Roy Lichtenstein, Nudes in Mirror (1994) / pocket knife

This work was damaged in 2005 while on view at Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz. It was repeatedly slashed, with four cuts each measuring nearly a foot in length.

From press:

“The perpetrator, armed with screwdriver, spray paint, and pocket knife, was a thirty-five-year-old Munich ex-prostitute suffering from schizophrenia. A museum visitor and an employee held the woman until police arrived. She scratched a police officer in the face and bit another in the leg during questioning. According to newspaper accounts, the attacker’s actions were spurred by her conviction that the painting was a fake—that as the Coburg Neue Presse reported,Nudes in Mirror ‘was not a genuine Roy Lichtenstein’—a claim the show’s curator, having had insult added to injury, of course immediately refuted.”

The painting was eventually able to be restored, and recently went back to auction.