The British sculptor Anish Kapoor had begun to transform his vandalised sculpture, Dirty Corner, at France’s Palace of Versailles as we went to press, masking a series of anti-Semitic slogans with gold to make the graffiti illegible.
Phrases were daubed on the 60m-long work and surrounding rocks in early September. The work is due to remain on show until 1 November. Following the defacement, the artist said that he aimed to “preserve these scars as a memory of this painful history”.
Kapoor’s reworking is the latest twist in a long-running saga. On 18 September, officials from the château said that “[the sculpture] will be subject in the coming days to an intervention to hide the damage, under the artist’s supervision”.
A court in Versailles then ruled that the anti-Semitic graffiti had to be removed immediately, after Fabien Bouglé, a local right-wing politician, filed a complaint against Catherine Pégard, the president of Versailles. Bouglé took legal action against the château for “inciting racial hatred, public insults and complicity in these crimes [for leaving the graffiti in place]”.
“From my perspective, [the court decision] is a triumph for the racists. The right thing is to carry on,” Kapoor tells us. The artist says that President François Hollande, who invited the artist to the Elysée Palace, backs his decision to leave the “marks of hatred” on view.
The work has been attacked three times. It was first damaged in June, when vandals splashed it with yellow paint. A few days after the second attack, the work was again defaced when the phrase “Respect Art as U Trust God” was painted in pink on the 10m-high sculpture.
