Museum Mishaps

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I’m Quinn Rose and I didn't go to art school, but I still love to learn about art and art museums.

Betty: And I'm Betty. I also didn't go to art school, but I also love learning about art as well as looking at art in art museums. And I feel very strongly about being as far away as possible and being careful in museums.

Quinn: [laughs] Foreshadowing. Well on our next episode, as we mentioned at the end of last episode, our next episode coming out two weeks from now is going to be about the Netflix mini series “This Is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist,” which is the story, the true story of stealing a ton of art from the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston. And so I thought while we are watching that—you don't have to watch it before the episode, but if you care to see it before we talk about it, that's why we're giving the advanced warning. But I thought while we are all watching that and getting ready for that episode, I would do a little… kind of a little warmup episode about art museums. Specifically—not stealing, but just kind of general mishaps. I am going to start right off with a very recent story.

Betty: I think I might know what this is.

Quinn: Yeah. Once again, you know, I feel like at this point when an art museum story breaches into the mainstream, we're obligated to talk about it at least a little bit. And so I am going to kick this off today with a story you may have seen which was of a Russian painting of… little guys. That’s a terrible description, but I'll get to it in a second—that a security guard drew eyes on. That's not what you're supposed to do. [both laughing]

Betty: Yeah, I actually, I had some of my friends sent me this article. Like some people will send it to me on Twitter as well. And I mean, my immediate reaction was like, well, obviously this is bad. This is like, don't do this. But it was just so funny.

Quinn: The reason why it's so funny is because of how it looks. Would you mind describing the painting and the little eye drawings on it?

Betty: Yeah. So this painting, it’s called Three Figures. And the artist's name, I'm probably gonna say this wrong, is Anna Leporskaya. Anyway. It looks like there are three figures, so like they're three humanoid looking, they almost look like that could be mannequins. There's like one in the foreground and two in the background, but it’s not a realistic representation. All you see are these ovals that are shaded. So it looks like there's a head and on top with some hair and then like a cylinder that looks like a neck. And then what could be the torso of someone is also just like a bigger oval. And then the, the one that the security guard, or the other one is what the security guard did, which is there's just dots on the figures where I guess eyes would be if the figures had eyes, but they're just dots. What looks like to be drawn with a pen.

Quinn: Yeah. And there's no addition of mouth or noses. And so it's just this, like, I guess it's kind of eerie looking, but also it does look pretty funny, but they're just these, these little dots for eyes on this very serious painting. Obviously the museum did not find this very funny. This is a painting—it was painted in the early 1930s and it's valued at about 1.4 million American dollars. So… a lot. [both laugh] It was on display at an abstract art exhibition at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center. And then there was a security guard that apparently I believe it was their first day? Just, you know, picked up a pen. It was, they said specifically that it was a pen from the Yeltsin Center. So didn't bring their own pen from home or anything. Just got one there and doodled on this painting. They do believe that it was related to some, the phrase they use is a “lapse in sanity.” So possibly related to some kind of mental illness of drastically misreading what you are supposed to be doing as an art museum guard. Obviously not good. The reason why we are still allowed to find this funny is that the restoration is going to be relatively easy—not easy easy. It's still going to cost like $4,500, but the guard drew on it so lightly that it will be able to be restored fully and like, compared to some of the amounts we're going to get to later. That's like a very small, when I got to reading this dollar amount, I was like, oh, that's nothing.

Betty: That's true. And yeah, I did read that the conservation experts say that there's not going to be any longterm damage after they're removed the pen marks. So yeah, it's relatively easy to fix and that there's not permanent damage which is great for the art. But I did also read it was actually—the Yeltsin Center doesn't own it, it was lent to them by the Moscow Gallery or another gallery in Moscow. So they don't even own it. And this happened while it was on loan. I believe the security firm who hired the employee is paying for the damage. So you know, they're the ones who are technically responsible. So, you know, like overall it could have been worse, but still, just the fact that this person thought it was okay to draw on the painting. I mean, I guess yeah. Like they must, they must be very unaware or maybe had some sort of challenge, like with thinking.

Quinn: Yeah, not a great situation overall, but again, relatively easy to resolve and I'm sure brought a lot of extra attention to this art exhibit and to this painting. So it will probably shake out that there'll be a lot more foot traffic to come see this painting after this received international media attention. So hey.

Betty: I mean, I'm not sure if you're going to bring this up, but I think we did mention this like a really long time ago on one of our episodes like this, just in terms of bringing attention. This reminds me of that Jesus restoration that was botched where it became, so the botched restoration became so famous that the—wherever it was located got more tourism than if it hasn't been botched.

Quinn: Oh, baby. You know we're going to get to that painting. [both laugh]

Betty: Oh, good.

