When a small child damaged Mark Rothko’s Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in April, the collective shudder as parents relived their own momentary lapses in vigilance might have registered as a small earth tremor.
The incident made international news, but accidental damage to works of art is surprisingly common. That’s where the expert art fixers come in – specialist conservators, practitioners in a largely invisible but growing industry, charged with restoring precious works to their former glory.
Accidents are more likely to occur behind the scenes than in public view, and to be inflicted not by an exuberant child, but by an adult in charge. In fact, London gallerist Anthony Wilkinson recalls visiting the home of a collector that was packed with delicate pieces of contemporary art. “She had three young children and I remember asking, ‘Aren’t you worried they are going to damage things?’ She said it had never happened and she wasn’t worried it would, because they had always had art around them from day one! Very brave…”
Gallerist Tom Rowland may take a different view after an experience years ago working at a well-known commercial gallery. “We had just finished installing a Tom Friedman sculpture, which was a giant ball made from thousands of plastic cups, when the curator’s seven-year-old rocked up and pulled one of the cups out of the sculpture and it completely collapsed.”
It turns out that once you start hunting for tales of near, and not-so-near misses, the confessional floodgates open: my own enquires quickly yielded a wodge of Instagram DMs containing remarkably similar stories of smashed sculptures, torn drawings – and a reel of Mr Bean sneezing over an Old Master.
Like many of my correspondents, the gallerist whose head went through the canvas he was holding as he tripped over a box of champagne glasses prefers to remain anonymous, though art historian Bendor Grosvenor, latterly of the BBC’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, was kind enough to remind me of the time his cat Padme jumped onto a 17th-century portrait by John Michael Wright he was restoring at home, causing irreparable damage.
Art historian Susan Owens, author of books including The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History, recalls wandering “by mistake onto Carl Andre’s 144 Magnesium Square in Tate – there was no barrier and I was looking intently at something else. A warden waved his arms at me and I looked to see what all the fuss was about and realised with absolute horror that I was marooned on a work of art – and the only way off it was to walk over more of it. No (obvious) harm done, though, I’m relieved to say!”
Fortunately for her, it wasn’t one of Yves Klein’s installations of sand and powdered pigment – those notorious accident magnets that typically involve visitors blundering into the artist’s famous International Klein Blue and then treading it around the gallery. “There are definitely works that as soon as they come across your desk we just know that it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a claim at some point,” says Joanna Bunting of art insurance brokers Hallett Independent.
While an impromptu hike across a Klein is likely to produce spectacular results, putting it right is often as simple as topping up the sand and pigment. But far more serious damage can also be very successfully repaired: though you wouldn’t know to look at it, Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647-51), in the National Gallery, has been attacked twice: first in 1914 when it was slashed by suffragette Mary Richardson, and again in 2023, when Just Stop Oil protestors attacked it with a hammer.
Another National Gallery treasure, Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-4), was sprayed with red paint in 2011, 30 years after a brutal attack in 1978 left it in shreds across the gallery floor. Archive photographs at the National Gallery confirm Adrienne Corri’s graphic eyewitness account in her book The Search for Gainsborough: “The picture wasn’t there. Nothing remained of it except a fringe of canvas around the edges. The rest lay on the ground in shreds or hunks, already curling at the edges; it was the most expensive jigsaw in the world.”
Increasingly, more and more art is being displayed in private houses, which not only ratchets up the risk, but significantly broadens the scope for potential mishaps. Textiles conservator Jessica Burgess, of Soteria Conservation, was called in after a bottle of fabric conditioner flew off a washing machine on its spin cycle and splattered all over a work on silk by Mexican artist Pia Camil.
On another occasion, a cat selected a textile piece by another Mexican, Eduardo Terrazas, as its scratching post – a complete write off, you’d think, at least if the arm of my sofa is any kind of guide. In fact, Burgess says her repair, done using the original threads, was “fairly imperceptible”. She even managed to successfully remove the fabric softener from the Pia Camil silk panels, which she says now have “Perspex covers over them, just in case another bottle of softener explodes.”
Sadly, there can’t always be a happy ending, as when, explains paintings conservator Clare Finn, “somebody decided to wipe over a watercolour on ivory with a damp cloth. They then asked if I could bring it back: the answer is no”.
Judging what counts as a “total loss” is an art more than a science, and will typically involve the insurer sending out a loss adjustor “to assess how it happened, who needs to be involved and if it’s restored, what the cost of that will be”, explains Bunting. If the cost of repair outweighs the value of the work, it is a total loss. Sometimes, she says, “it can be restored, but there will be loss of value and so the insurers will pay for the restoration and the amount that’s lost in value once it’s been restored”.
With works of exceptional importance, as with many in museum collections, saving the work outweighs the financial burden. When one of Mark Rothko’s celebrated Seagram Murals, Black on Maroon (1958), was scrawled with black ink in 2012, the impact was immense, affecting the relationship between all nine of the paintings in the series, which were donated to Tate by the artist and intended to be experienced as an enveloping “environment”. It took two years of research and treatment before the painting could be returned to the gallery wall, following removal of the graffiti with solvents.
In keeping with the artist’s wishes, Rothko’s huge abstract canvases are typically unvarnished and unglazed, which makes them especially vulnerable to damage. But broadly speaking, there is usually something that can be done, says Finn, although “fire and flood are a bit tricky”.
Textiles conservator Burgess agrees, adding that stains are the great enemy of fabrics, though an overlay – rather like a patch – or the application of pigment can lessen the impact. A client might suggest cutting away an area of damage, but “we can maybe cover it – we have to be mindful that we are just custodians”.
Consulting a living artist is not as simple as it sounds, explains Georgia Powell, of collections management consultancy CURA Art. “The artist’s intention may have been that it should change,” she says. “And they’re always most interested in the works they’re making at the time, which is completely fair enough – they might not want to go back to something they made 30 years ago.”
Some artists will struggle to limit themselves to restoration, says Clare Finn, who once collaborated with the late John Piper on the conservation of one of his paintings, only to discover that he was actually reworking it. Others will embrace damage and destruction: the painter Carole Robb is brutal when it comes to destroying works she’s not happy with, and Edvard Munch’s dealer was regularly in despair as paintings arrived caked in pigeon excrement.
For Munch, wear and tear was part of a painting’s life story, a point of view that has gained traction at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, which recently announced a policy of recognising art as “living”, and so introducing the possibility of death.
But while climate and the energy crisis have forced difficult questions about how art is cared for, the time, effort, and resources expended on rescuing much-loved treasures suggests that a wholesale shift of attitude is unlikely to happen any time soon.
