An act of vandalism

Spatial Concept Expectations (c.1959) - Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968)

In 1958 a hippy art student, John Smith, went on trial at the Old Bailey charged with criminal damage to a work of art.

The prosecution's case was that the defendant did wilfully take a knife and slash his client's painting, an act of vandalism damaging the work beyond repair.

The defence argued that far from damaging an existing artwork, his client had created a radically original work by introducing spatial voids to an otherwise flat monochrome canvas. Creation, not destruction, was his client's motive.

This rationale had been hastily concocted by John as he sat on an uncomfortably hard bench shivering in a cold, dimly lit police cell, regretting his impetuous act of vandalism against an innocently bland abstract painting. But as the trial progressed he began to ponder the truth of this defence; he became convinced that he had introduced a revolutionary artistic concept that broke with the constraints and tradition of the past whilst heralding a liberating approach for the future.

The defence's argument failed to impress a jury unsympathetic to developments in modern art and to bohemian students; he was handed down two years at her Majesty's pleasure.'

Upon his release in 1960, John enthusiastically set to work splashing paint and slashing canvas to produce a body of work he was convinced would take the art world by storm.

Unfortunately, fate had also wielded a knife. The abstract painting John had originally slashed belonged to painter Lucio Fontana. The rest is history.