Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III?
What is a painting? What counts as art and what doesn’t? Just because your kid could probably make that same piece, does that mean the artwork is less “art” than something your kid definitely couldn’t make? Everyone has their own thoughts on these questions but not everyone takes them out on the art.
The artist in question here is Barnett Newman and he is a classic example of someone who creates art that other people feel some type of way about. Honestly, I feel like no one looks at his work and thinks ok cool sure, it’s not memorable. People are either loving or HATING his pieces. At the time he was creating them (the 1940s, 50s, and 60s) people tended to hate them. One of his famous works Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III hung in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and had a lot of haters. Keep in mind this thing is almost 18 feet wide and 8 feet tall (so you know, a little hard to miss) and almost entirely painted red with a thin stripe of blue on the left end and an even thinner stripe of yellow at the right end, Newman called these strips “zips”.
So in 1984 there was an exhibition called La Grande Parade at the museum which basically was trying to use art to get reactions out of people. Let me just tell you, it worked. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III was one of the stars of the show and people had big reactions to it, one person even wrote a letter to the museum to tell them that the painting made her physically sick. But, one person took these feelings WAY too far.
The Crime
Gerard Jan van Bladeren was a struggling artist himself and he came into the exhibit one day with a box cutter, I’m assuming there was zero security, and slashed the painting. When all the slashes were added up they were almost 50 feet long! The best part is that he claimed that the painting provoked him by being so large, so red, so abstract (no surprise here but he hates abstract art). He saw this slashing as an artistic gesture and always stood by this claim, though he was sentenced to five months in jail. That is attack #1, the slashing, but there is more to the story.
Of course everyone was shocked and outraged at this act of vandalism and was devastated about the painting but they knew they had to try to get it restored. The issue is, with paintings that are one solid colour restoration is going to be more obvious because any difference or interruption on the surface of the painting is going to be super noticeable. After some searching an art conservator named Daniel Goldreyer told them that he could definitely fix it within 98% accuracy. This was great news and the painting got shipped to his studio in New York.
The Second Crime
Four years later the painting was “done” and was sent back to Amsterdam. Everyone was very happy because there were no signs of the slashes, so, job well done, right? Literally couldn’t be more wrong, this part almost makes me more upset than the initial slashing. As soon as the painting was hung up for display again people were like uhhh why does the red look like a completely different colour? It had lost the depth, a certain shimmering quality to the colour, and a little je ne sais quoi that made the painting so unique. The painting was examined by a forensic team and they discovered a couple of things.
First of all they realized that instead of carefully painting ONLY where the painting had been damaged, Goldreyer had repainted the entire red section of the canvas with a completely different type of paint, acrylic house paint. Second of all he used a roller to just slather that canvas in layers of this new paint that Newman would never have used. He basically transformed the painting into something (although technically recognizable) that is completely different from the original. If you’re keeping score, in my opinion, this painting has now been attacked twice and could possibly be permanently ruined as a result of this botched restoration.
So now, instead of being on display, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III sits in storage all alone waiting for conservators to figure out how to undo the damage done to it by Goldreyer. It can’t be on display even in this altered state because van Bladeren (remember him, the slasher) found out about the restoration and tried to come back and attack it AGAIN (more on this in a future article). This is why it has to stay in solitary confinement, for its own protection.