Taking scissors to a Van Gogh landscape, smearing paint over a Rembrandt, setting fire to a Leonardo drawing - even imagining such acts can make the stomach clench. We'll never own these masterpieces, cannot touch them, may never see them up close. Yet their destruction prompts outrage.
Galleries generally prefer not to discuss attacks on artworks for fear of provoking more of them. Besides, what is there to gain by dwelling on vandalism? Surely, these crimes are the antithesis of art - the culprits must be brutish or deranged.
But an exhibition at Tate Britain makes a forceful counterclaim: that certain assaults contain meaning and even insights into history and art. To advance that argument, "Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm", which runs through January 5, presents butchered paintings, decapitated sculptures and other damaged works in a survey of centuries of art vandalism.
Tate Britain's director, Penelope Curtis, says the show has already stirred more anxiety in the art world than she had expected. "The whole show is a concern." But Curtis says there is value in pondering the meaning of iconoclasm. "I suppose I'm interested in using galleries to think about difficult questions."
Unfortunately, Curtis notes, the issue has become "rather horribly topical" recently. Several attacks have taken place in Britain over the past year. But the Tate's curators persisted in their scholarly labours, surveying 500 years of assaults on British art and coming up with three chief motives: religion, politics and aesthetics. (They ignored "unthinking attacks", such as those by the mentally ill, or the destruction of a work to conceal an art theft from the authorities.)
One challenge for the show is relying on works that have, by definition, been ruined. Tabitha Barber, a co-curator, cites two stone fragments from Nelson's Pillar, a monument to the British naval hero that was blown up in Dublin by an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army in 1966. "You could walk past those pieces of stone and think they were just pieces of stone," she says. "But we've brought them into an exhibition … We're saying, actually these fragments have power."
The power of iconoclasm is especially resonant in Britain, where historical collections were drastically reduced by destruction. The Tate collection, for example, contains nothing dated earlier than 1545, largely because of the razing of religious art after Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church.