Quinn: Well, that's what I wanted to start with because it has been in the news fairly recently, but the rest of these that I'm going to talk about are not quite the same thing where it's just someone vandalizing something. There's tons of examples of people deliberately breaking or vandalizing artwork either because of their own artistic statements—some of which we covered a little bit in our episode, way, way back in the day about Ai WeiWei, that's something that happened with his work. Tons of examples of people doing that either because they are trying to make some kind of political, artistic statement, or unfortunately oftentimes because of some kind of mental health crisis, but that's not really what we're talking about today. I wanted to actually focus more on just general mishaps, where people either had really good intentions or just tripped, like nobody intended to do anything bad with the rest of these, things just happened. And I find them very funny. So the first little mishap that I want to get into is truly a layered story. And that is the story of a man named Nick Flynn and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In February 2006, Mr. Flynn was walking down the stairs in the Fitzwilliam Museum when he tripped, tried to catch his fall, but really didn't have anything to catch his fall with and ended up just kind of falling immediately into a vase. This happened to be a vase from the Qing Dynasty that, you know, is hundreds of years old, worth—the whole collection of phases is worth about a hundred thousand pounds altogether. And it still would've been pretty bad, but it wouldn't have been so bad if he just hit the one vase. But the thing is he did, he hit one vase and then that vase just kept going and then kind of domino effected and smashed the other two. [both laugh]

Betty: Oh, no. This sounds like something that would be in like a comedy skit.

Quinn: Here’s the thing. They were just sitting there. They'd been on display for 40 years. At the time he didn't actually realize how valuable the vases were. I have quite a long, he gave a quite a long sort of statement interview to The Guardian after all of this kind of became public information. And it was quite long, I’ve cut it down a little bit, but I was wondering if we could do a little reading series and you could read an abbreviated version of his statement about the incident.

Betty: Okay, real-time reaction. “I had no idea my accident was going to turn into an international news story. When I walked out of the museum, after it happened, I forgot all about it. Until a few days later, that is, when I was watching Channel Four news and they had a picture of me in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Then I saw an appeal in the newspaper, ‘do you know this man?’” Oh, my. "It wasn't until April that I was arrested. They thought I had done it on purpose for publicity. 25 police officers came to my house at 7:00 AM, some wearing stab proof vests, others ready to kick the door in. They had a search warrant and they handcuffed me and I spent the night in cells. It wasn't too heavy. The police kept offering me tea and beans and potato wedges. I felt like Caravaggio.” What is going on?

Quinn: Such, such a British sentence, such a British sentence. 

Betty: Yeah first thing I'm like, should I be putting out a British accent? But I feel like that might be offensive, like, cause I would, I don't do a very good British accent. So I'm just going to continue. "Everyone asks if I feel guilty, but I actually think I did the museum of favor. So many people have gone there to see the window sills where it all happened that I must have increased visitor numbers. They should make me a trustee. If I was in charge, I would have made sure everything was valued properly. They said that they had an open gallery policy, but it was ridiculous. Like leaving your front door open for a week when you're not in the house. I've been to the museum hundreds of times over the past 16 years, including three or four visits since the incident, and I'm planning my next visit at the end of the month, when they unveil the first vase they pieced together. I'm not banned, it's a public building and it was an accident.” 

Quinn: You know what's funny is other news outlets report that he absolutely is banned. So I don't know if he got unbanned or if he got banned later or what, but he seems to think it's pretty much fine.

Betty: [laughing] Oh my god. This is great. I mean, it isn’t. He seems so like, “what's the big deal?” But I do think what seems to be the British equivalent of SWAT team showing up at his door might've been a little excessive.

Quinn: The way he says “they should make me a trustee” made me laugh out loud. When I first read that I was like, should they? [both laugh] But I do, I like his approach. He was like, I'm sure I got them tons more traffic. I'm not sure exactly how much money it costs to put these back together, they did put them back together. It costs a lot of money to do so because they were, it wasn't just like, like a little bit broken. They were smashed. 

Betty: Oh, no. Do you have, do you have a picture of what it looked like after the incident? Or is that not public?

Quinn: Oh, that's a good question. Let me look that up real quick. [laughs] Oh no!

Betty: Oh my God.

Quinn: And he says he was like, I didn't really think anything of it after I left. He didn't think about this after he left? The way he says that makes it sound like he smashed them and walked out without saying anything. And I have to imagine that he spoke to someone about it before he walked out of the museum, but maybe not because then they were trying to identify him! This man is a menace.

