Last week a security guard at the Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg, Russia, defaced a painting on his first night on duty. The painting was a US$1,000,000 abstract of the faceless figures painted by a famous Russian artist, Anna Leporskaya, in 1968. The painting looks a lot like line art with a large oval shape in the foreground and 2 smaller oval shapes in the middle distance placed at equidistant on either side of the first figure. The thick lines are created with a brush laden with paint, most likely oil. The bodies are created with rectangles whose corners have been softened by ensuring they are round. Suffice it to say that the faces have no eyes. Well…they didn’t, until the security guard decided to take ballpoint pen to canvas.

 The guard was subsequently fired and the whole case is under investigation. The authorities decided they didn’t wish to prosecute the 60-year- old because they felt that the damage was insignificant and fixable. The restoration of the painting will cost around US$3,300 but only because his ballpoint pen did not leave deep impressions in the brushstrokes.

 The thing that struck me was that the damage was not discovered until days later when a gallery customer spotted the eyes.

 By the way, did I mention that the painting was an abstract? I don’t wish to knock abstract works but, from what I can see, such works seem to break the incredibly difficult rules that traditional artists live by. Rules such as perspective, proportionality and composition. By the latter I mean that if the painting were of a landscape or seascape, you would not see part of a still life included in it, unless it was an abstract landscape.

Now since this particular piece was an abstract I wonder if the eyes went unnoticed because their addition did not look off in the picture. I’ve seen the painting and I guarantee that if you saw the painting and read that it had been defaced but without the details of the damage, you’d be hard pressed to work out what part had been defaced. I hate to say this but the eyes did not look off or out of place. I’ll bet that the only people who noticed that eyes had been added were those who were familiar with the work. But, before anyone jumps on this statement, I am sure that anyone might have noticed a change in the painting tool used -- the ballpoint pen. Had the guard painted in the eyes using a brush, maybe those unfamiliar with the work would not have noticed.

 I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that abstract works can be slightly damaged without the damage being noticed or whether traditional works can be damaged and that damage can stand out like a sore thumb.

 Some people might argue that if an abstract work of art is even slightly damaged, the painter might have intended it to look that way. This argument might stem from the many unusual works that hang in galleries and that have often invited ridicule from traditional artists. Remember the banana taped to the wall around three years ago? That was in a renowned gallery and many traditional artists poked fun at what is being considered art by posting their own pictures of various fruit taped to their walls. I agree that this is not defacement of the banana ‘art’, but when the banana started to turn black and rot and if the gallery hadn’t replaced it, is the artist poking fun at himself?

 But Leporskaya isn’t the only artist whose work has been damaged. Famous works by Rembrandt and Leonardo Da Vinci have also been vandalised, some repeatedly. The Mona Lisa has had crockery thrown at her as well as acid on her face. Rembrandt’s Night Watch has had three knife attacks and Edward Eriksen’s statue of The Little Mermaid has been blown off its base with explosives as well as, at one point, being beheaded. And then, of course, there’s our favourite artist, Banksy, most of whose works have been defaced or vandalised. But then many may argue that since all of Banksy’s works are graffiti, can they be considered defaced when they are?

 One wonders why people deface artwork. Is it boredom? Or do they dislike the artist or the gallery or establishment within which it is hung? Or do they not like the message the artist is sending through his artwork?  Or is it just kids messing around? Why not just look and enjoy?