Child Damages $57 Million Rothko at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
151April 30, 2025
A child damaged aMark Rothkopainting estimated to be worth $57 million at theMuseum Boijmans Van Beuningenin Rotterdam, Netherlands, last week during what a museum spokesperson told Dutch news outlet Algemeen Dagblad was an “unguarded moment.” The canvas,Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8,1960, which is about seven and a half feet high and eight and a half feet wide, sustained scratches in the unvarnished paint layer of its lower region. It had been on view in an exhibition of collection highlights at the Depot, a publicly accessible storage facility adjoining the main museum, which is closed through at least 2030 for renovations.
“Conservationexpertise has been sought in the Netherlands and abroad,” said the museum in a statement. “We are currently researching the next steps for the treatment of the painting. We expect that the work will be able to be shown again in the future.”
Sophie McAloone, conservation manager at the U.K.’s Fine Art Restoration Company, told the BBC that unvarnished modern paintings like the injured Rothko are “particularly susceptible to damage . . . owing to a combination of their complex modern materials, lack of a traditional coating layer, and intensity of flat color fields, which make even the smallest areas of damage instantly perceptible. In this case,” she continued, “scratching of the upper paint layers can have a significant impact on the viewing experience of the piece.”
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has not publicly revealed whether it will bill the child’s family for the damage. The institution in 2011 asked a visitor who accidentally set foot in Wim T. Schippers’s 1962 work Pindakaasvloer (Peanut-Butter Platform), which consisted of the titular substance spread thickly upon the museum’s floor, to pay for repairs to the work.