Alberti’s Window

I first came across the book Lost Masterpieces by Michael Collins at the library earlier this year, and I liked it so much that I bought a copy as a birthday present to myself. It is a small little green book and it is divided into four sections, focusing on art that has been either lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed. Some of my favorite topics, all in a portable volume! The entries aren’t long – only a page or two – but it is just enough of information to get me to think about a work of art or two for a few minutes during my busy day. And I’ve been surprised at the new things I’ve learned about works of art that already were familiar to me.

Tracey Emin, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995,” 1995.

One thing that I was surprised to learn is that Tracey Emin’s famous tent installation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a 2004 fire at a London warehouse that was leased by Momart, a company which specializes in fine art storage.¹ At the time, the installation was being stored by its owner, the gallery dealer and collector Charles Saatchi. Many other artists lost their own works of art in the fire, including Damien Hirst and Chris Ofili. The value of the art that was destroyed in the fire is estimated to range from £30-50 million pounds. Many artists, auction houses, galleries and collectors sued Momart for negligence, and Momart counter-argued that those using their facilities should have had their own insurance.

The loss of Tracey Emin’s tent is an interesting one, since the tent was a time capsule of a specific period of time in Emin’s life. The tent is appliquéd with the names of 102 people that Emin had slept with over the course of two decades. And it should be noted that the title “slept with” is not always a euphemism for sex, but can literally just mean sleep: Emin includes the names of people like her grandma, explaining “I used to lay in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod off to sleep. You don’t do that with someone you don’t love and don’t care about.”²

The impactful installation, which was intended to cause people who entered the tent think about their own lives, partners, and who they had “slept with,” as well as broader topics found in her work that include abuse, rape, sexual violence and poverty.³ The collector and dealer Charles Saatchi bought Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 for £40,000, although he had to buy it from a secondary private dealer because Emin refused to sell it to Saatchi due to his advertising work for Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps Emin, who had originally sold the installation for only £12,000, felt like the fire was a form of karma? After the fire, Emin said that she wouldn’t recreate the installation, explaining that “I couldn’t remake that time in my life any more than I could remake the piece.”⁴ She further argued that the fire was not a total loss: “No one died and ideas continue.”⁵ The tent may have gone to rest in a metaphorical sense, but Emin’s ideas will not be going to sleep anytime soon.

1) Michael Collins, Lost Masterpieces (DK Publishing: New York, 2002), 179.

2) Barry Didcock, “The E spot,” The Sunday Herald, 30 April 2006.

3) Simon Hattenstone, “The radical, ravishing rebirth of Tracey Emin: ‘I didn’t want to die as some mediocre YBA,’” The Guardian, 29 May 2024

4) Collins, 180.

5) Ibid., 181.

Paul Delaroche, “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,” 1834. Oil on canvas, 246 cm × 297 cm (97 in × 117 in). National Gallery, London. Image courtesy Wikipedia

Yesterday I was watching an episode of “Fake or Fortune” that discusses a flood of the Thames River in January of 1928 (see 31:05 in the video episode linked above). The flood filled the lower galleries of the Tate up to eight feet of water and many paintings were damaged. One of these paintings was The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (shown above) which did sustain some damage and tears, but clearly was not destroyed. Instead, the painting rolled up and was forgotten until 1973, when a researcher at the Tate discovered it was rolled up in another painting that was presumed lost in the aftermath of the flood: John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. I think there is an element of irony that a painting about the eruption of Pompeii was nearly destroyed in another force of nature, albeit rising water instead of falling volcanic ash.

Although eighteen paintings were listed as damaged beyond repair, these two paintings by Delaroche and Martin turned up decades later. The “Fake or Fortune” episode considers the possibility of finding another one that may have been lost in the aftermath of the flood (a painting by Edward Landseer), although I won’t divulge a spoiler here! Luckily, many other works of art escaped damage or experienced minimal damage, including the new murals by Rex Whistler which had been completed for the Tate restaurant only the year before in 1927.

The Tate has a list of the paintings partially damaged and damaged in the flood (as well as some photographs of the event), It looks like at least one painting, Frederick Lord Leighton’s Helios and Rhodes  (see below) has been kept in the collection but is unable to be restored.

Lord Frederic Leighton, “Helios and Rhodes,” 1830-1896. Oil on canvas, support 165.8 × 109.9 cm. Tate. Creative Commons License

This flood has had an impact on contemporary art, too. Artist Julia Fullerton-Batten used photography and digital tools to create a scene of workers carrying a painting out of a flooded gallery within the Tate. More information about this image and the step-by-step process used by Recom Farmhouse to help Fullerton-Batten create the scene, “Tate Britain Flood,” is found here.

This flood of the Thames in 1928 reminds me of the flood of Florence in 1966, which also created considerable damage to art. Do you know of other works of art that have been damaged or destroyed due to floods?

Marcel Duchamp, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),” 1915-1923. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, 9 feet 1 1/4 inches × 70 inches × 3 3/8 inches (277.5 × 177.8 × 8.6 cm)

Last week, some of my students and I were discussing Duchamp’s readymades. One student mentioned something to the effect of, “Well, I wouldn’t be able to just march up to a museum and hand them a broken window and expect them to accept it as a work of art.” I chuckled a bit at that comment, since Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also called The Large Glass) is made of large panes of cracked glass. The glass wasn’t broken initially, but it cracked in transit accidentally after an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926-27.

Luckily for Duchamp, he found that the broken glass helped to complete the work of art. Previously, he had declared that the art was “definitively unfinished,” but then later determined the work of art to be complete after he pieced the glass panes back together. The cracks remind me of the delicacy of a bride’s veil. You can read more about the different forms in this object both here and here.

It is interesting to me how this accidental damage was used to help complete the work of art, and even become a feature that is celebrated as part of the aesthetic. This is different than the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana, since those slashes were intentionally made by the artist as part of the original conception of the object.

In contrast to this accidental damage, I have blogged previously about art that is damaged intentionally, often as a result of attack. In addition, there are countless examples of works of art that have been damaged by accident, too, such as the boy who tripped in a museum in 2015, the Cairo Museum workers who accidentally knocked off King Tut’s beard (and then infarmously tried to glue it back on), and the $40 million painting by Picasso that Steve Wynn accidentally punctured with his elbow. In these instances, however, the works of art are restored to give a semblance of their original appearance; the damage isn’t celebrated from an aesthetic standpoint.

Duchamp’s cracked The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even reminds me of “biography” of a work of art – the concept that objects have lives of their own. The broken glass is a reminder of the fateful trip that the object took after the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum – and it was the only time this work of art was displayed in a temporary exhibition! Interestingly, though, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which permanently houses The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, is interested in keeping the work of art in a more timeless and historicized space. The museum website proudly declares that the object is exhibited in the same space that Duchamp chose for it over half a century ago, when The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was acquired by the museum in 1953. In a way, perhaps this static display counteracts the sense of a living “biography” that is suggested by the object itself.

Do you know of other works of art that were accidentally damaged, and then this damage was incorporated into the finished work of art? Of course, I’m thinking of situations that are more extreme than the “happy little accidents” that Bob Ross talks about in his painting show. If you know of anything, please share!