She kissed a $70 million painting: inside the Cy Twombly lipstick trial

In 2007, at an exhibition in France, a woman named Rindy Sam walked up to one of Cy Twombly’s all-white canvases and kissed it, leaving a smear of red lipstick. She was arrested and tried in court for “voluntary degradation of a work of art.”

Her defence at trial was simple: “I just gave it a kiss. It’s a gesture of love.” The argument did not persuade the court, and she was fined and ordered to pay restoration costs.

Twombly’s paintings, known for loops, scratches and half-formed letters resembling an unerased chalkboard, have drawn comparisons to children’s scribbles for decades. When the Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1994, the curator wrote an essay specifically defending him from that accusation, titled “Your Kid Could Not Do This.” Twombly himself addressed the comparison directly: “My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake.”

His canvases often referenced classical literature and myth; one series of drawings consists solely of the word “Virgil,” written over and over. His painting Untitled (New York City), made with wax crayon and house paint, sold for $70.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2015. Only approximately 650 Twomblys exist in total, and the work had previously been owned by two of art history’s most trusted collectors, Leo Castelli and Charles Saatchi.

The lipstick case remains one of the clearest instances of a court formally distinguishing between marks on a canvas that qualify as art and those that qualify as criminal damage.