Who's Afraid of a Red, Yellow and Boxcutter
The painting vandalized, restored, and then vandalized by its own restoration
Image: Unsplash
- Repair Cost
- Disputed (restoration itself condemned)
- Curator's Blood Pressure
- 98%
- Embarrassment Level
- 9/10
- Recovered?
- Contested
- Selfie Involved?
- No
Dutch painter Gerard Jan van Bladeren slashed Barnett Newman's monumental 'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III' dozens of times — and its controversial restoration was later attacked as more damaging than the knife.
In 1986 van Bladeren walked into the Stedelijk with a utility knife and left nearly fifty feet of cuts across Newman's vast abstract canvas. He insisted he was not a criminal but an artist responding to an insult masquerading as art — and, unsettlingly, many members of the public wrote in to agree.
The painting's ordeal did not end there. Its restoration was criticised so fiercely that some historians argued the repair had done more harm than the attack, a debate later dramatised in the documentary 'The End of Fear'. Newman's painting endures as a monument to an uncomfortable question: when does restoring an artwork begin to erase it?