MIRO ON LOAN DAMAGED AT TATE MODERN

Miró on loan damaged at Tate Modern

Cost of repairs and depreciation was £203,000

By Martin Bailey. Museums, Issue 242, January 2012

Published online: 08 January 2013

An important painting by Miró was damaged in 2011 while on loan to Tate Modern, in an incident that went unreported in the media. The work was on loan from the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the cost of repairs and depreciation was £203,000, which is revealed in figures obtained by The Art Newspaper on government indemnity.

According to a visitor to the Miró retrospective, a man leant against the picture with both hands. A spokeswoman for the Tate says that the gallery believes it was an accident. None of the gallery’s staff witnessed the incident. 

Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse I, 1968 (above), is part of a room-sized triptych, and the left-side picture is 3.5m long. The incident occurred on 7 July 2011 and the painting went back on display eight days later, after conservation work was completed by the Tate with advice from the Miró foundation. The conservation work would have cost a few thousand pounds, so the £203,000 indemnity payment by the UK government was mainly compensation for depreciation in its value. As its title suggests, the acrylic on canvas is largely white, with a wiggling black line. Although conservation masks the damage, the repair is still just barely visible.

After London, the Miró retrospective travelled to Barcelona. It closed in August 2012 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where the damaged painting was not shown.

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