Vandals

The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handle.

— Bob Dylan

Just in time for the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues“—which enshrined a vandalized pump within America’s literary canon—an unknown artist in Denmark has vandalized a famous painting by one of nation’s most revered 20th-century painters.

Ibi-Pippi Hedegaard was arrested last Friday for vandalizing a painting by Asger Jorn that hangs in the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark.

Hedegaard claims he only wished to spark a debate about “authorship.”

The 1959 painting, The Disquieting Duckling, comprises an appropriated image of a countryside home overpainted with a garish duck.

Jorn belonged to a left-leaning school of painters who had hoped to challenge the traditional divide between “good” and “bad” art.

Hedegaard, who signed his name to the painting in permanent marker and pasted a photo of himself to it, says he was advancing the school’s ideas.

But Hedgaard has no interest in those ideas.

He is, instead, part of a right-wing group that gets its jollies by attacking Muslims, castigating “wokeism,” and performing stunts in blackface.

Museum curators fear the painting is irreparably damaged.

Transcending traditional painting, as Jorn strove to do, is all the rage right now.

Young artists are favoring “immersive” presentations that go beyond the rectangular canvas hung on a white wall. They’re striving to say that the conventions of fine art are no longer sacred.

But vandalizing traditional paintings is something else.

The vandals want to say that they have the right to deface or destroy any work they find objectionable.

It’s easy to laugh about Hedegaard’s stunt, until you remember that Adolph Hitler began adult life as a landscape painter.

Within 30 years, his goons were seizing and burning “degenerate” art—paintings that didn’t suit Hitler’s parochial tastes.

Above: Pump at Bard College by Lisa Bornemann Paterson. The pump stands in front of Bard’s publications building, which in Dylan’s days on campus was a rooming house where the singer-songwriter frequently stayed. The Disquieting Duckling by Asger Jorn. Oil on canvas. 21 x 25 inches. Now defaced.

The post Vandals appeared first on Original still life oil paintings for sale l Robert Francis James.