‘I Am A Fool’: Russian Guard Who Drew Eyes On 20th-Century Painting Says He Thought It Was Children's Drawing
The painting dates back to the 1930s, and has three torsos and heads with hair but no facial features. The guard drew eyes on two of them using a ballpoint pen.
New Delhi: On his first day on the job, a Russian security guard at the Yeltsin Centre in Ekaterinburg ended up with a criminal case against him after he vandalised a 20th-century painting by drawing eyes on figures left deliberately faceless by the artist, media reports said.
It was an avant-garde painting on loan from Russia’s top art repository. The gallery said the damage to Anna Leporskaya’s ‘Three Figures’ could be repaired, according to an AP report.
The painting dates back to the 1930s, and has three torsos and heads with hair but no facial features. The guard, who worked for a private company that is providing security at the gallery, drew eyes on two of them using a ballpoint pen.
The AP report said the incident took place on December 7, and Yeltsin Center has sent the painting to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which owns it, for restoration.
The painting had been insured for 74.9 million rubles (roughly $1 million), reports said, adding that the criminal case opened against the accused guard carries a sentence of up to three months in prison.
Leporskaya, who lived from 1900-1982, was a student of Kazimir Malevich, a seminal Russian abstract artist best known for his 1915 work “Black Square.”
‘What Have I Done!’
Meanwhile, the security guard identified by the local media as Aleksandr Vasiliev is now remorseful.
In an interview to Russian news site E1 Friday, Vasiliev (63) said he was an injured veteran of the Afghan and Chechen wars. He said he thought the image was a “childrens’ drawing”, and that teenagers visiting the gallery told him to improve upon it, The Art Newspaper reported.
“I’m a fool, what have I done!,” Vasiliev said.
He told E1 that he did not know he was doing anything wrong, though remembered how other museum visitors were walking by smiling.
When the police came to him several days later, Vasiliev said, he could not understand the charges against him. He told the police that he would “erase everything so it’s not visible”. The E1 article said the teens who he said goaded him on to deface the painting could not be seen in the security camera footage.
Vasiliev also said he would never have damaged the work had he known “the paintings were brought from Moscow and are so expensive”.
His wife told E1 that he is “absolutely normal in daily life” but “is naive as a child” in some things.
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