At the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Gerard Jan van Bladeren attacked Barnett Newman's monumental abstraction Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III with a utility knife. The March 21 vandalism became one of the most notorious modern-art attacks of the late twentieth century because the damaged work was not a portable old master but a canonical postwar color-field painting held by a major public museum. The incident also turned conservation into public controversy: Newman's vast fields of saturated color made restoration choices unusually visible, and debate over the repair became part of the painting's later reception. The same vandal later attacked Newman's Cathedra in 1997, linking both episodes in museum-security and conservation histories.
The attack made the repaired surface, not only Newman's original image, part of the painting's art-historical record.
