Van Bladeren was 31, unemployed, living with his parents, and was a painter himself — although not very successful. He regarded this act of vandalism as an artistic gesture. He saw the painting as a kind of cultural provocation, and one of the main arguments that his lawyer made in his defense was that this provocation called for a reaction and got one. Van Bladeren was sentenced to five months in prison, and stood by his actions as a defense of artistic values.
Many people in the Netherlands agreed and sent letters to the Stedelijk. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro is one of the leading experts in the field of art conservation. Mancusi-Ungaro has pioneered techniques for restoring work by modern and contemporary artists and has worked on several paintings by Barnett Newman. She says that there are a set of rules that conservators must follow when restoring a painting, the first being that you should make every effort to not use any material that cannot be removed or reversed in the future.
If conservators add paint to a canvas, they want to make sure that paint can be dissolved and removed later. They do this in case the artwork needs to be retouched again in the future. Conservators also try to preserve as much of the original material as possible, touching only the areas that need treatment.
They should also really study the artist and look at their past work in order to get a sense of what the artist was trying to achieve. With these rules in mind, the Stedelijk phoned up practically every conservator in Europe. The biggest challenge was the very simplicity of the painting. Goldreyer promised that when he was done, the slashes would be virtually invisible. Finally, four and a half years later, Goldreyer unveiled the painting, and when the museum director, Wim Beeren, came to inspect his work, there was no sign of the slashes.
But when the painting went back up, people immediately noticed that the red paint looked different. It was the same hue as before, but previously there had been a shimmering quality to the red that gave it a sense of depth. The city council of Amsterdam sent it to a forensic lab to try to figure out what Goldreyer had done, and they concluded Goldreyer had used a paint roller to lay down layers of dull acrylic paint similar to house paint over the original.
If the analysis was correct, Goldreyer had rolled over the entire canvas of a twentieth-century masterpiece with house paint. The whole affair cost over a million dollars and now the museum was still stuck with a damaged painting.
Van Bladeren found another piece by Newman, a large blue painting with a white zip down the middle titled Cathedra and attacked this piece with a box cutter. When he was done, he threw a packet of pamphlets on the floor that contained rambling, incoherent writing. At his second trial, van Bladeren was declared mentally unfit and sent to a psychiatric institution. A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray-painted with swastikas in and just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding this same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets.
After Cathedra was attacked, both Ysbrand Hummelen and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro advised on its restoration, and the museum spared no expense. The canvas was stitched together with surgical sutures and orthodontic wire on a specially built table. Four painstaking years later, it was unveiled. Cathedra is currently on display at the Stedelijk.
The painting is in a storage facility at the edge of town. It waits there, hoping for a day when future conservators might be able to undo what was done to it. Wim Beeren, director of the Stedelijk Museum at the time of the attack, revealed in an interview that Van Bladeren was not pleased with the restoration and called the museum to warn his successor Rudi Fuchs of a second attack.
Van Bladeren entered the museum for a second time in to make good on his intentions to deface Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III but was not able to locate the painting. He instead opted to attack a different Barnett Newman painting called Cathedra , which he slashed in a similar fashion to his first attack.
Beeren recalled that the painting, not on display at the time, was in a storage facility. The oil on canvas painting measures by cm. It belongs to the collection of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin , who bought it in from Newman's widow for 2. It was attacked on April 13, , days before it would be presented to the public, by Josef Nikolaus Kleer, a year-old student who claimed that the picture was a "perversion of the German flag" the painting has vertical bands of red, yellow and blue, while the German flag has horizontal stripes in black, red and yellow , and that his actions completed the work, a reference to the title of the painting.
The restoration took two years. The Who's Afraid of series has reached an iconic status in the world of modern and contemporary art, and has been the inspiration for many artworks and exhibitions. Perhaps we will know once the mourning is accomplished. We must therefore accomplish it. Mourning means neither sinking into melancholy, nor clinging frantically to the phantoms of past promises. It means working for survival, giving oneself chances for the future by reworking the past.
The mourning process must begin with the recognition of an ever-present fear, which is always the fear of death. But in this context fear can act as a lever. Of the two questions extending from there, one belongs to the dawn of Modernism, the other to its twilight.
The first was, does abstract painting still have a past? Both are dictated by fear, both demand a courageous answer which may be simply to ignore the question without, for all that, putting it out of mind. The paradox lies not only in the symmetry of the questions, but also in the historical position of the senders and addressees.
In , when painters as different as Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Frantisek Kupka, Kasimir Malevich, and Mondrian were about to switch to abstraction, they were also about to break with the whole past of Western painting. Of this break they were all highly conscious, and they all hesitated before crossing the threshold. Their audacity was not blind recklessness but the courage to address the question that they had been asking themselves to a recipient still absent.
It was to the future that they addressed the question of the past of abstract painting, and we are the ones who receive it, together with the set of answers given to it by modernity.
Correspondingly, the question of the future of painting which we are asking ourselves ought to be addressed to the past. Here the paradox is more obvious. It seems equally reasonable for us, who are concerned about the future of painting, to ask the future to calm or confirm our anxieties.
Yet the future will not tell what will have been the future of painting today. From what past? Possibly the whole of the past, since there is nothing in memory, certainly nothing it has repressed, that cannot be reactivated. But it is above all modernity, this Modern ist past which we are told we no longer belong to, that will or will not legitimize the painting of tomorrow.
