When a museumgoer vomited on a Mondrian masterwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last month, museum officials called it "an unfortunate incident" and said the young man involved had apparently not done anything deliberate to harm the painting.
But now the man, a 22-year-old Toronto art student, has acknowledged that he intentionally defaced the painting, "Composition in Red, White and Blue," in what he contended was an artistic statement about "oppressively trite and painfully banal" art.
In a telephone interview today from the computer lab at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where he is a student, the man, Jubal Brown, said he also vomited - this time in deep red - on a work by the French impressionist Raoul Dufy at the Art Gallery of Ontario on May 15.
"My piece was intended to be a trilogy, with one performance for each of the primary colors," he said.
But he said he was now uncertain whether he would follow through on the third step, in yellow. Mr. Brown, who has a bowl hair cut, shaved eyebrows and a lip ring, has in the past vandalized advertising on many bus stops, painting in darkened eyes and bowl cuts so that the figures look like him.
A gallery is exhibiting his works. -He traveled to New York for a few days in November planning to select a painting at the Modern to be the second part of his project.
"I don't hate Mondrian," he said. "I picked him because he's such a pristine symbol of Modernism". He said he had arranged to have a photograph taken of himself, "just a few inches away" from the Mondrian painting and still hopes to sell the photo to a newspaper.

Source: The New York Times, Dec, 1996