Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

This guide to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam centers on Gerard Jan van Bladeren, a Dutch painter who in 1986 walked into the museum with a box cutter and slashed Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, then went to prison for it. It follows the museum's own misstep afterward, when a hired restorer rolled acrylic paint over Newman's original surface, a decision critics called a second act of vandalism. Years later, in 1997, van Bladeren picked up the phone and called the Stedelijk to say he was coming back.