From Rothko to Michelangelo and
Rembrandt, it seems to be the most powerful works of art that draw the vandals
Red alert … the defaced Mark
Rothko Seagram painting at Tate Modern. Photograph: posted on Twitter
Mark Rothko's Seagram murals
are great works of art that were given, free, to Britain. They are glories of
our artistic heritage – American marvels preserved permanently in London.
Now one has been defaced.
The idiocy of someone
scribbling on one of these wine-dark, blood-rich paintings is hideous. Nobody
stopped the scoundrel. A witness tweeted that the criminal "tagged"
the painting. This was not a tag, which implies a creative act. It was a
pathetic assault.
Well, I've got that off my
chest.
But why is it always the
greatest works of art that get damaged in these ways? Because the Seagram
paintings are among the true art treasures of the world. They have a power that
expands your mind's eye as you gaze at them. To deface one of these is to
deface something with life and magic.
It is a horrible fact that
people who for whatever reason feel compelled, in an art gallery, not to stand
and look but to scribble, or throw acid, or pull out a hammer, tend to pick the
most potent and authoritative works of art for their assaults. It seems there
is a psychic force in truly great art that draws the attacker.
In 1987, a man fired a shotgun
at Leonardo da Vinci's Burlington cartoon in the National Gallery. This is a
full-scale design for a painting in which the Virgin Mary sits on the lap of
her mother Anne. Mary smiles sweetly; her mother gazes out of cadaverous eyes.
The infant Jesus greets a young St John the Baptist. This is an image with
great psychological power that speaks intimately of mothers and sons. It
fascinated Sigmund Freud: you can see his reproduction of it in his house in
north London. He wrote about its maternal aura.
So someone with a confused mind
might well find provocations, resonances, that made him choose this of all
works of art to blast with a shotgun.
The same deep power emanates
from the paintings of Rembrandt. His Danae in the Hermitage in St Petersburg
manages to be about sex and god at the same time. A naked woman in a luxurious
bedroom greets a divine numinous visitor. Rembrandt confronts the beholder with
the force of desire and the terror of god. In 1985, a man attacked this great
painting with sulphuric acid.
Michelangelo's Pieta is another
work of art that touches our souls. Here is a young man, dead, in his mother's
arms. Michelangelo makes the flesh of Christ's frail body so real and tender in
death it is heartbreaking. Once again a transcendent work of art was attacked,
this time with a hammer, in 1972.
Recent art attacks, while
mercifully less damaging, have similarly singled out works of true power.
Poussin's Adoration of the Golden Calf is an angry portrayal of false religion.
It was defaced. In a perhaps unique incident where the artist expressed
pleasure in an illicit response to his work, a woman kissed a Cy Twombly
painting and left lipstick on it. For Twombly, that showed how much passion his
art incites.
Rothko, like Rembrandt, like
Michelangelo, is an artist who suggests the power of god – or in his case, of
god's absence. Attacking him is like attacking fathers, attacking cultural
authority. His art will endure, however, as the truth endures.