Art Damaged

In Art Damaged, Christopher Schreck explores stories of artworks being defaced, damaged, or destroyed for reasons ranging from the political to the personal, from artistic expression to pure accident.

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In December 2019, Picasso’s “Bust of a Woman” (1944) was defaced while on view at London’s Tate Modern.
According to witnesses, a 20-year-old Londoner named Shakeel Massey attacked the work before being arrested on-site; whil

In September 2019, Daniel Buren’s 1967 painting “Peinture (Manifestation 3)” was badly slashed by a museum visitor with a knife while on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The attacker, who was arrested on-site, had no apparent m

The Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow has found Igor Podporin guilty of damaging Ilya Repin’s painting “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan 16 November 1581”. The incident took place on May 25, 2018 at Moscow’s Tretyakov

In January 2019, a 17th-century oil painting by John Michael Wright was damaged at the London home of BBC “art expert” Dr Bendor Grosvenor.
At the time of the incident, the work was already in a damaged state, as a cold winter followed b

Statue of the Two Hercules (circa 1700) / tourists
In May 2015, the “Statue of the Two Hercules” was damaged when two tourists climbed upon the work in the hopes of taking a selfie, accidentally dislodging a portion of the statue’s

In December 2018, ten separate works were damaged while on view at the Denver Art Museum, as an 18-year-old visitor named Jake Siebenlist pushed over an exhibition case and hurled works of art to the floor, damaging rare Mayan artifacts and a Qing dy