A clumsy art lover ripped a six inch gash in an £80m Picasso painting when she accidentally fell against it.

The woman was visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York when she “lost her balance”.

The painting, called The Actor, depicts a gaunt male figure in a pink costume on stage and was completed in 1905.

It marks Picasso's shift from his Blue Period, of images of tattered beggars and blind musicians, to his Rose Period of paintings of costumed acrobats.

The woman was uninjured, said museum spokesman Alyse Topalian, but the painting received a vertical tear in the lower right hand corner.

It has been removed from the gallery and taken to the museum's conservation studio for "assessment and treatment", the statement added.


So have you ever destroyed something entirely by accident something important but it couldn’t be fixed? Or What was the most expensive thing you've ever broken? I did manage to break a new pair of glasses my little brother had just got and I was messing and tried them on ended dropping them broke the lense and they were about 2 hours old. Suffice to say my parents weren’t exactly happy!!! You????