Russia urges harshest punishment for Ivan the Terrible painting attacker
Russia called for the harshest possible punishment after a visitor to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery caused serious damage by attacking a famous 19th-century painting of Ivan the Terrible.
On Friday, Russian police arrested a 37-year-old man who used a metal pole to break the glass covering Ilya Repin’s painting of the 16th-century tsar killing his son, damaging the work in three places. Russia’s deputy culture minister Vladimir Aristarkhov told a news conference the gallery on Monday that his ministry expects the man to receive “the most severe punishment possible”.
Under current law, the man faces up to three years in prison. “Three years is nothing,” Aristarkhov said.
“We would like to initiate a discussion on toughening up the punishment for the vandalism of art,” Tretyakov Gallery director Zelfira Tregulova added, speaking in the Repin Room of the gallery where the crime took place.
Russian media said the man — a builder named Igor Podporin — vandalised the painting for “historical reasons” and later told police he acted under the influence of alcohol and may have been drunk after drinking a shot of vodka. The gallery’s chief conservator, Tatyana Gorodkova, said the man did not appear intoxicated and bypassed four of the gallery’s guards before throwing himself at the painting just before the museum closed.
She told journalists museum staff heard him “say something about how Ivan the Terrible did not kill his son”.
She stressed that archival letters by Repin prove the painter did not intend for the work to be historical, but rather about “psychological drama”.
For her part Tregulova said she feared that Russians are increasingly “not differentiating artistic work from historical facts”.
“The mixing of the two can mean that any artwork can be a victim [of an attack],” she warned.