A vandal who spray painted a Pablo Picasso painting on exhibit at the Houston Museum with a stencil of a bullfight and the word ‘conquista’ is being sought by the police. Picasso’s Woman in a Red Armchair is a Cubist masterpiece valued at over 20 million dollars. It is currently with the museum’s onsite conservation lab and it looks likely that no permanent damage has been sustained to the 80 year old work. The vandal, according to a witness was the street artsist Uriel Landeros, The act was caught on a bystanders video phone which has led to speculation that the bystander was working with the vandal to create a youtube viral video . The video has received thousands of hits.
Over the years many works of art have also been the target of vandals. The Mona Lisa has been attacked several times, once with acid, and it has had a stone thrown at it. Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” masterpiece was slashed twice by a lunatic and sprayed once with sulphuric acid and Michelangelo’s sculpture The Pieta was attacked with a hammer by a religious fanatic who thought he was jesus, in the 1960’s.
Pablo Picasso was born October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain and died April 8, 1973, Mougins, France. He was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque and Juan Gris) of Cubism.The enormous body of Picasso’s work remains, his legacy a tribute to the vitality of the “disquieting” Spaniard with the “sombre piercing” eyes who superstitiously believed that work would keep him alive. For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to and paralleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th century.
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