Art and Vandalism

The NY Times has an article on an interesting exhibit at the Tate on gallery art and vandalism.  A topic that has been in the news recently as we have seen more, or have at least heard more about these incidents.  The article states many galleries dont like publicizing acts of vandalism as it might encourage more acts.

The Tate exhibition looks at the attacks as a scholarly endeavor and for a deeper meaning than just a simple assault.

The NY Times reports

Taking scissors to a van Gogh landscape, smearing paint over a Rembrandt, setting fire to a Leonardo drawing — even imagining such acts can make the stomach clench. We’ll never own these masterpieces, cannot touch them, may never see them up close. Yet their destruction prompts outrage.

Galleries generally prefer not to discuss attacks on artworks for fear of provoking more of them. Besides, some reason, what is there to gain by dwelling on vandalism? Surely, these crimes are the antithesis of art — the culprits must be brutish or deranged.

But a new exhibition opening on Wednesday at Tate Britain makes a forceful counterclaim: that certain assaults contain meaning and even insights into history and art. To advance that argument, “Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm,” which runs through Jan. 5, presents butchered paintings, decapitated sculptures and other damaged works in a survey of centuries of art vandalism.

The Tate Britain’s director, Penelope Curtis, said the show has already stirred more anxiety in the art world than she had expected. “The whole show is a concern,” she said. But Ms. Curtis maintains that there is value in pondering the meaning of iconoclasm. “I suppose I’m interested in using galleries to think about difficult questions,” she said.

Unfortunately, she noted, the issue has become “rather horribly topical” recently. Several attacks have taken place in Britain over the last year.

In June, a man sprayed paint on a recently completed portrait of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey, and another glued a photograph onto a Constable painting in the National Gallery. Most damaging was the defacement of a Rothko mural with permanent marker last October at the Tate Modern, which has required months of restoration.

Even as these crimes unfolded, the Tate Britain curators persisted in their scholarly labors, surveying 500 years of assaults on British art and coming up with three chief motives: religion, politics and aesthetics. (They ignored “unthinking attacks,” like those by the mentally ill, or the destruction of a work to conceal an art theft from the authorities.)

One challenge for the show is relying on works that have, by definition, been ruined. Tabitha Barber, a co-curator, cited two stone fragments from Nelson’s Pillar, a monument to that British naval hero that was blown up in Dublin by an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army in Dublin in 1966. “You could walk past those pieces of stone and think they were just pieces of stone,” she said. “But we’ve brought them into an exhibition, put them on a podium, covered them in glass. We’re saying, actually these fragments have power.”

Source: The NY Times