Ancient site destroyed
News from the worlds of art and archaeology
A 20-year-old man who punched a hole through a Picasso at Tate Modern last December has been jailed for 18 months. Shakeel Ryan Massey, a Spanish architecture student, appears to have entered the museum with the express intention of damaging the painting – a 1944 portrait of the artist’s lover Dora Maar, thought to be worth up to £20m. He is said to have wrapped his hands in scarves and padlocks to smash through security glass, before ripping a hole in the canvas. He told security guards that it was an “art performance”, but the judge presiding over his trial concluded that he was a “fame seeker”, looking for a moment of “notoriety”. Possibly Massey was aware of the case of Wlodzimierz Umaniec, a Polish art student who daubed black ink onto a Rothko at Tate
Modern in 2012. Umaniec, who professed to being a Rothko admirer, claimed he had defaced the work in the name of a selfconceived art movement he termed “yellowism”. He later described his actions as a “mistake”, but other art vandals have been rather less repentant: in 1986 one Gerard Jan van Bladeren attacked a Barnett Newman painting at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk museum with a box cutter, claiming an intense dislike of abstract art. Although he was briefly jailed for the crime, he returned to the gallery 11 years later to mutilate another Newman painting. The restoration of the Picasso is expected to take 18 months, and to cost around £350,000.
Gold hunters have destroyed a 2,000-yearold archaeological site in Sudan, reports the BBC. Believed to date back to the kingdom’s Meroitic period (350BC-AD350), Jabal Maragha, in the eastern Sahara, was a small settlement or checkpoint at the entrance of the ancient Kingdom of Kush. When Sudanese archaeologists visited the site, they were devastated to find a huge pit, about 55 feet deep and 65 feet long, where it should have been, and five men at work with two mechanical diggers. “They had only one goal in digging here – to find gold,” said archaeologist Habab Idriss Ahmed. “They did something crazy; to save time, they used heavy machinery.” Archaeologists have warned that there are ancient sites scattered over the Sudanese desert that are at risk. The men found excavating Jabal Maragha were reportedly released without charge, highlighting the difficulty of enforcing conservation laws in the country.