Art: Stabbed at Prayers

Anyone who knifes a work of art is judged insane, yet every art critic has a list of art works he would like to knife. On nearly every such list is Jean Francois Millet’s The Angelus, a calm brown picture of a peasant and his wife standing at prayer in the middle of a field. An ably painted picture, it is deplored because of its ubiquity on art calendars, school rostrums, candy boxes.

When Engineer Pierre Guillard last week whipped out a jackknife in the Louvre and slashed The Angelus five times, stabbed it several times and scratched it in 20 places, he was overcome by a guard, jailed, judged insane. Experts began at once to repair the gashes and stabs. Except for a rent in the sky, all can be made invisible. The picture, though not inimitable, is irreplaceable, hence its value will not be affected by stabs and gashes.

Millet painted The Angelus in 1859 at Barbizon, France, which gave its name to the Barbizon school of French painting. Said he: “A peasant I am, a peasant I shall die.” He saw the humble Barbizon peasants pause in their work to pray at the sound of the Angelus bell. Back in his studio, he painted the picture from memory. He sold it for $120. A French department store tycoon named Chauchard paid $150,000 for it in 1910, bequeathed it to the Louvre.

Art hackers are a recurring phenomenon. Several years ago in the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam, Rembrandt’s Night Watch had a hole torn in it. Last year in the same museum a little Dutchman axed Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson (TIME, March 2, 1931). On March 10, 1914 May Richardson, famed suffraget, pulled a hatchet from her muff and slashed Velazquez’s Venus and Cupid in London’s National Gallery as a protest against the jailing of Emmeline Pankhurst. Until 1845 the beautiful Portland Vase in the British Museum was crackless. Then one William Lloyd suddenly dashed it from its pedestal, shattered it into pieces which were painstakingly fastened together again. In 1927 one George Latreille fell on LeNain’s Réunion de Famille in the Louvre with a razor.

No maniac, no art critic, was the Milwaukee thief who last week stole six paintings from the watchmanless Milwaukee Art Institute. He took Roy Brown’s October, Trepied France, Cullen Yates’s In the Delaware Valley, Peter Rotier’s Deep Pond and September, Agnes Leindorffs The Sketch Class and a marine by William Ritchell. A fortnight ago someone stole the Institute’s Study of a Nude by the late William Wallace Gilchrist Jr. The Institute’s secretary said that though it could not afford a night watchman, no one had ever taken anything before.