[imagesource: Getty Images]

You have to have some degree of control over the primitive and instinctual part of your mind to not doodle on a famous art piece in an art gallery.

Especially the ones that look like they’re lacking…

If boredom is added into the mix, you might find yourself with a serious dilemma.

I suppose this gallery guard in a Russian art museum just couldn’t contain his urges as he stood around protecting the gallery.

In a moment of weakness, he decided to use a gallery-branded ballpoint pen to draw eyes on two faceless figures from a valuable abstract artwork in the gallery.

Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures, a painting on display at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, was vandalised by the pen-wielding guard:

Image: The Art Newspaper Russia/Newsflash/Australscope

Edgier still, the guard had apparently worked at the gallery for less than 24 hours before he drew on the painting.

Three Figures, painted somewhere between 1932 and 1934, is insured for approximately £740 000 (around R15,2 million).

The Guardian has more:

“The ink has slightly penetrated into the paint layer, since the titanium white used to paint the faces is not covered with author’s varnish, as is often the case in abstract painting of that time,” Ivan Petrov wrote in the Art Newspaper, which broke the story.

“Fortunately, the vandal drew with a pen without strong pressure, and therefore the relief of the strokes as a whole was not disturbed. The left figure also had a small crumble of the paint layer up to the underlying layer on the face.”

The exhibition’s curator, Anna Reshetkina, said that the motive is still unknown but that it must have been “some kind of a lapse in sanity”.

Although, it seems he had enough control and sanity to not draw on the largest face in the painting.

The doodles were noticed by visitors of the gallery, who notified a gallery employee. Soon after, the painting was removed and returned to where it was loaned from, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The Tretyakov restoration experts estimated that restoration would cost 250 000 roubles (just over R50 000).

After some deliberation about how significant the damage is or isn’t, the bored guard ended up with a fine and up to three months in prison.

He was also promptly fired from the private security company he worked for.

The adding of eyes to Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures still pales in comparison to some other defacements of classic Russian artworks, like Ivan the Terrible in the Tretyakov, which was attacked twice by two separate people:

Image: Public domain

Although, as you can see, a “lapse in sanity” causing an art attack makes more sense for this painting.

[source:guardian]