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Robert Arthur Cambridge had been to the National Gallery in London with his sawed-off shotgun once before. Not just there but the Tate Gallery, too. Both of those times he’d wandered around, looking at art, the gun hidden in a small flight bag he carried by its handles. On those days he’d kept his disquiet mind in check and had left the paintings untouched and had gone home — taking the Underground south to Wimbledon and his mother’s flat where he’d been living since his divorce four years before.

At 37, Cambridge’s life was a failure. He was unemployed, living in an apartment filled with ugly childhood memories: ceaseless battles between his domineering mother and a father he remembered as drunk and weak; cruel schoolmates; a fractured family life. He joined the army at 17 and left a year later, the same directionless, anti-social boy he’d always been. One clerical job followed another until the day he got drunk, smashed a window and was escorted from a job by police. The marriage should have stabilized him, he thought. She left after he tried to commit suicide, twice, and wouldn’t get psychiatric help. Now he was a drunk with a bad back who sometimes sold antiques in a street market, his dreams of an ideal family — peaceful and self-affirming — as empty as his future.

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, 1499-1500, Leonardo da Vinci, 141.5 x 104.6 cm, black chalk and touches of white chalk on brownish paper, mounted on canvas on tinted paper

And then, quite by accident, he found the family he’d been looking for. For three months, Cambridge had been wandering aimlessly through the city, getting on and off the Tube at random stops. One day he walked into Room 7 in the National Gallery and found himself face to face with Leonardo da Vinci’s tranquil, reverential cartoon known as the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. The four-foot, 6-inch tall charcoal sketch sits by itself, the only piece of artwork in the small room. The lights are dim; people speak in whispers. The face of Mary radiates serenity. Cambridge found himself seated in a chair, staring at the iconic, beatific mothers and their two boys, deeply moved by their beauty.

A week later, July 17, 1987, Cambridge arrives back the National Gallery. His plan is simple: wait until just before closing when the museum is beginning to empty, wait for a guard to give him the final warning to leave, wait for that guard to walk away, and then pull out the shotgun.

It’s late afternoon as he pushes through the front revolving doors of the museum. He wanders from room to room, a feeling of pressure building inside his head. He has a cup of tea in the cafeteria. The clock inches closer to 6 p.m: closing time. He walks up the stairs from the cafeteria to the main floor. More wandering; more art-filled walls. Raphael. Michelangelo. da Vinci. Titian. Finally, Room 7. He sits on a bench. Slowly, the room clears. 5:55 p.m. Right on schedule, here’s the guard with the final warning. The guard turns and leaves. Cambridge stands. And in the space of a few seconds, he takes the gun from the bag, holds it waist high and blasts, without aiming, a six-inch-wide crater in the glass over the Virgin Mary’s heart.

The roar of the gun blast fills the gallery and tendrils of smoke and the reek of gunpowder fill the air. Glass shatters and sprays on the ground. Dozens of guards pour into the room. They kick the gun away from the bench that Cambridge is sitting on and pepper him with questions. But Cambridge is silent. He sits with his chin resting in his hand. He’s aware of the melee of people and voices, but inside of him is an incredible feeling of relief. “Suddenly, it’s over,” he thinks to himself. “I will be arrested and taken to hospital.”

Cambridge spent four years in a maximum-security mental hospital undergoing intensive psychotherapy. The Independent in London profiled him the month before he got out and described a hyperactive man who spouted self-help platitudes — he repeatedly called it “a cry for help” — when asked why he’d attacked the painting. The story never mentions if his mother came to visit.

Sources:
The Associated Press, July 18, 1987, “Art Restorers Tend Blasted Leonardo Da Vinci Drawing”
United Press International, July 18, 1987, Ed Lion, “A man who pulled a sawed-off shotgun from his jacket and fired on a sketch by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci in Britain’s National Gallery may have irreparably damaged the 16th century masterpiece, an art expert said Saturday.”
The Associated Press, July 20, 1987, “Man Charged With Damaging Da Vinci Drawing Appears In Court”
The Times (London), January 15 1988, Lynda Murdin, “Restorer tackles microscopic jigsaw”
The Independent (London), November 17, 1991, Steve Boggan, “The invisible mending”
The Independent (London), August 6, 1998, Jason Bennetto, “Man squirts yellow paint on National Gallery Rembrandt”
Cabinet Magazine, Issue 3, Summer 2001, Steven Goss, “A Partial Guide to the Tools of Art Vandalism”
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/plan/floorplan.htm

When the Iraq War began, I was sitting in a small steakhouse in rural Central California and as the television screens lit up with grainy, phosphorescent splashes of color, the people around me began clapping. We all knew it was coming; the build up to the war had been years in the making. But I was the one stunned into silence, amazed by the satisfaction and appreciation on the faces of the people around me.

