Art

Bull spray-painted on a Picasso Painting

Last week, an unknown man strolled up to Pablo Picasso’s painting Woman in a Red Armchair at the Menil Collection of the Houston Museum and spray-painted a stencil bull right on the canvas. He also wrote the word “Conquista,” (Conquest in Spanish), right under his “masterpiece.”

The hooded vandal turned out to be a Mexican-American artist, Uriel Landeros, who said it was his way of honoring the great Spanish master.

Museum staff said they had rushed the work to the conservation lab before the paint got dry, which spared the masterpiece much damage.

Oddly enough, but one of the visitors even managed to catch the vandal on his cell phone cam and upload it to YouTube. Suspicion has been raised that the person taking the video may have been an accomplice.

History is full of records about vandalized masterpieces, which were cut up with scissors, sprayed with acid, stoned, and fired at.

As a rule, such acts of extreme vandalism are carried out by fanatics or maniacs. However, the recent years have seen this list extended to include up-and-coming artists, who are trying to get their name out there by taking extreme measures such as this.