debate among the public. While the majority of art experts did not find anything artistic in this act, some insisted that the commercialization of the art market was a process dramatic enough to justify Brener’s radical reaction.

7. Art Vandalism and Mona Lisa

Probably the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, had a long history of being targeted by art thieves and vandals. Mona Lisa’s worldwide popularity started with the scandalous disappearance of the painting in 1911. One of the suspects was none other than Pablo Picasso.

With great popularity came great risk. The earliest recorded account of violence inflicted on the painting happened in the mid-1950s. A man attempted to cut the work out of the frame with a razor blade, claiming he was in love with Gioconda. After the initial attack, the Louvre curators protected the work with a glass case. This decision would prove to be wise in 1956 when a homeless Bolivian man threw a rock into it.

Unfortunately, this was not the end of attacks on the famous Mona Lisa. In 1974, a disabled woman visited the Tokyo National Museum, which had the painting on loan, and sprayed the work with red paint. She wanted to protest against the museum’s failed accessibility policy. In 2009, a Russian woman, furious after her French citizenship request was denied, threw a souvenir mug right into the protective glass. The glass wasn’t broken, however. The latest incident took place in May 2022, when a climate activist smeared the protective glass with a cake.

ALEXANDRIA, La. (KALB) – Louisiana’s Celebration Gator is preparing to roll down the streets of New York City in less than a week for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the third year in a row. Each year, the float has hosted a Louisiana native as its headline performer. In 2021, that artist was New Orleans native Jon Batiste. In 2022, Lainey Wilson of Baskin sang her way to 34th Street.

This year, an Alexandria native will take the stage, representing Central Louisiana in a big way.

Alex Smith grew up in Alexandria, spending much of his time inside Red River Music, fostering a love of music first instilled in him by his family. Now, Smith will bring the sounds of the Pelican State to the streets of the Big Apple with what he calls Louisiana Country.

“I took a bunch of the songwriting aspects that 90s country has, but then also loved all the swampiness that we have in our culture and our music with slide guitars and [sic] and all these things that are Louisiana kinda feeling and swampy even in the texture of them,” said Smith. “So it’s kinda come together in this blend of Louisiana and Nashville to me is what I consider Louisiana country.”

There is no better stage to showcase the uniquely Louisiana mashup than from the top of the 60-foot-long Celebration Gator.

“We surely stole the show each year with that gator crawling down the street, blowing confetti out its mouth, it really shows Louisiana,” said Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser. “Especially since the Swamp People, Duck Dynasty and the swamp tours have been a big part of our tourism, that super gator just fits really well to promote Louisiana.”

Nungesser’s office estimates the parade has reached 2.4 billion viewers in the past two years, totaling more than $22 million in advertising value, which has meant great things for Louisiana’s tourism industry.

As he looks to showcase a little bit of home, it should mean great things for Smith too.

“I’m just overwhelmingly grateful for the opportunity. I am so excited to be able to represent my city in such a national exposure experience,” said Smith. “I hope it just brings joy to all these people that get to watch this on TV and show that’s what our culture and our music does. Because you can’t go to a single bar in Louisiana that doesn’t have a live band and there’s dancing, there’s not a still foot in the house. And I think that’s what Louisiana kind of represents is that style of music and that style of energy throughout the state.”

Smith will be joined by Mandeville fiddler Amanda Shaw to usher in the holiday season with his debut album “Bootshake.”

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade begins at 7:30 a.m. CT on NBC and Peacock.

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Two top knotch women artists known for their in-depth explorations, an abstract master who was a Neo tantra yogi and author who created sculptural paper dyes that celebrated meditative moorings. A Kerala artist who creates stellar landscapes and a stoneware and bronze sculptor who endorses the beauty of the human figure, these are a series of stand alone wonders at Art Mumbai Official’s debut.

Anjolie Ela Menon’s lingam and Anju Dodiya’s portraits became works to contemplate upon  at the Art Mumbai bouquet of an art gala. Anjolie Ela Menon’s Murano glass lingam at Apparao Galleries Booth, and Anju Dodiya’s mixed media laminate with painted fabric mounts at Vadehras, wove their own meanderings of cerebral conversations with verve. Along with those reflections was  famed author, abstractionist and seer Sohan Qadri’s paper dye ( Apparao Galleries) , KP Prasad’s Kerala landscapes, Satish Gupta’s robust bronze head ( Sanchit Art )  and  Rajesh Ram’s bronze  figure ( Palette Art Gallery ) that held their own.

Apparao’s suite of abstract wonders stems from Sharan Apparao’s curatorial history as one of India’s finest art gallerists with a historical edge. Anju Dodiya’s quartet at Vadehras creates a summary of autobiographical  annotations in art history in a melange of materials.Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna’s  astute articulations come through in their choice of artists at Palette. Sanchit Joshan’s resonance filled gallery unveiled art essence at its best.

Anjolie Ela Menon’s lingam

Murano glass and a lingam, the light filters through to create a series of design dynamics in Anjolie Ela Menon’s lingam that at once sifts the master from the rest. This lingam series  created as far back as 1998 at the glass blowing studio in Italy reflects the versatility and variety of genres that Anjolie traversed during her years as an artist of robust realms.

