He told a security guard it was for a ‘performance’
A man who vandalised a Picasso painting while it was displayed at Tate Modern, London, has been sentenced to jail for 18 months. Twenty-year-old architecture student Shakeel Massey punched through the 1944 painting Bust of a Woman on 28 December 2019.
The artwork, painted during the Nazi occupation of France, depicts the photograph and Picasso’s lover Dora Maar, dressed in green. It has been valued at £20 million. Massey reportedly held metal padlocks and wrapped his hand in scarves before punching through the toughened glass protecting the painting. He told a security guard that it was a ‘performance’ as he threw the work to the ground.
Massey kept a handwritten note in his pocket at the time of the incident, detailing the amount of jail time he expected for vandalising the painting, and referencing a 2012 episode when the Polish artist Vladimir Umanets defaced a Mark Rothko painting at the gallery.
‘He did what he did foolishly for five minutes of fame,’ the lawyer representing Massey said in court. ‘He was an immature artist making a point of who knows what. It’s really unjustifiable.’
The condition of the painting at the time is said to have been ripped, with no further detail provided by Tate. It has not been returned to its display since the incident. It had been on a long-term loan to the gallery from a private collection.
