Listicle: 10 priceless artworks damaged by clumsy folks

Damien Hirst’s installation at London’s Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 was made out of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays. How was cleaner Emmanuel Asare to know that it was not a pile of rubbish waiting to be cleared? It happened at Italy’s Sala Murat gallery too. In 2014, a cleaner handed over scattered cardboard, newspapers and biscuit pieces to garbage collectors, clueless that the ‘rubbish’ was a £8,200 work of art.

Poor Picasso! He titled his 1932 painting Le Rêve (The Dream), depicting his mistress Marie T Walter. But he couldn’t have dreamt that she’d be shoved by American business magnate and art collector Steve Wynn decades later. In 2006, while showing the painting to his friends, Wynn’s elbow accidentally pierced through the canvas, causing a six-inch tear. In 2013, businessman Steve Cohen purchased the restored painting for $155 million.

It was his first day working at Russia’s Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in 2022. He was a war veteran. He was bored. So, Alexander Vasilyev took a ballpoint pen and doodled two pairs of eyes on the featureless faces of Anna Leporskaya’s 1930s work. He thought he was improving on a child’s drawing. He ended up vandalising a historic canvas and was sentenced to 180 hours of compulsory labour and psychiatric evaluation.

The Dutch master’s 1642 oil painting has had its sides cut to fit the wall in Amsterdam Town Hall. Worse, it bore knife attacks in 1911 and again in 1975, when a mentally unstable Dutchman sliced it zig zag with a knife, claiming that he was on a “divine mission” at the “behest of God!” In 1990, a runaway psychiatric patient sprayed it with sulphuric acid. Thank heavens for protective varnish!

Nick Flynn tripping over his untied shoelace spelled doom for three 17th-century Chinese Qing dynasty vases. He tumbled down the stairs of the UK’s Fitzwilliam Museum in 2006, crashing into them. They were worth about £100,000 and uninsured. He got arrested. But he blamed the museum for their “careless” display. Visitors flocked to the crash site as news spread. He took credit for increasing museum footfall too.

In 2009, a worker at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Corsica couldn’t resist the temptation of sitting on a 200-year-old exhibit – a folding chair – that Napoleon Bonaparte had often used. The historic chair had lasted numerous heavy-weight military campaigns and had stayed intact. But its red leather seat and wooden frame crumbled under the weight of a mere security guard. Luckily, restorers were able to salvage it.

The two meant well. They just wanted the faded 5000-year-old illustration depicting a skiing man to be clearly visible to visitors at a Norwegian island. So, in 2016, they engraved in white over its faded outline. The damage is unfortunately irreversible. The oldest known evidence of the sport, which inspired the logo for the 1994 Winter Olympics, exists now only in photos.

This happened only last month. Contemporary sculptor Nicola Bolla’s Van Gogh Chair laden with hundreds of Swarovski crystals was on view at Verona’s Palazzo Maffei in Italy. One man tried to pose half-seated on the bejewelled chair while his companion took a picture. He lost his balance and broke the chair’s seat and legs. Security cameras caught them fleeing before the staff found out. The chair has since been restored.

On the one hand, a work that featured household objects such as a feather and football poking through a large pane of glass. On the other, a respected art critic who disliked the work. Avelina Lésper was at the Zona Maco Art Fair in Mexico City in 2020 when she placed a soda can near Rico’s $20,000 work. The reverb caused it to shatter. The damage was unintentional. “It was like the work heard my comment and felt what I thought of it,” she told reporters.

Baroque painter Anton Domenico Gabbiani and his portrait’s subject Ferdinando de’ Medici are long dead. But their expressed their disapproval from the beyond last month, when a visitor leaned against the portrait at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, mimicking the Tuscan prince’s pose. The man tripped and fell backwards on the canvas, causing a rip in the 1712 work. Italy is considering new rules for selfies. Not a moment too soon.