A Polish man who scrawled his signature on a Mark Rothko painting worth millions of pounds was jailed for two years by a British court.
Wlodzimierz Umaniec - known also as Vladimir Umanets - stepped over a wire in front of Rothko's "Black on Maroon" in London's Tate Modern gallery in October and wrote "Vladimir Umanets '12 A potential piece of yellowism" on the canvas.
Umaniec, 26, who has lived in Britain for three years and promotes an artistic movement called yellowism, had pleaded guilty to a charge of criminal damage.
There is a "need to deter others from doing as you have done," Judge Roger Chapple told Umaniec, as he sat looking serious and nervous with a translator in the dock at the Inner London Crown Court.
"Your actions were clearly deliberate, planned and intentional. While you may not have immediately decided which bit of art to vandalise, your intention was to cause damage to a work of art."
It was not entirely clear why Umaniec, described as "plainly an intelligent man" by the judge, defaced the painting Rothko donated to the museum in the 1960s.
But speaking to Reuters shortly before his arrest, he said: "...it was an artistic statement, but it was more about...
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