Museum security guard doodles eyes on pricey Russian painting

The museum curator said she believes the security guard had a "lapse in sanity" when he decided to draw on the painting.

A security guard who doodled on an expensive Russian painting while on shift is facing charges for his lapse in judgment.

The security guard, who was working his first day on the job at a Russian museum, drew two small eyes on the abstract faces of two people that appear in Anna Leporskaya’s Soviet-era painting “Three Figures.”

Anna Reshetkina, the curator of the exhibition at the Yelstin Center in Yekaterinburg, said administrators were baffled by the security guard’s decision to add eyes “with a Yeltsin Center-branded pen.”

“His motives are still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity,” Reshetkina said in a statement.

There is no official value associated with the piece, but it has been insured for $1 million.

Yeltsin Center’s executive director Alexander Drozdov said the security guard was employed by a private security organization.

Thankfully, the vandal didn’t use too much pressure on the canvas and the damage doesn’t go too deep, reported The Art Newspaper Russia, which first broke the story.

However, the paint layer on the left-hand face in the painting had crumbled slightly.