The transparency of the glass, the cosmic consciousness of the lingam and its many layers all come together to give us a spiritual echo that speaks in multiple moorings of an Indianesque ethos. Apparao had a series of shows of Anjolie’s glass works entitled Sacred Prism in the early years of 2000. This work brings back that memory of her finesse and her erudite aura as an artist of depth and dynamism. Anjolie’s understanding of Indian iconographic elements too stands the test of time in terms of her explorations into abstract territory. Her words ring true:

“The lingam or cosmic spheroid represents pure consciousness. It is serenely detached and self sufficient. Its erectness and translucent substance signify that it is consubstantial with the penetrating essence of the universe beyond manifestation.”

Sohan Qadri’s dyed paper symbolism

“When I start on a painting, first I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into primordial space. Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with emptiness of the canvas,” Sohan Qadri once said at his show in Sundaram Tagore Gallery NY. Though he started out painting in the impasto style using oil and acrylic on canvas and board, he discovered his spiritual medium in inks and dyes. He used Van Guelder paper – a heavy paper used for intaglio printing – and treats it to create a consistency ideal for ink and dye dispersion.

He  was perpetually seeking a medium where effort was superfluous. Deep states of being were not brought out by effort, according to him. But they were born of a state of mind. This work exemplifies his understanding and the gravitas that poured into the many patterns he evoked with individual techniques.

Instead of using subject matter drawn from the gritty urban world like many of his contemporaries, he searched for subject matter that inspired spiritual feelings and turned to an Eastern mode of expression full of bhava or mood. “I was focusing purely on colour and form without distraction from figure,” he said.

Qadri developed a methodology of painting that he would use for most of his life, dividing pure colors into three categories or parts: dark, warm or cool, and light. Dark colors form the earth element or lower level. Warm or cold colors denote energy, each of which possesses a different vibration and form the middle level, and light colors, the upper level. This allowed for a tripartite arrangement that could be organized in descending or ascending order.

Anju Dodiya’s winsome quartet  (Vadehras)

In a winsome quartet Anju Dodiya’s works celebrate the adage small is beautiful. Her faces are at once both  powerful as well as poignant in a pensive way, as she revels in the emotional theatre of her own private, inner world of allegories and allusions. She creates narratives that revolve around the eye and the mind in intuitive introspection. She creates monosyllabic conversations where the inevitable pauses are rumination.

Known for assembling imagery  from mythology as well as  autobiographical fiction, her repertoire now includes a series of  mixed media works on paper and laminate  mounted in fabric mounts, that have tensile tender emotions painted with  the wispy feather touch strokes of watercolour and tactile textures that reaffirm her place as one of India’s greatest contemporary figurative masters. Dawn Breaks and The Sharp Song both have their own cadences rippling into her passion for reading as well as her affinity for capturing elements of solitude. These four works look like four pages in a book of modernist metaphors. Enchanting however are the minimalist cadences that are added with the embellishment of fabric mounts that add a gateway to the emotive expression on the solitary faces in the centre. These faces are manifestations of mood, they capture the intricacies of her multifaceted approach. These four stylised female portraits create a rich, embodied space for feminine renderings.

Prasad KP’s landscapes of Kerala ( Palette)

The light shifts continuously in his native bound Kerala landscapes. Baroda dwelling artist  Prasad KP’s landscapes at the Palette Booth revel in resonance as well as the rhythms of lush tropicana and earth tones. As the day progresses, the relief patterns of his native land and  space constantly changes its appearance.

The architectural symbolism of the land  is both  alive and animated within its many nooks and crannies. Nevertheless, to breathe life into it, it requires a human presence and of course, light. Prasad takes many days to create his masterpieces that are created in keeping with the twilight shades of sunrise and sunset; the position of the sun, whose rays penetrate the terra firma, is different for each time of day and season, as is also the case in the famous pathways in the landscape , bathed in the light pouring through the shades of trees and facades of the forests in the hills of his native village.

As an artist Prasad aspires to create a universe within the spaces of his landscape he observes. On looking at his landscapes ,visitors can feel the existence of his universe and become aware of their own aliveness. Prasad’s  ideal is to get viewers to be attentive to his rumination.

Rajesh Ram’s sculpture ( Palette )

In an interview with me this year Rajesh Ram said: “ I’m constantly exploring the properties of the place of history amidst a fluidity and movement created with  heavy connotations of human reality  and the power of politics in the life of man .”

Rajesh’s human bronze figure at Palette Art Gallery ,contends with surpassing the limitations of the physical constraints of materiality while interrogating notions of perceived reality, power and strength within the history of politics, hybrid forms and the existence of man. The animated form of the human figure reflects his love for perfection and his passion for creating works that will remain in human memory.

Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of nature, history  and anatomy, Rajesh Ram  examines perceived material capabilities   in surprising ways from the haunts of history. The human sculpture with a flower on the head  represents  imaginative ,fascinating  forms, suggesting mathematical perfection to the fusion of  man as a metaphor, while the exterior surface reflects a shiny reflective armature ,in the polished patina resembling — metaphors for the human experience and where  real beauty in  humans can be found.

