Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid
Last week, an Italian tourist at Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia damaged an artwork when she tripped while attempting to take a selfie with it. According to the Spanish newspaper ABC, the tourist who fell on Alberto Sánchez's ballet set for La romera de los cornudos (The Pilgrimage of Cuckolds) in 1933 tore it in one part. As she fell, she grabbed the piece and ripped a section of its wallpaper. The Pilgrimage of Cuckolds began as a set for Federico Garca Lorca and Cipriano Rivas Cherif's one-act ballet of the same name. Its protagonist is a man who attempts to seduce a married woman who is on a religious pilgrimage with her husband in order to become pregnant.
The Sánchez is now located in a room near Pablo Picasso's 1937 painting Guernica, which is one of the Reina Sofia's most well-known attractions, as part of a recent collection rehang of the museum's permanent collection. According to El Pais, the museum stated that the damage was minor. "It was an accident, fortunately with few consequences," said a spokesperson. The damage to the work "was minor and unintentional."
This is not the first time that a work of art has been harmed as a result of a selfie. A visitor to the Museo Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy, for example, damaged a plaster model of a 19th-century sculpture in 2020, breaking off two of its toes. In a similar vein, in 2017, a visitor to a Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. smashed a pumpkin sculpture while taking a selfie, causing "minor damage" to the work, according to the museum.
Jean Dubreil