Hans-Joachim Bohlmann
I know you’re probably thinking “who the heck is that?!” Don’t worry, I was too. But this man has done over €138 million in damage to famous, beautiful paintings. What compelled him to do this? How did he manage to pull this off so many times? Let's find out.
Bohlmann’s Early Life
Hans-Joachim Bohlmann was born in 1937 in Wrocław, Poland. Honestly, he had a pretty tough go at the beginning of his life so buckle up. He suffered from a personality disorder and showed symptoms of this as a teenager, as a result he was placed in in-patient therapy at the University of Kiel in Germany. There he underwent electric shock and insulin treatments, the facility also tried tranquillizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics, behaviour therapy, and group therapy but they weren’t seeing the results that they hoped for.
From 1968-1972 Bohlmann worked in a warehouse and even got married! It seems like he was doing pretty well during this period, he was only on two medications and he was holding down his job and living a quiet life. He and his wife loved to visit art museums together and she really showed him the value and importance of art in society.
Things took a turn for the worse in 1972 when Bohlmann met Dr. Dieter Müller from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Dr. Müller was a neurosurgeon who suggested that Bohlmann get a lobotomy. Just no. Before the surgery, Dr. Müller said that there was a 70-80% success rate with these surgeries, though what they were trying to achieve or change about Bohlmann I don’t know. As I said, it seems like he had been doing alright. Unfortunately, they decided to go ahead with the procedure and again, like before, there was no change. This choice was later criticized and people said that even when the surgery was performed it was already outdated and all it did was reduce Bohlmann’s intelligence.
Five years later, in 1977 Bohlmann’s wife was doing some cleaning in their home and fell out of an open window. She died from her injuries shortly after. This is what Bohlmann himself credits as the event that pushed him over the edge.
As mentioned, he and his wife would often go to art galleries and he seemed to really appreciate the works he saw there and understand their value. But after the death of his wife, he started buying sulfuric acid at pharmacies and spraying it on paintings, greatly damaging if not ruining them.
Vandalism
He began his career as an art vandal in 1977 when he entered the Kunsthalle Hamburg and damaged the painting Goldfish by Paul Klee. He followed that up with attacks in Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Essen, Dortmund, Hannover, Bochum, Kassel, Düsseldorf and Hamelin ALL IN THE SAME YEAR.
Here are some details from that year. In August he poured sulfuric acid in a number of paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder in Hanover, including portraits of Martin Luther and his wife Katherine von Bora.
Again in August he hit Archduke Albrecht by Rubens in Düsseldorf.
In October he attacked four paintings in Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel. Among those were Rembrandt’s Jacob Blessing Joseph’s Second Son and a self-portrait as well as Noli me Tangere by Willem Drost. These paintings are estimated to be worth more than €25 million.
He was strategic when choosing which paintings would be his victims. He tried to target famous paintings and famous artists, he did damage to paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Dürer to name a few. His complimentary strategy was to target any faces in the painting, hoping to inflict maximum damage to these works and make it extra difficult to restore them. This is despicable.
It’s also worth noting that he didn’t just attack paintings in galleries at this time, he also set an altar on fire in Lübeck and spray painted anti-semitic imagery on hundreds of tombstones at night in Hamburg.
Of course, there was public outrage at these crimes and the media was widely reporting on them. This attention and coverage in the media made Bohlmann feel like he was famous, he thought he was becoming a celebrity, and this caused him to stop taking his medication.
Finally, in October 1977 Bohlmann was arrested and in 1979 he was convicted to five years in prison on 17 counts of damage to public property and 3 counts of damage to private property. He did end up serving his full term (though five years is not that long) and was released in October 1982. After he got out of jail he went right back to vandalism, awesome rehabilitation job jail. He was quickly banned from buying acid but he didn’t let that stop him. Instead, he set a construction site near Hamburg on fire and caused €65,000 worth of damage. He was arrested again after this incident and sentenced to three additional years in jail.
Bohlmann was released from his second prison stint on May 5, 1986. This time they didn’t just release him back out into the world, they learned their lesson (for now), and Bohlmann was taken for treatment to the psychiatric department of the Hospital Hamburg-Elibek. Also, he was forced to pay for some of the damage he had done years before to Ruben’s Archduke Albrecht.
While he was in the hospital receiving treatment he was still able to go out during the day, he wasn’t under lock and key there. So in March 1988 Bohlmann bought two litres of sulfuric acid and hid them in a park. Then on April 20 he took a leave from the hospital and retrieved the acid. He went to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek where he splashed the acid onto three paintings by Albrecht Dürer, Lamentation for Christ, Paumgartner Altar, and Mater Dolarosa. The damage caused by this attack was estimated at €35 million.
He was arrested immediately after the attacks and taken to a different hospital in Bavaria. He was convicted in 1989 to two years of imprisonment concurrent with treatment, for as long as was necessary, in a psychiatric hospital. He served this sentence (escaping twice actually but always coming back to the hospital) until January 2005 when he was released back into public life.
What’s interesting is that while he was serving this latest sentence he attended art therapy where he painted pictures every day for nine years, resulting in almost 1,500 works by him. Just a little tidbit for you.
If you think that changed him, sadly you’d be wrong. On June 25, 2006, about a year and a half after he was released, he sprayed lighter fluid on and set fire to Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster by Bartholomeus van der Helst at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Luckily most of the damage was only done to the varnish layer (if you’re a loyal reader you’ll appreciate the importance of a thick varnish layer). Bohlmann was then sentenced to three years in jail but after serving only two-thirds of his sentence he was released from prison. He returned to Hamburg and ended up dying there in January of 2009.
The majority of the paintings were able to be restored but this involved hours upon hours of careful, painstaking work to bring these masterpieces back to their former glory. I find it quite sad that Bohlmann could not stop vandalising paintings, he was clearly a sick man and so many systems failed both him and the artworks when they weren’t able to prevent this from happening. Luckily, now it would be MUCH harder to get away with something like this.