The Ministry of Culture appealed to the Prosecutor General’s Office because of the peephole drawn at the exhibition in the Yeltsin Center to the painting by Malevich’s student

The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation sent a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office after damage to the painting “Three Figures” by Kazimir Malevich’s student Anna Leporskaya from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. The picture was spoiled at an exhibition in the Yekaterinburg Foundation “Presidential Center of B.N. Yeltsin.”

According to Interfax, the Ministry of Culture explained that they had applied to the Prosecutor General’s Office to cancel the decision to refuse to initiate a criminal case on the damage to the painting. The Department of Museums and Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Culture is waiting for the decision of the supervisory authority.

Recall that earlier in the media there was information that Leporskaya’s painting “Three Figures” (1932-1934) from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, sent to the exhibition “The World as Non-Objectivity. The Birth of a New Art” in Yekaterinburg’s “Yeltsin Center”, suffered at the hands of a vandal. An unknown person drew small eyes with a ballpoint pen on the abstract faces of two figures in the picture.

According to The Art Newspaper, the ink penetrated the paint layer because the titanium white used to paint the faces was not covered with author’s varnish. The directorate of the Yeltsin Center, according to the publication, turned to the police with a statement about this on December 20. The Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for the city conducted an inspection, as a result of which, on December 20, it decided to refuse to initiate a criminal case.