Security guard under investigation for drawing eyes on $1 million painting

Police in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg have opened an investigation after a security guard was accused of drawing eyes on a painting worth more than $1 million during his shift in an art gallery.
The avant-garde painting by Anna Leporskaya, known as the three sisters is on display at the Yeltsin centre Ekaterinburg around 1,500km east of Moscow, the country’s fourth largest city.
The Yeltsin Centre’s Executive Director, Alexander Drozdov said the accused guard was working for a private company that provides security at a gallery inside the building. Speaking to local website URA, the exhibition’s Curator, Anna Reshetkina, revealed that it was the contractor’s first day on the job.
On loan from Russia’s most renowned art repository, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, for the exhibition ‘The World as Non-Objectivity’, the painting is the work of Anna Leporskaya, who died in 1982. She was a student of the world-famous artist Kazimir Malevich, who developed an avant-garde movement that took the art world by storm in the 1920s.
The abstract 1930s work depicts the heads and torsos of three people with faces intentionally devoid of features. Last month, visitors noticed a pair of “small, crudely rendered eyes” on the left figure and reported the defacement to gallery staff. The suspected gallery security guard had allegedly drawn the eyes using one of the souvenir ballpoint pens available from the gallery, penetrating a layer of paint, according to The Art Newspaper Russia.
Deemed irreversible the damage to ‘Three Figures’ repair costs estimated at $3,400 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The pen marks were made “lightly,” artist Ivan Petrov, a journalist for The Art Newspaper Russia, said, noting that “the ink has slightly penetrated the paint layer.”
Despite the presence of CCTV cameras the vandalism was not picked up for days, with the museum taking two weeks and still failing to provide a picture of the culprit.
The identity of the vandal remains unknown, but the 60-year-old guard suspected of the act has since been fired. A criminal case has been opened against the former employee who, if found guilty, could face a fine and up to three months in prison, according to Moscow daily RBK.
Reshetkina said the motives of the museum security guard are “still unknown,” and he is still under investigation for drawing they eyes on the paining, which can only be described as “some kind of lapse in sanity.”

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