50 years ago, Gerhard Richter painted three large-format pictures for the lobby of the BMW headquarters in Munich. Now they have been restored and put into climate boxes. Why this makes sense, but also a loss.
Now the three Richters at BMW have also suffered this fate: the fate that works of art will be banished behind glass throughout history. The most famous representative of this shared destiny is the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris. After two attacks in the 1950s – first with acid, and a little later someone threw a stone at her – the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci was finally secured with a cover made of bulletproof glass. Additional spacers now ensure that the approximately 2.8 million visitors who push past it every year do just that: keep their distance even further.