Gallery visitor trips and tears $130 million Picasso painting The Actor

[Honey]

The Actor, which suffered a 6in rip

An art enthusiast accidentally ripped a Picasso masterpiece valued at $130 million (£80 million) during a class at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The woman made a 6in (15cm) tear in the lower right-hand corner of Picasso’s The Actor, an unusually large 6ft (1.8m) x 4ft canvas of an acrobat striking a pose. “A visitor attending a class lost her balance,” the museum said in a terse statement.
The Actor, painted in the winter of 1904-05, marks Picasso’s shift from his Blue Period, of images of tattered beggars and blind musicians, to his Rose Period of paintings of costumed acrobats. The painting was donated to the museum in 1952 by the car company heiress Thelma Chrysler Foy and has been prominently displayed ever since.
Immediately after the accident on Friday, the painting was taken to the Metropolitan’s conservation studio for repair. “Fortunately, the damage did not occur in a focal point of the composition, and the curatorial and conservation staffs fully expect that the repair, which will take place in the coming weeks, will be unobtrusive,” the museum said.

The picture should be ready for display in the museum’s exhibition of 250 Picasso works from its permanent collection, due to open on April 27.
The Actor is not the first Picasso to suffer damage as the result of carelessness in recent years. In 2006, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, tore Picasso’s Le Rêve with his elbow while showing it off to friends in his office, including the Hollywood scriptwriter Nora Ephron and her husband, Nick Pileggi.
The 1932 picture of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter was about to be sold for a record $139 million. Because of the tear, the sale fell through and the painting’s estimated value fell to $85 million — a drop of $54 million.

Gallery visitor trips and tears $130 million Picasso painting The Actor - Times Online

[Beeyotch]

Hey, that's what krazy glue is for...

[Jexxifer]

D'oh!

[Grimmlok]

Omg can you imagine how that person feels

[angelais]

You break it, you buy it.

[McJag]

Seems like they would have it idiot-proofed.

[Penny Lane]

How the fuck did she trip and rip it? Did she have a knife in her hand or something? Some people are just clumsy but damn..

[VenusInFauxFurs]

She ran with scissors?

[chartreuse]

You break it, you buy it.

[MrsDark]

Nothing short of retarded that something this valuable was not better idiot-proof protected

[twitchy2.0]

Hey, you idiot proof something and they'll just invent a better idiot.

[kingcap72]

$130 million? She better hope they'll take a post-dated check.

[calcifer]

i can almost cry.
gorgeous painting.

Seems like they would have it idiot-proofed.

sometimes paintings are protected with a thin layer of plexiglas. that obviously wasn't the case here..

[sputnik]

Nothing short of retarded that something this valuable was not better idiot-proof protected

i don't think that's the solution. it would seriously suck if all museums started putting paintings behind glass (oil paintings aren't supposed to be in glass, it distorts them, unless you're francis bacon and put them behind glass to make them harder to see on purpose), or even worse, behind some stupid barrier.
people should be more careful but luckily this type of accident is extremely rare so i don't think more drastic measures are necessary.

[Str8_uncut-jock]

I just went to the Met and MoMA last week. Almost none of the paintings were protected. You could touch them if no one was looking. Of course they did have guards stationed in every gallery.