In April, a couple of Tourists visiting Palazzo Maffei in Verona, Italy, destroyed an art piece by attempting to sit on it to take a picture. The Art installation valued at $50K, known as the ‘Van Gogh’ Chair, was built by the Italian artist Nicola Bolla and is bejewelled with thousands of shimmering Swarovski crystals made from polished, machine-cut glass. It is named after Vincent van Gogh and is a tribute to the Dutch artist’s painting of a simple chair.
Image Courtesy: National Gallery, UK
the Surveillance footage shared on social media on June 12 by the museum captured the moment when the man, accompanied by a woman, decided to sit fully on the ornamental chair rather than mimic the pose by hovering above it like his companion.
Image Courtesy: Palazzo Maffei Museum (Instagram)
The museum condemned the act, highlighting the pair’s deliberate avoidance of staff
“Sometimes we lose our brains to take a picture, and we don’t think about the consequences,” says museum director Vanessa Carlon.”Of course, it was an accident, but these two people left without speaking to us – that isn’t an accident,” she adds. “This is a nightmare for any museum”. Carlotta Menegazzo, an art historian based at the Palazzo Maffei, says that – while it looks sturdy – its frame is mostly hollow and kept together with foil.
The chair, since then, has been restored to its original condition. Two legs and the main seat were broken, but Ms Menegazzo says “a great job” has been done to restore the piece, and it is now back in place.
Van Gogh Chair: Image Courtesy: Palazzo Maffei Museum
Ms Carlon says the majority of visitors are considerate, and she hopes this release of CCTV footage won’t become a “negative episode”. Instead, she wants to highlight that “anyone should enter art places, or museums or churches, wherever art is displayed, in a more respectful way. “Art must be respected and loved because it is very fragile,” she adds.
Who is Nicola Bolla?
Nicola Bolla (Saluzzo – Cuneo, 1963) lives and works in Torino. His sculptures and settings employ the studied use of the Swarovski crystals studded on the subjects of the artist’s collection. Skulls, mythological animals, urinals, loops or chains, different objects both for dimension and for icon meaning, where visual and thematic oxymorons coexist: dark and light, shape and contents, opulence and poverty.
Bolla employs the use of Swarovski crystal in a more conceptual way, which is not a status symbol. It is seen more as a means of representing the illusion of value, the ambiguity between appearance and substance. Swarovski is ground glass, imitating diamond without possessing its properties. It is reflected light, therefore ephemeral, unstable, and never fully graspable. Its choice marks a turning point in the artist’s poetics: it has since become a recurring material in installations, sculptures, and objects. It is the perfect tool to embody the memento mori, the contemporary vanitas( Vanitas became a popular genre of Dutch master paintings in the seventeenth century that utilizes the still-life form to evoke the fleeting quality of life and the vanity of living): brilliant, seductive, but at the same time empty, like the promise of luxury that, in truth, is never authentic. Moreover, crystal brings with it an ambiguous physicality: it appears solid but crumbles easily, it imposes itself on the eye but has no weight.
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