Photo: Donat SorokinTASS/Getty
A security guard at a Russian art museum made quite a first impression when he defaced an exhibition painting during his first day on the job.
Anna Leporskaya’s avant-garde artworkThree Figures, on display at Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center’s “The World as Non-objectivity. The Birth of a New Art” exhibition in Yekaterinburg, was discovered in December to have been defaced with doodles of two sets of eyes,the Art Newspaper Russiareports.
The painting, dated sometime in the early 1930s, features three figures with round, empty faces lacking any features — which changed when two museum guests noticed little round eyes added with a pen to two of the smaller figures.
This week, the offender was revealed as a security guard from a private security firm, who is being charged with vandalism, according to theWashington Post.
The motives of the 60-year-old guard — who remains anonymous but has since been fired — “are still unknown, but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity,” said Anna Reshetkina, the exhibition’s curator.
Restoration on the painting, which is worth in the vicinity of $1 million, will cost an estimated $4,600,Sky Newsreports.
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
The piece has been returned to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which had originally loaned it to the Boris Yeltsin Center.
RELATED VIDEO: This Eco Artist Turns Litter Into Landscape Paintings: ‘We Can Be Better, More Sustainable Humans’
According to the Art Newspaper, prosecutors originally stopped short of pressing criminal charges against the former employee because of the relatively “insignificant” damage to the piece of art.
The charge was ultimately classified as an act of “vandalism,” which in Russia can come with a somewhat less severe maximum sentence of three months in prison, 360 hours forced labor, and/or a 40k ruble ($5K) fine.
source: people.com
