The child damages painting worth 50 million euros in the Netherlands

A child damaged a painting worth millions of books by American artist Mark Rothko in a Museum in Rotterdam.

A spokesperson for the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum said that he was considering the “next steps” for the treatment of Rothko’s Gray, Orange on Maroon, n ° 8.

Damage took place during a “moment without guard,” a museum spokesperson for the Dutch media Algemeen Dagblad (AD) told last week.

A spokesperson for the museum told the BBC that the damage was “superficial”, adding: “The small stripes are visible in the paint layer in the lower part of the paint”.

The abstract painting is estimated at 50 million euros (42.5 million pounds sterling), according to advertising in the newspapers.

“Conservation expertise has been sought in the Netherlands and abroad. We are currently looking for the next steps in the treatment of the table,” the museum spokesman for the BBC told.

“We expect the work to be displayed again in the future,” they added.

Sophie McCaloone, the manager of the conservation of the Fine Art Restoration Company, said that “modern without eyeshadows” paintings like Rothko’s Gray, Orange on Maroon, n ° 8 are “particularly sensitive to damage”.

This “due to a combination of their complex modern materials, the lack of traditional coating layer and the intensity of the flat fields, which even make the smallest areas of instantly perceptible damage,” she said.

“In this case, the scratching of the layers of superior paint can have a significant impact on the experience of visualization of the part,” said Ms. Mcaloone.

Rothko’s painting was suspended in the deposit of the museum – a storage installation accessible to the public alongside the main museum – as part of an exhibition displaying a selection of “public favorites” from the gallery collection.

Jonny Helm, marketing director of the Art Plowden & Smith catering service, said the incident had implications for British institutions such as V & A East and the British Museum, who plan to “open the display of things that would be otherwise obscured in the archives”.

“How will this event affect other British institutions that open their archives in the same way?” Helm said.

The restoration of a Rothko painting is a difficult task because “the mixture of pigments and resins and glues of Rothko was quite complex,” said Helm.

He said that the fact that painting is without eyeshadow – which means that it is “open to the environment” – will take an additional challenge to the Conservatives.

The conservatives who work to restore painting will now likely document the extent of damage and the search for “successful historical treatments” of Rothko paintings.

“Rothko’s work seems to have a terrible chance – this is not the first damaged Rothko that we have heard of,” said Helm.

Rothko’s work in 1958, Black on Maroon, was deliberately vandalized by Wlodzimierz Umaniec at Tate Modern Gallery in London in October 2012.

Umaniec was sent to prison for two years and then apologized for his actions.

During his trial, the lawyer for the prosecution of Gregor McKinley said that the cost of repairing the work would be around £ 200,000. It took preservatives to repair the paint 18 months.

Rachel Myrtle, head of cash and fine arts of the AON insurance company, said that art insurance policies generally covered “all the risks associated with physical loss and damage to art works, including accidental damage caused by children or visitors, although with certain exclusions”.

She said that when a work of art is damaged, the insurer of a gallery will appoint an expert in specialized art losses to visit the museum.

The losses adjuster “generally examines damage to works of art, examines all video surveillance images to determine the exact cause of the loss and assesses the conservation options,” said Ms. Myrtle.

The museum has not commented on who will be held responsible for damage to the 1960 table, which the gallery would have bought in the 1970s.

The Boijmans Van Beuningen museum previously billed visitors who caused damage to the works on display.

In 2011, the museum asked a without distrust tourist who worked on the ground illustrations with Wim T. Schippers, called Pindakaasvloer, to pay for repairs to the work.

Sharon Cohen, museum spokesperson at the time, was cited by Ad saying: “It is normal procedure for people to pay if they damage art.”

Rothko’s painting is described by the museum as an example of paint on the colored field, a term used to describe the art characterized by large flat and solid blocks distributed on a canvas.

Rothko’s Gray, Orange on Maroon, n ° 8 Painting is one of the many works of modern art that have been damaged in the Netherlands in recent years.

In November 2024, several screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol were damaged by thieves during an attempted theft of the MPV art gallery in the city of Oiscterwijk.

In another incident, a Dutch town hall admitted that it had “most likely” eliminated 46 works of art by accident – including an Andy Warhol impression from the former Dutch queen – during renovation work last year.

Museums have different policies when they respond to the damage caused by children.

In August of last year, a four -year -old boy accidentally broke a 3,500 -year -old jar in pieces at the Hecht Museum in Israel.

At the time, the worker of the Hecht museum, Lihi Laszlo, told the BBC that the museum would not treat the incident “with gravity” because “the pot was accidentally damaged by a young child”.

The family was invited to the exhibition with their family for a visit organized shortly after the incident.