Attacking artworks (Uffizi bombing, Pietà, Night Watch, Fathers of Confederation)

[matt_mcl]

I have a morbid curiosity about terrorist attacks on works of art. Will someone with details please tell me more about one or more of the following? Web searches turned up little of interest.

1. the Mafia car-bombing of the Uffizi gallery in 1993
2. Laszlo Toth’s sledgehammering of Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s
3. the slashing of Rembrandt(?)'s The Night Watch by a disgruntled Dutch navy cook
4. the destruction of The Fathers of Confederation in a museum on Prince Edward Island, possibly by a disgruntled curator.

Thanks for any info.

[Chas.E]

The only two I heard about restorations were the Pieta and Night Watch, both were successfully repaired. I think the Uffizi restoration is finished but I don’t recall the specifics, or what happened to the artworks.
What concerns me more are incidents like the spray-paint vandalism of Kasmir Malevich’s “White on White” which seeped instantly into cracks in the pigment and totally destroyed the painting, it could not be restored. I recall a similar incident with one of Yoko Ono’s paintings, except in her case, her Arte Povera drawing was specifically labeled as an artwork that Ono intended you to add to and draw on top of it. So someone did, doodling on it with a magic marker. And she got pissed off. Excuse me, if you don’t want people to write on your paintings, don’t invite them to do it.

[hawthorne]

Another one for you Matt: Andre Serrano’s spooky Piss Christ photo was attacked and badly damaged here in Melbourne a few years ago. This link has some background.

[hawthorne]

I should have opened a few more links in AltaVista. Try here for what looks like heaps on the Serrano attack. Given that this is a page from a site called http://www.museum-security.org I think you may be in morbid curiosity heaven.

[Johanna]

Somebody spraypainted Picasso’s Guernica in 1974.

[RickJay]

I am reminded of Toronto art student Jubal Brown, who a few years back went around to art galleries after eating large meals and swallowing food dye and then barfed, in primary colors, on important works of art.

[delphica]

There’s an interesting website with info on the Uffizi bombing here: http://www.florence-concierge.it/earticoli/cipulci.html

I was working in Florence at the time of the bombing, and was at a house on the Via Bolognese, which is about 15 minutes (by car) from the Uffizi. We heard the explosion and were quite mystifed as to what it was, and where it came from.

When I returned to NY, I saw some negative press about Florence, saying that Florentines were in an uproar over the damage to the art in the Uffizi, and not at all concerned about the five people who were killed in the explosion. However, in Florence, I saw first hand the enormous distress over the bomb’s victims, especially the two young children who were killed.

[Guinastasia]

Ilya Repin’s huge canvas of “Ivan Grozny and the Tsarevich” was slashed in the Hermitage, I believe.
(Ivan Grozny=Ivan the Terrible. It’s this HUGE painting of him holding his son’s dead body-Ivan beat his own son to death…it’s a fascinating and horrible story).

[Coldfire]

From the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam website, I will quote a paragraphs about the damage done to the Nachtwacht (Night Watch).

The Night Watch has been moved a couple of times. The painting hung in the Great Hall of the Arquebusiers until 1715. It was then moved to the town hall on Dam Square, at which point it was drastically altered. Because the Night Watch was too large for the wall there, it was cut on all sides. A particularly large piece was cut off the left side. Unfortunately none of these pieces were kept. A seventeenth-century copy by Gerrit Lundens shows how the painting originally looked.

In hindsight, that’s a terrorist attack of some sort. Cutting it up just to make it fit Town Hall. Jesus.

OK, on to the actual deliberate non-authorised damages. First hit: the Night Watch was sprayed with acid in 1990. From this article about the slashing of a Picasso:

Dutch authorities said the 41-year-old mental patient, identified only as Paul G., was a suspect in a 1990 incident at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in which someone threw acid on “The Night Watch,” a masterpiece by Rembrandt. The man has been under the supervision of the psychiatric clinic since 1978, when he tried to hijack a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines jet from Amsterdam to Madrid using a toy gun. Passengers and crew members overpowered him and he was arrested and convicted on assault charges.

Clearly someone who likes a bit of attention. No detail about the restoration, or the damage done.

We search on. Hey, this is nice. Not really vandalism, but some good trivia nonetheless on this site:

The fate of Rembrandt’s Night Watch is the fate of all images.
The master labored over this enormous canvas for two years. Indignities were heaped on it almost from the beginning. In 1715 a third of the painting was shorn away. Generation upon generation of protective varnish was slathered onto it. The Night Watch embarked upon a night that would not be marked in hours but in centuries.
In 1946 a thorough cleaning revealed that these “watchmen” were actually soldiers getting ready for battle. The painting known for three hundred years as The Night Watch was not a night scene at all — it took place in broad daylight. So its name was changed to The Company of Frans Banning Cocq Preparing to March Out. And fifty years later, everyone still calls it The Night Watch.

After searching pretty hard, all else I have found is that the painting was slashed in 1975, and spent a year in restoration afterwards. I remember reading once it was yet another wacko, so I’m sure none of the acts of vandalism on the Night Watch were acts of politically motivated terrorism.