Wlodzimierz Umaniec, a 26-year-old a Polish man also known as Vladimir Umanets, will appear at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court in south London tomorrow charged with one count of Criminal Damage in excess of £5,000.
The move cams as the defacing was described as “a stupid act of vandalism” rather than art, by Anish Kapoor, the artist.
Kapoor branded the act “idiotic” and dismissed claims by Umanets that his scrawls were symbolic.
“What a sadness,” he said.
“The tragedy of it is self-evident — it is just idiotic.”
Kapoor described the Black on Maroon masterpiece, which is one of Rothko’s Seagram murals, as “extraordinary” and said the series of paintings had been hugely influential on his own work.
Umanets has compared himself to Marcel Duchamp, the French conceptual artist who once signed a urinal and put it on display.
But Kapoor told the Evening Standard newspaper: “There is a big difference between being a radical and being vandal and acts of vandalism are simply that … there is no symbolic value in it at all.”
Umanets is suspected of daubing black writing on the 1958 painting in the Tate Modern,
in order to garner publicity for a movement developed alongside fellow artist Marcin Lodyga called Yellowism, which is described as “neither art nor anti-art”.