Moscow: There are many ways your first day at a new job can go. For a security guard at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre, an art gallery in Russia’s Yekaterinburg, it involved getting bored and drawing over a million-dollar avant-garde painting with a ball-point pen. Needless to say, he got fired even before he could work a second day.
The painting in question is Anna Leporskaya’s Three Pictures, a 1930s artwork that had been loaned by State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to an abstract art exhibition at Yeltsin Center, titled The World as Non-Objectivity, the Birth of a New Art. The guard’s personal addition to the painting was first noticed on December 7, 2021, by two unsuspecting visitors when a pair of eyes on two of three faceless figures stood out to them as unusual.
The exhibition’s curator, Anna Reshetkina, told The Guardian the painting was vandalised “with a Yeltsin Center-branded pen”. The painting was insured for 75 million roubles (USD 1.3 million, £740,000).
A day after the ill-fated incident, the artwork was returned to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and inspected by art restoration experts. The total cost of restoring the original artwork was pegged at 250,000 roubles (USD 4,600) and is reportedly being paid by the security agency whose employee is suspected to have been behind the damage.
In the report published by The Art Newspaper, Ivan Petrov elaborated on the extent of the damage: “Fortunately, the vandal drew with a pen without strong pressure, and therefore the relief of the strokes as a whole was not disturbed.” He added that the ink has slightly penetrated into the paint layer for the lack of varnish.
The Yeltsin Centre reported the incident to the police nearly two weeks after the incident, on December 20. The identity of the alleged vandal was not revealed.
Yekaterinburg’s Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation initially refused to initiate a case, citing that the damage is ‘insignificant’ and that since the picture has not lost its original properties, it does not qualify as a crime under the criminal code of the Russian Federation.
However, the Ministry was reported to have complained to the prosecutor general’s office about the gallery’s delay in taking action. The police recently stated that an investigation is now underway and the suspect faces a fine and a one-year correctional labour sentence.
Meanwhile, the painting is under restoration and according to gallery officials, the damage can be fixed without any major consequences for Anna Leporskaya’s work.