There is a seamless strain of  poetics within the juxtaposition of fragility and strength in the sculpted  forms that he  works with. Within the structure of sculptural vignette we see a  physical duality which unravels as a parallel to the very notions and paradoxes  of the human condition.This work is a natural evolution of Rajesh Ram’s  explorations of the physical nature of materials, the place of memory and the politics of  human behaviour.

IMAGES: Vadehra Art Gallery, Apparao Galleries &  Palette Art

END OF ARTICLE

When Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the incoming new president of the Venice Biennale, was once asked in an interview whether he was a fascist, the Italian rightwing journalist and public intellectual replied: “I am not a fascist. I am something else.”

After Buttafuoco was this week officially nominated to lead the oldest and largest cultural exhibition in the world, it is not just the artists, actors, architects, film-makers, dancers and musicians whose work will be shown at the coming biennales’ six events who are asking themselves what exactly that “something else” may be.

To the far-right party of Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, the former leader of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party is an ideological ally in a battle against what it perceives to be an art establishment dominated by leftwingers. “Buttafuoco affirms a change of pace that the Meloni government wants to imprint in every cultural and social centre of the nation,” said the deputy parliamentary leader of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, rejoicing at the appointment.

Curators who have worked on previous iterations of the biennale, meanwhile, fear the 60-year-old’s appointment could follow a pattern familiar from Poland or Hungary, where rightwing populist governments have drafted in ideologically aligned polemicists.

It is possible that Buttafuoco, who will not take over from the current president, Roberto Cicutto, until March 2024, could surprise them both.

Born and raised in Catania, Sicily, Buttafuoco was a national leader of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party established by Giorgio Almirante, who was a minister in the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s government. As a journalist, he began working with rightwing magazines and the then MSI newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia.

Since then, however, he has proved an eccentric type of conservative. For one, there is his 2015 conversion to Islam. “Call me Giafar al-Siqilli,” he wrote in one of his books, in honour of the emir of Sicily. Far from an act of provocation, Buttafuoco insisted his change of faith was a reconciliation with the history of his native region. “The identity of Sicily is Islamic,” he wrote. “Every market is a casbah, every club is a transfiguration of the archaic social code, and if the principle of long duration holds, it is the Saracen that endures still.”

While there are parallels between Buttafuoco’s political trajectory and that of Meloni, their relationship has not always been idyllic. In 2015, when Buttafuoco’s name emerged as a potential candidate for governor of Sicily in the rightwing coalition, Meloni used her veto as her party’s leader in the house to block his candidacy.

She cited his conversion as the reason for her objection: “Do we realise the cultural message, even before the political one, that we would give to the world?” she said at the time. “It’s as if a Christian were to be a candidate and elected in Istanbul.”

He has spoken out against the right to bear arms, a topic dear to the Italian right, and he has in the past accused the right of being too demagogic about migrants.

Buttafuoco has remained faithful to some traditional rightwing ideas, championing Italy’s historical cultural identity and opposing political correctness, but he does not couch them in populist terms. Among the publications that regularly publish his opinions are leftwing daily Il Fatto Quotidiano and the liberal daily La Repubblica, two publications fiercely critical of Meloni, as well as the centrist daily Il Foglio and financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

Few of the previous holders of the post have been overtly political. During the 80s and 90s, the biennale was headed by a string of architects and film critics, but for the last 25 years its presidents have had a more technocratic feel: they were economists, bank managers and, in the case of Cicutto, appointed in 2020, a film producer.

Critics claim Buttafuoco’s managerial experience, including a five-year stint as president of the regional theatre Teatro Stabile di Catania and his current presidency of the Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo, is limited.

The budgets he will have to handle with prudence during his tenure are considerable. The biennale has recently received a grant of €169m (£148m) from the Italian government and the European Union to carry out major repair works to the Arsenale exhibition space in Venice’s former shipyards and relocate its archive.

How much time that leaves for Buttafuoco to imprint any kind of ideological vision on the festival at all remains to be seen. While the biennale president appoints the artistic curators that set the themes of each of the festival’s disciplines, the national pavilions that attract most of the attention are curated autonomously.

One of the Italian right’s bugbears has been the conversion of the Italian-themed neoclassical palazzo inside the Giardini park into a central pavilion showcasing international artists, and the Italian pavilion’s relegation to the Arsenale venue. Some curators fear that Buttafuoco, spurred on by the Meloni administration’s infatuation with “Italian-ness”, could reverse that decision.

Others hope the new president will prove enough of a free thinker to resist a narrowing of the institution’s appeal. Francesco Rutelli, the former centre-left mayor of Rome and current president of Italy’s cinema association Anica, said the biennale’s historical strength was its role as an instrument of freedom. “I am certain that Buttafuoco, a free spirit, will be able to continue this and interpret it in the best way.”

Contacted by the Guardian for an interview, Buttafuoco said: “Not now. Let’s talk when the appointment, God willing, becomes official next March.”