A “bored” security guard on his first shift at a Russian art museum decided to have a little fun by drawing eyes on a modern art painting worth an estimated $1 million. The unnamed 60-year-old guard defaced the “Three Figures” painting by Anna Leporskaya at the Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg in December 2021, The Guardian reports.
On his first day on the job, a security guard drew two pairs of eyes with a ballpoint pen onto artist Anna Leporskaya’s ‘Three Figures’ painting (pictured) during an abstract art exhibition in Yekaterinburg, western Russia pic.twitter.com/K5LFgM7uwP
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) February 9, 2022
- He just got out a ballpoint pen and went for it. He’s said to have drawn on two of the three faces in the painting, which was being displayed as part of an exhibition called The World as Non-Objectivity: The Birth of a New Art.
- It’s unclear how he thought he was going to get away with it. And maybe he didn’t – perhaps he was just a troll who thought he’d come in and raise some hell before being fired (which is what happened). However, it seems a bit of a long con to go through getting hired by a private security firm just to get sacked on the first day.
- Experts are now working on the image to restore it. While Leporskaya died in 1982 and will be unaffected by the defacement, art lovers, as well as the museum’s staff and visitors, want it restored. It’s estimated that the art suffered about $3,350 worth of damage.
- The private security firm is reportedly paying for the repairs. Hopefully it can be restored to its original glory and the company will screen its potential employees a bit better in the future.
