The man who defaced part of a Rothko mural at the Tate Modern in London was sentenced to two years in jail on Thursday.
Wlodzimierz Umanets, 26, was arrested Oct. 7 after scrawling graffiti on the painting. He applied black paint to a small area and scrawled the phrase “a potential piece of yellowism.†(Yellowism is an artistic movement he co-founded.) Shortly after vandalizing the work he told the BBC that he was “not a vandal,'' adding, “I haven't done criminal damage.''
But later in October he pleaded guilty to just that: criminal damage valued at more than $8,000. A prosecutor said that restoring the painting would cost more than $300,000 and take up to 20 months.
Judge Roger Chapple of the Inner London Crown Court told Mr. Umanets that his actions “were entirely deliberate, planned and intentional,'' according to the BBC, adding that it was “wholly and utterly unacceptable†to promote the movement by damaging a work of art that had been “a gift to the nation.''
The defaced work, “Black on Maroon,'' from 1958, is one of a series of paintings originally commissioned as a mural for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. But Rothko, appalled by the restaurant's clientele, changed his mind and refused to deliver the paintings. Instead he ended up giving nine of them to the Tate.
Contemporary art experts have valued “Black on Maroon†to be worth between $8 million and $14 million.
