‘Bored' security guard draws eyes on $1m Russian painting

A security guard's 'boredom' on his first day at the office turned costly for a Russian art gallery after he allegedly drew eyes on a faceless figure painting worth $1 million. According to "The Guardian", the now 'ruined' Three Figures painting, by Anna Leporskaya, was put on exhibit at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
 

This painting dates to a period between 1932 and 1934 had been insured for 75m roubles. The faces on the three figures in this painting were blank until the security guard drew eyes using a ballpoint pen. The vandalism was first noticed by visitors on December 7 during the gallery's exhibition titled 'The World as Non-Objectivity, The Birth of a New Art'. Thereafter, the gallery withdrew the painting from the exhibition and returned it to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which had loaned the painting.

The exhibition's curator, Anna Reshetkina, said that the exact motive behind this act was still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse insanity. She adds that the security guard used a Yeltsin Center-branded pen for this vandalisation of the painting.

The security guard worked for a third-party security firm at the gallery and has now been fired.

According to reports, the ink had slightly penetrated into the paint layer as the titanium white used to paint the faces was not covered with the author's varnish, like most abstract paintings of that time. Thankfully, not much pressure was laud while drawing the eyes and as a result strokes as a whole was not disturbed. The left figure in the painting, however, had a small crumble of the paint layer up to the underlying layer on the face.

Restoration experts at the Tretyakov have estimated that the restoration work would cost 250,000 roubles approximately.