Betty: Even if I was just at like some secondhand store where they're selling a bunch of like plates and vases, and I accidentally broke some. And even if say that I broke $50 worth of ceramics. I was still be like, oh no. I don't know. I would probably go to the store manager and be like, I'm so sorry. And like, they might make me pay for it. But like, unless I know that it's hundreds of thousands of dollars and they're going to make me pay for it, I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars, but then, then they're going to find me anyway. I don't know.

Quinn: Yeah he says that he didn't think they were worth that much because they were just kind of on a stairwell apparently, but even then, what?

Betty: I do think probably they should have, there should have been some sort of guard rail.

Quinn: Well, let me tell you, there is now. There’s a protective casing on these things. They're not letting those get smashed again.

Betty: That's good.

Quinn: There were also, I found multiple reports of people accidentally like falling into paintings and ripping them and stuff like that. That's happened several times prominently in art museums and galleries and stuff. But luckily that's not quite as, that's usually not quite as difficult to repair as three absolutely smashed to bits vases because at least like if you have a clean hit on a painting, it's probably not that difficult to repair.

Betty: I can't believe they put that back together. I mean, actually, I don't know if, I don't know if this is public knowledge, but I guess it’s—I guess I'm going to say it now. And if it isn't then well, I’ll… This happened a number of years ago, but there was a sculpture that was like smashed in in the AGO where I used to be a gallery guide and it wasn't by a visitor. It was just during transport. It fell off a crate and it just smashed to pieces. It was a Henry Moore and it was very expensive. And I remember it was something like this too. They showed us like a picture and it was like in pieces, it was like bits, just, it looked like it's not repairable. And the thing that's also, I mean, it's terrible for the person who's delivering it, but it was really funny because next to the picture was I think the curator and they just had the head in their hands.

Quinn: Oh no.

Betty: But since then they've repaired it and it's back on display. And if you didn't know it was destroyed, you would have, you would never know because they've put it back together really well, but I'm still like, how did they do that? It just didn't seem possible.

Quinn: Yeah. This stuff just happens sometimes. A slightly different kind of art destruction happened at an exhibit called Art and The Sixties: This was Tomorrow at the Tate in 2004. I have no idea why this is so British. I don't know what's going on in England.

Betty: Do British people trip a lot?

Quinn: Wellhis was a really fun one because there, there was an installation. It was recreation of first public demonstration of auto destructive art by Gustav Metzger. And a cleaner actually threw away part of the exhibit because part of the exhibit was a plastic bag of trash. So you could see pictures of this and yeah, I get it. I get why this was thrown away. It's just a bag of trash. It's not, it's not like a sculpture of a bag of trash. It's not loose, it’s not even loose trash, it's bagged trash.

Betty: Yeah this, I don't think I blame the cleaner at all. I would've also mistaken that for like an actual bag of trash.

Quinn: It's funny because it actually almost works as part of the art piece itself because this artist is the creator of what he calls auto destructive art, which means that art that definitionally only has a finite existence. One of the ways that he does that is he created the acid painting. It's nylon covered in acid, which will slowly destroy it over time. And so it's a level that you can actually see the destruction over time as opposed to everything else which tends to, you know, be destroyed so slowly that the humans don't tend to notice. And they did replace the bag. This is, my favorite line in the little article was “the 78 year old artists replaced it with a new bag. The gallery would not reveal whether he would be compensated.” [both laugh]

Betty: He just like went to his trash, grabbed a plastic bag, put it in, came back in the museum and be like, all right, here you go.

Quinn: Yeah. I mean, it's his art, sure. But also I think it's, I think in this case it is fair maybe if he's not compensated for the new bag of trash, like I don't, I think that probably didn't put him out too much. This might be my favorite one of all the examples I have just because the cleaner accidentally became part of the art exhibit without meaning to.

Betty: Yeah, it’s kind of like if his acid paintings were the self destruction aspect is like, the chemical is going to destroy itself. This other piece, the trash bag is it's going to invite cleaners to want to throw it out. That's the destructive part, like the auto destructive part.

Quinn: One hundred percent, it auto destructed. This is also not the only time that cleaning staff has thrown away part of art exhibits because they are trash. I mean, they're trash being used as art, but like, you know, sometimes my art is throwing away trash and that's fine. I definitely don't think this cleaner got in trouble for anything because… fair enough. And then they would just like made sure to be really clear to the entire staff of like, hey. Don't throw away this bag. We know it's trash. We know, but it’s—we like this trash.

Betty: This feels like the opposite of what happened when a few years ago, someone dropped their eyeglasses on the floor at a museum and people thought it was art.

Quinn: Oh yeah.

Betty: This seems like the reverse of that, where yes this piece of junk on the floor is art, but people didn’t—like this is probably what leads to people not really sure whether random objects in an art museum is art or not.

Quinn: Sometimes it is very unclear and that's so fun, isn’t it? The last example I want to talk about today is of course, Monkey Christ.

