Security Guard Draws Eyes on $1.3 Million Painting – First Day on the Job

The culprit who drew eyes on faceless images in a painting at a cultural center in Russia has been publicly identified as a security guard, though his name has not been released.

It was his first day on the job.

Anna Leporskaya painted Three Figures between 1932 and 1934. The work is insured for 75 million roubles, or about $1.3 million. It was being displayed at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg and was on loan from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The guard is alleged to have used a ballpoint pen to draw eyes on two of the figures back in December. Police declined to investigate at the time.

“His motives are still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity,” the exhibition’s curator told the Guardian.

However, The Art Newspaper reported – quite hilariously – that, “In January of this year, the Ministry of Culture sent a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia about the refusal to initiate a criminal case with a request to retrain him.” [Emphasis ours]

Presumably, the security guard’s initial training did not include a section about refraining from drawing on art with ballpoint pens.

As Christiane Amanpour said in a report for CNN international, this was hardly the first time a vandal has defaced a painting in Russia.

“In 2018, a man was charged with attacking an artwork of Ivan the Terrible,” she said. “He then confessed that after getting drunk on vodka, he found the painting disturbing.”

Watch above via CNN International.