ROYAL FLUSH

The fall of red.

- JACKSON ARN

Johannes Vermeer's "Girl with the Red Hat" (c. 1669).

The first time he tried to kill red, he brought a box cutter. The wounds were almost fifty feet long combined— clearly, he didn't want to leave anything to chance. Not that the failed painter Gerard Jan van Bladeren had much of a plan when he visited Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum in the spring of 1986, but later, when asked why he'd done it, he was emphatic about hating abstract art. He seems to have hated it for the same reasons that lots of people do: it was lazy, childish, ugly, offensively simple, meant nothing beyond what it literally was. Which, given that the canvas he chose-Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III" is literally a hundred and forty square e feet of red oil paint, flanked by two thin stripes, would mean that it was red, pure red, he was slashing.

The trial was national news. Van Bladeren's lawyer, a pioneer of the "relax, it was just performance art" defense, insisted that the attack had been a creative act which the painting itself had provoked. Red, in other words, was asking for it. Van Bladeren was sentenced to five months in jail plus parole-not bad for attempted murder-and the world soon moved on to a million other things.