According to reports coming out of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Ekaterinburg, a security guard drew eyes on a faceless avant-garde painting in an exhibition in December of last year. Avant-garde generally means a work that is experimental or radical with respect to art, culture, or society. The painting was worth a million dollars. Even then he drew eyes just because he was bored on his first day of work.
Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures, an artwork, painted between 1932 and 1934 was displayed at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Ekaterinburg as part of an exhibition in December of last year. Someone had noticed something strange there with the same piece of art. Actually, the “three figures” were depicted in the avant-garde piece as faceless, but then two of them had small dots in place of eyes on the face.
Such defilement was first observed on 7 Dec. by two visitors who notified the staff at Yeltsin Center about it. Then the search for the perpetrator began. But one thing that was not even the expectation of anyone, was the fact that a security guard who was being paid to protect the things from such degradations, was actually a vandal.
At first, the reason behind the guard’s action was unknown and it was being stated that his mental condition was not stable. As Alexander Drozdov, the executive director of the Yeltsin Center said, “His motives are still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of lapse of insanity. ” Moreover, he mentioned, “Fortunately, the vandal drew with a pen without strong pressure, and therefore the relief of the strokes as a whole was not disturbed. The left figure also had a small crumble of the paint layer up to the underlying layer on the face.”
Apparently, the security guard had drawn eyes on the historical piece of art as he was bored on his first day of work. Man’s identity had not been revealed. But the same man who worked with some private security company was fired after the act. He was also fined and would spend several months behind the bars.
The Guardian reported that this act was first reported by the Yeltsin Center on December 20, but the ministry of Internal Affairs declined to press charges. It did so because it considered the damage “insignificant”. However, the ministry of culture complained to the prosecutor general’s office about the same, and then the official investigation began