It is for it to say whether, yes or no, what we have called painting during modernity, which includes ancient painting, will have ceased to exist and whether, yes or no, the practices that may replace it will have maintained the link with their pictorial prehistory.
Thus the future of painting addresses its demand for legitimization to the Modernist past. Such a statement is highly problematical, since it bears an uncanny resemblance to the various neotraditionalist and historicist positions currently dominating the art scene, if it does not appear as a simple reiteration of the formalist position.
Yet it is radically opposed to them, the whole question being to know, in the long term, how modernity is to be defined and, in the short term, how this demand for legitimization is to be formulated. But he made several mistakes, of which not the least consisted in holding an a priori concept of what painting is, a concept which came to him from too narrow a reading of history and which served him as a yardstick for prejudging the future.
Here was criticism undertaking to prophesy a tradition to be legitimized in advance by a middle-class, watered-down version of Modernism. Kitaj or Jim Dine, have been able to integrate by refusing. None of these people—and other names should be mentioned—has the excuse of ignorance or irresponsibility.
At most one can grant them the mitigating circumstances of fear. But if one grants them that, one must on the other hand incriminate them for their pursuit of power. Whether influential critic, manipulator of the market, or curator or director of a museum, the people mentioned here have sought or are seeking the power to intervene in the history of art. And this not only oppresses the most vital art of today, not only directs and deforms judgment, but risks further mortgaging the chances of a reinterpretation of the history of Modernism.
It is in this sense that the future of painting—or of art—addresses its demand for legitimization to the Modernist past. It is to a Modernism that is still waiting to be reinterpreted. But a lot remains to be done, that can be done only if one starts by sorting out as far as possible, on a theoretical level, what pertains to judgment and what to interpretation. It ought to be an established fact that the judgments that have made history in the period from Manet to Pollock and beyond are without remission.
Concerning artists as undisputed as these or Mondrian or Newman, or Marcel Duchamp, for that matter, any revisionism would be absurd or monstrous. The consequences indeed would be serious and immediate. And this is not because, as one might be inclined to think, there is an unbroken and irreversible chain of progress in which artists are linked to one another throughout the course of a one-way history, but because no work of art exists alone, being always the interpretation of at least one other work.
On the one hand there is the relevance of the interpretations the works propose of one another by order of historical succession; on the other, the resonance that ranks these interpretations around a limited number of focal points echoing each other in all directions, forward and backward, mainstream and fringe, specific and trans-specific. It is one thing to interpret the history of art as an artist, another to interpret it as a critic or historian. Nevertheless both parties have this in common—that everything begins and ends in esthetic judgment.
The difference is that his judgment is not by the same token an interpretation, or at least not an explicit interpretation, and explicitness is required of the historian, whereas it is absolutely not required of the artist. The historian and the critic are obliged to give reasons for their judgments, to explain them and build an interpretation of the works that places them in a context which is, more often than not, their historicity.
Furthermore, their discourse constantly refers to that of other historians and critics, either refuting them or taking them over, either amplifying them or cutting them down. None of this is required of artists. Although their culture, ideology, and taste are formed by what they have read and learned about art as much as by their firsthand acquaintance with works, and indeed by many other things, no one should expect them to make explicit in their work the interpretation which that work embodies.
The esthetic judgments out of which a work arises—and in the making of art the only judgments that count are esthetic ones 8 —do not require any explicit motivation, justification, or explanation whatsoever. In a way, of course, this is also true of the historian and the critic.
Inasmuch as their work begins and ends in esthetic judgment, they have as much right as anyone to the most arbitrary subjectivity. But it is their job to produce a rationale for their verdicts, with the imminence of another verdict to be rendered in their own case, of which they must know they run the risk.
What they submit to the judgment of others is not simply their esthetic judgment but rather the interpretation explaining, justifying, or amplifying it. And this, needless to say, is not to be judged esthetically. It is to be judged interpretively. The discursive history of art—which must be distinguished de jure even if de facto this is not such an easy task from the operative history of art, entirely immanent in the opera , the works—is thus made up of interpretations that expose themselves to the verdict of other interpretations.
Although this may look like a truism, it is not. For every precaution must be taken to avoid the misconception that what is here intended is a revival of the old ideology of the autonomy of art, according to which artworks can perfectly well dispense with theories and interpretations: that being sufficient unto themselves, they enjoy complete immunity and impunity with regard to what critics and art historians may have to say about them.
This is not true. Artworks have everything to do with theories and interpretations, and not only with those which the artists supply on their own account in texts and manifestoes. They have everything to do with them because they themselves are theoretical and interpretive, owing their status as works of art not to the skill or technique of artists, nor to their ideas or intentions, but rather to their esthetic judgments. And these are unquestionably interpretations, but—and this is the point—interpretations that cannot interpret themselves.
If they could that would mean either that the work in question was not the resultant of esthetic judgments but the illustration of a pre-existing theory and there are of course many cases of this, which adds to the confusion , or that what is called its self-reference amounted to a tautology offering no hold to criticism and this does not exist, whatever some may think.
In the first case works of art would be merely ideological and without any specificity; in the second case they would exist as absolutely autonomous and hermetic monads not accountable to ideology, history or the outside world. As neither case is admissible, it must be concluded that works of art worthy of the name are concretions of esthetic judgments which interpret other, earlier or at the most contemporary ones, but which as interpretations remain suspended, awaiting other, later interpretations which will make the former explicit.
Depending on whether those subsequent interpretations are themselves works of art, i.
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