Displaying items by tag: vandalized

The British artist Anish Kapoor, whose sculpture placed at the Palace of Versailles became known as the “queen’s vagina”, has lashed out at French “intolerance” after his work was vandalized. The work, entitled "Dirty Corner," was on Wednesday found sprayed with yellow paint and is now being cleaned by palace authorities.

"Neptune's Daughter," a bronze sculpture that stood prominently in the Garden of Enchantment to the right of the de Young Museum until 2011, was vandalized that year and quietly removed from the garden without any press attention. The four-foot statue of a young girl atop a sea horse, created by artist Melvin Earl Cummings in 1926, was on prominent display at the museum for nearly 90 years before unidentified vandals pried off one of its arms and disappeared with it. And now, thanks to some Good Samaritans and the good will of the insurers, the arm has been restored and "Neptune's Daughter" will be rededicated next month.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the museum had insured the sculpture with Lloyd's of London, who paid the museum just under six figures for it after a search of Golden Gate Park three years ago turned up no trace of the missing bronze arm.

A man briefly disrupted the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum this afternoon, splashing red paint against a wall and signing his name. He did not vandalize any artworks.

According to artist Laura Higgins Palmer, who alerted Hyperallergic to the intervention, the man threw red paint against the wall in a gallery on the third floor. Palmer said she was taking a selfie of her reflection in one of Koons’s silver bunnies when she noticed a man walking by with a black bag. When she turned around, he was splashing paint on the wall, in what appears to be a kind of double X shape, although it could also be a human figure with arms and legs spread.

Vandals ironically daubed graffiti on a £650,000 Banksy mural - just hours before a wealthy philanthropist paid to stop the iconic artwork being removed.

The elusive artist, whose identity is a jealously-guarded secret, painted three 1950s-style spies on the side of a £300,000 semi-detached house in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in April this year.

But this week, vandals scratched a name into one of the spies' sunglasses, before messily scribbling it out.

Officials from the Museum of Fine Arts are investigating after they discovered spray painted images of Homer Simpson and other graffiti on the exterior walls of the building, as well as on the base of the statue that greets visitors at the main entrance.

A groundskeeper who asked not to be identified said she was “bummed” when she walked around the art museum on Friday morning and found the graffiti, which included phrases like “tell the truth” and Homer Simpson’s face, on the outside of the Japanese Garden, the front and back entrance to the gallery, as well as on the foundation of a prominent statue, called “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” which depicts a Native American riding atop a horse that welcomes guests coming in from Huntington Avenue. The actual statue was not damaged.

A €10m artwork by Claude Monet all but destroyed when a man put his fist through it is once again hanging where it belongs after a painstaking restoration.

The impressionist painting was ripped apart in a devastating three branch tear in June 2012 while it hung in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

After a delicate 18 month restoration, "Argenteuil Basin With A Single Sailboat," dating from 1874, has been restored to near its former glory and is back on the walls.

The tears on the canvas laid end to end would have been about a foot long in a painting less than four feet square.

Mark Rothko's painting Black on Maroon has gone back on public display at London's Tate Modern gallery, 18 months after it was vandalised with graffiti.

The 1958 painting was defaced by Wlodzimierz Umaniec in October 2012. He was sent to prison as a result but has now apologised for his actions.

The Tate's conservators have spent 18 months repairing the painting.

Conservator Rachel Barker said: "It's definitely better than I could have hoped at the beginning of the project."

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington is trying to track down a group of visitors who recently vandalized a number of the institution’s works with stickers. The stickers, which feature some religious script and imagery, were placed on a number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and an outdoor statue. Other stickers with a large red “T” were also placed on the paintings.

The vandals were captured on the museum’s security cameras, but attempted to hide their identities. The stickers have been successfully removed by a painting conservator, but the amount of damage done to the collection is unknown. The Delaware Art Museum has one of the most celebrated collections of Pre-Raphaelite art outside of Britain.

In March, the Delaware Art Museum announced that it would deaccession four works from its collection to pay off its $19.8 million bond debt and replenish its endowment. The institution has not specified which works it plans to sell.