Miró on loan damaged at Tate Modern
Cost of repairs and depreciation was £203,000
By Martin Bailey. Museums, Issue 242, January 2012
Published online: 08 January 2013
An important painting by Miró was damaged in 2011 while on
loan to Tate Modern, in an incident that went unreported in the media. The work
was on loan from the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona
According to a visitor to the Miró retrospective, a man
leant against the picture with both hands. A spokeswoman for the Tate says that
the gallery believes it was an accident. None of the gallery’s staff witnessed
the incident.
Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse I,
1968 (above), is part of a room-sized triptych, and the left-side picture is
3.5m long. The incident occurred on 7 July 2011 and the painting went back on
display eight days later, after conservation work was completed by the Tate
with advice from the Miró foundation. The conservation work would have cost a
few thousand pounds, so the £203,000 indemnity payment by the UK
After London , the Miró
retrospective travelled to Barcelona Washington , DC
Tate Modern has around 5 million visitors a year. In
October 2012, a 26-year-old man scrawled a slogan on one of Mark
Rothko’s Seagram murals, Black on Maroon, 1958, which is in the Tate’s
collection. In December, the vandal, Wlodzimierz Umaniec (also known as
Vladimir Umanets), who is Polish-born and British-based, was sentenced to two
years’ imprisonment for criminal damage.
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