Aleksandr Vasiliev had only been working for a few hours when he decided to improve modern art. 😳
This 63-year-old war veteran, bearing wounds from Afghanistan and Chechnya, was standing guard at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia, when he saw what seemed to him like a visual injustice: three figures without eyes, without mouths, without grace.
Some teenagers approached him and asked why the artwork was ‘incomplete.’ They gave him a pen. Convinced that it was an abandoned children’s drawing, he drew the missing eyes on two of the figures.
The problem was that this ‘correction’ had a name and surname: ‘Three Figures,’ by Soviet painter Anna Leporskaya, on loan from the Tretyakov Gallery and insured for about 1.000.000 dollars.
The restoration cost around 3.348 dollars, which the security company paid. And although the marks could be erased, the law did not forgive the incident: 180 hours of community service and psychiatric evaluation for the man who only wanted those faces to stop staring into nothingness. 🖌️