The Many Deaths of a Painting

March 27, 2019 7:28 PM

99% Invisible explores the vandalism - and conservation - of paintings by abstract expressionist Barnett Newman.
posted by mandolin conspiracy (12 comments total)

To be clear: the paintings are by Barnett Newman, unlike the vandalism and conservation.
posted by zamboni at 9:16 PM on March 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

In 1997, eleven years after the slashing, van Bladeren found out about the botched restoration of Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, and returned to the museum to do it again. Van Bladeren returned to the museum searching for Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, to slash once more, but fortunately, the painting was not on display at the time. Van Bladeren found another piece by Newman, a large blue painting with a white zip down the middle titled Cathedra and attacked this piece with a box cutter. When he was done, he threw a packet of pamphlets on the floor that contained rambling, incoherent writing. At his second trial, van Bladeren was declared mentally unfit and sent to a psychiatric institution.

I'm have mixed feelings about the target painting being gone.
posted by Brian B. at 9:46 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Newman’s work, in particular, has been vandalized several times for anti-semitic reasons. Newman was a Jewish artist and Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV (which was the sequel to Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III) was struck and spat upon in Germany, because the attacker said it bore a mocking resemblance to the German flag. A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray-painted with swastikas in 1979 and just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding this same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets.

Wow. Just last year.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:19 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I can remember reading about the botched restoration somewhere - the 'conservation' of a painting with about as much care and attention as you would paint a wall in your house. Good to get the full story.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:28 AM on March 28, 2019

Huh, I'm about to zip back to Cologne and bring our Barnett Newman home. I don't think I was aware of the story of the botched restoration. Now I have something to listen to on the plane.
posted by PussKillian at 6:56 AM on March 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray-painted with swastikas in 1979 and just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding this same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets.

They're talking about Newman's Broken Obelisk, at the Rothko Chapel. It's a gorgeous piece. There's a photo of the vandalism from 1979 from ArtNews that can be viewed online. I always assumed it was targeted because the sculpture is dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. (and because it's non-representational art, which always seems to make reactionaries livid).
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:43 AM on March 28, 2019

"The city council of Amsterdam sent it to a forensic lab to try to figure out what Goldreyer had done, and they concluded Goldreyer had used a paint roller to lay down layers of dull acrylic paint similar to house paint over the original. If the analysis was correct, Goldreyer had rolled over the entire canvas of a twentieth-century masterpiece with house paint. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III had been murdered… again."

Man, I watch a lot of very professional art restoration videos on youtube from this british museum or something. They take such incredible care to always do everything "right" by conservator standards, all paints and cleaners chosen for their reversibility and lack of damaging qualities. It's really intense and takes them ages and is really impressive work. To read this in comparison is hilarious, a fundamental disrespect for the original painting and process and restoration techniques more fitting for children repairing a torn finger painting than you know, something known internationally known seen artwork.

"A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray-painted with swastikas in 1979 and just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding this same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets."

"Newman was a Jewish artist and Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV (which was the sequel to Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III) was struck and spat upon in Germany, because the attacker said it bore a mocking resemblance to the German flag. A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray-painted with swastikas in 1979 and just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding this same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets."

Goddamn. Not even artful graffitti. I think on top of the egregiousness of attacking art like this and on top of the disgusting bigotry behind it is just how pathetically artless it is. Leaving pamphlets/leaflets behind after any dramatic demonstrative act, regardless of the cause is just shitty and really undercuts any drama built up. Even leaving behind literal garbage would be more meaningful.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:02 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

I find it really funny in a "look at the nerve of this asshole" way that the restorer, after spending 10 minutes and 10 dollars on what he'd been given 4 years and a large sum of money to do, got so mad that his obvious half-assedness had been revealed that he sued for defamation. It's much less funny that he still got to walk away with over a million dollars for it, though.
posted by Copronymus at 8:25 AM on March 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Huh, I'm about to zip back to Cologne and bring our Barnett Newman home.

I see what you did there.
posted by rocket88 at 9:41 AM on March 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

:D

Ours is weird because it's a horizontal zip, not a vertical. He and Rothko fought about it when Rothko curated a show of Newman's work because Rothko thought he knew better and hung it vertically.
posted by PussKillian at 10:14 AM on March 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

A great episode. Has anyone seen the film that was the inspiration for this episode?
posted by stevil at 11:30 AM on March 28, 2019

Barnett Newman's paintings have delighted me and reminded me of spectrographs ever since I was in college, freshly having switched my major from physics to art. (In some forgotten closet I have a giant drawing of the spectrograph of Sigma Draconis, done for a 'do art in the style of' assignment) It makes me sad that anyone would damage his paintings. Why couldn't they have gone after that hack Rothko? (They did? I guess I'm sad about that too. Just less so.)
posted by surlyben at 11:19 AM on March 29, 2019