Monkdogz Artblog

A woman has joined a select club of people who’ve accidentally put a tear in a painting.

Wandering around with her art class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Friday, she stumbled onto the Picasso painting “The Actor” considered to be worth $130million and a rare example of his rose period when he painted itinerant acrobats in costume according to AP and MSNBC. The damage, a six inch irregular vertical tear in the bottom right hand corner is expected to be unobtrusive when completed.

The other person to famously tear a Picasso is Steve Wynn who put his elbow into “Le Reve” when he was showing it to some friends just after he negotiated to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for reported $139million. Wynn put a small thumb-sized hole in the canvas and the deal with Cohen fell through. It’s rumored that he said at the time “Thank goodness I did it and not someone else!” I hear that it hangs in Steve Wynn’s office today.

Unfortunately, I am also in this club, not a Picasso, but a large painting “Wild Irish Rose” a rose colored work that Robert d. Hogge gave me when I first really got to know him. I was hanging the work up in the house, when my hand slipped and it fell onto a sharp corner of a cabinet. It made a right angled tear of about 3 inches in the middle of the lower half of the painting.

I felt absolutely awful. Really sick to the stomach. Mortified. Devastated.

I feel dreadful even now when I think about it. I don’t know how I plucked up the courage to tell Bob about it but I did, knowing that he would see it before long. He was very good about it and brushed it off; reassuring me and saying he could repair it easily.

Bob did repair it well and he kindly says that he can’t see where it was now, some 7 years on. I can sense it, because it’s burned into my mind but it is hard to see. It hangs in my bedroom today where I see it every day. It’s one of my favorite paintings. It reminds me to be grateful, humble, know that life goes on and that friendship survives.