Near the Iraq/Syria border, 3/6/06. Photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon, U.S. Air Force.

The next day, the Department of Defense released its first press photo (stock photos shot by the DoD for media outlets) of the war — an image of Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference. Since then, the agency’s collection of media photos has grown into the hundreds. They’re fairly uniform: Soldiers run to helicopters that are blowing up walls of dust. Soldiers with guns search homes. They stand in streets having pleasant conversations with Iraqis and they peer around brick walls with their guns at the ready. There are never any dead bodies; the smiling Iraq children are always hugging smiling soldiers — the photos are propaganda at its most transparent and banal.

And the photos are, at times, beautiful. They were shot by people with an aesthetic eye for the moment, an eye for the dramatic and powerful. The truly artistic photos are rare — only a few each year. And they’re limited in their scope: dramatic composition and lighting is the best most photographers can pull off. But the images are striking and memorable all the same. Flipping through the last four years, I find myself pulled into the DoD’s narrative of the war.

Sather Air Base, Iraq, 3/12/08. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force.

Camp Ar Ramadi, Iraq, 9/3/06. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock, U.S. Air Force.

When I write that sentence I hear the echo of four-year-old applause in my words. I know the steak house diners were clapping for something different. Me appreciating a propaganda photo from the DoD is not the same as their Pavlovian response to foreigners dying along the axis of some fabricated argument for war. But it’s disingenuous to pretend the photos are independent from the government that created them. It’s like my relationship with the US Army, which I despise for its role in the war, and the individual soldier, whom I respect for her service. Each one is an intrinsic part of the other, just like a photo and the events it depicts.

To like the photos does not mean I have to be an apologist of the war. But to like them brings me into a closer relationship with the powers that created this war than I would ever want. And so I try and balance on that line. I see the art. I hear my own clapping. And I remain coldly aware of what birthed these beautiful images.

Fair al Jair, Iraq, 12/16/07. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Adrian Cadiz, U.S. Air Force.

Sonny Liston had 15-inch fists and a 7-foot reach. He was the son of an Arkansas sharecropper, a “labor enforcer” for the Italian Mafia, a world heavyweight champion who learned to box during a teenage prison stint for robbing a gas station. He was powerfully built, illiterate, sullen, violent and withdrawn — a man who did not engender support from the civil rights leaders of the 1960s.

Liston is best remembered for loosing two of boxing’s most controversial and most famous fights, one in 1964 and one in 1965, against a man with antithetical looks and personality, Muhammad Ali. You don’t know it, but that’s how you know Liston, too. The iconic image of Ali standing triumphant and raging over the sprawled figure of a boxer was from the second of those two fights. Ali’s muscles are taught and shiny; he looks impossibly powerful. Liston, his face obscured, looks not just defeated but destroyed.

That’s the famous photo. The one below was taken as Liston struggled to stand up moments later. He would fall down again, get up and then try to defend him self from a flurry of blows from Ali before the fight was called.

The match was fixed. Or at least that’s the predominate theory. He supposedly owed money to his underworld contacts. Or he threw it because he was scared of what the Nation of Islam, which was managing Ali, would do to him if he won. The punch that sent him to the floor was, from some angles, glancing at best. Four former heavyweight champions said he threw the fight. But Sports Illustrated did a frame-by-frame analysis and said he didn’t. Liston was not a subtle man. His acting skills — especially for a man who’d never been knocked down in a match before — weren’t that good. Either way, while he continued boxing over the next five years, Liston’s career was essentially over. He was found dead in his apartment in 1970 from what police described as a suspicious heroin overdose. Liston didn’t know the date of his birth; he was dead for long enough before being found that the exact date of his death is unknown, too.

In the footage of the pre-fight weigh-in for the 1964 fight, the locker room is a melee — a mass of people, helmeted police, cameramen and Ali, who formed his own whirlwind of taunts and verbal explosions. Liston looks at once both irritated and tired as he weakly tries to shout rejoinders at Ali over the crowd. Somehow, he looks sad.

But maybe that’s because I know what’s facing him. I watch him unsmilingly flash peace signs to the crowd as a doctor checks his lungs with a stethoscope and wonder what it must be like to fall to the ground like he’s about to do. What a deep ache there must be in your heart you try to get back up and your legs fail, and the lights overhead explode like stars, and you collapse with the roar of the crowd and the echoing taunts of a younger, better man ringing in your ears.