Betty: Great.

Quinn: This happened in 2012 in Spain where a poor, poor 82 year old woman did her best and [laughs] she tried her best and she did not succeed. So this was in the town of Borja. And it was actually not in an art museum or gallery. It was in the Misericordia Church. And this was a fresco of Jesus Christ and this poor woman, her name is Cecilia Giménez, and she, there was some kind of breakdown in communication. She thought she had permission from the church's priest to do some restoration of the fresco, but she, she didn't do a great job. It was described by BBC correspondent Christian Fraser as a “crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill fitting tunic.” And it has commonly been referred to as “Monkey Christ.”

Betty: I don't know if anybody hadn't heard of this, but yeah, it was definitely big news when it happened and yeah, I guess like, I barely remember exactly the details of this news. Obviously she does not have training in art restoration. Like she was just, she just liked the painting and was somebody who went to the church, and was like I’m going to fix this.

Quinn: She was an 82 year old woman.

Betty: She wasn't a retired conservator, I guess.

Quinn: No, she was just a concerned community member who thought she was doing a good thing and it didn't work out. We referenced this painting in the very first episode of this show, when we talked about artificial intelligence making art. And we said that some of the paintings looked like Monkey Christ. This painting is part of the DNA of this podcast. And I love it very much.

Betty: I mean, I'm assuming they're not going to like, unlike some of the other ones where they fixed it, I'm assuming this they're not going to fix it because of the attention it draws. Is that correct in assumption that it still looks like this today? 

Quinn: Well, there was a surprise happy ending in 2016.

Betty: Oh, okay.

Quinn: Basically, an antiques dealer discovered the original painting that was used as the model for that fresco, which is really, really cool. So this was a painting done by Elías García Martínez. So there was the original painting and there was the fresco recreation of it. And someone found the original painting and was like, hey, is this fresco. And they like, yes. It’s exactly the same. It's even exactly the same size. And so now they managed to have their original painting back, I mean, that was like the crown jewel of their church beforehand. And then they got this new version of it, which has become like this international thing. They said they've, it's brought in thousands of tourists to the church. I thought this was really cute. “Since it happened a constant stream of visitors, tourists, and curious individuals have come to the church to see the unique version and to photograph it. There's no doubt that a visit never fails to raise a smile.”

Betty: That’s great.

Quinn: And so now they have their new version and they have the return of the original version able to hang side by side, which is amazing. 

Betty: That’s really great.

Quinn: It does make it seem like kind of a meme where it's like you versus the guy she tells you not to worry about. [both laugh]

Betty: A lot of times, you know, these stories, you're like, oh no, like the art has been destroyed and that's terrible, but I'm glad this ended up becoming a story that has a happy ending in the end.

Quinn: Yeah. I picked stories that either like there's a full restoration or some kind of happy ending at the end, because I wanted to be able to just laugh at this stuff and not be just sad about destroyed art. But yeah honestly of all of these, even though this is the one that like the original could not be saved. It ended up in some ways being the happiest. And I want to be clear. It wasn't just like it was a perfectly good painting that she decided to just like go at, like it was very damaged. And so that was why she was like, oh. I believe she was a painter. And so she was like, I'm a painter. I will do it. But professional restoration and painting are two different skills. And unfortunately she did have to learn that, but now it's so, it's so famous. It's brought so much tourist, it’s brought so many tourists to their town and to their church, and like obviously was able to really put a lot of life into the economy, because, you know, people come there and then they have lunch and everything. And that is a really beautiful ending to this weird story.

Betty: Oh, well, you know, if we’re ever in Spain we should make this another location on the Pictorial field trip.

Quinn: I totally agree if. If I have the chance to see this in person, I absolutely would. I'm going to end our, I'm going to end the main discussion of the topic today with just a quote from her, which makes me so sad—which makes me so sad but also happy. First of all, she tells other amateur restorers, don't do it. But then she says “people from all over the world are visiting the sanctuary now. That's the best medicine. I used to cry a lot over this, but I don't cry anymore because I can see how much I’m loved.” Aww.

Betty: Aww. Well, I'm glad she's she doesn't feel bad anymore. And you know, she had the best intentions, of course.

Quinn: Hurray for a happy ending in this case. Well, thanks everybody for listening to my little walkthrough of some little art mishaps that, are they bad things that happened? Yeah, but can we laugh about them now also? Also yes. You can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial. You can also follow us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. If you would like, you can also follow me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv. And I am also on YouTube as ARTiculations and speaking of YouTube, we also have a YouTube channel called Pictorial Podcast where you can see video versions of our episodes a few weeks after the audio version, this one will be a particularly fun one. So be sure to check that out.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!