VERSAILLES, France (AP) – A sculpture by Anish Kapoor in the Versailles Palace gardens is being covered with gold leaf to mask anti-Semitic graffiti that caused an outcry in a country still reeling from January’s terror attack on a Jewish supermarket.
The controversial red trumpet-shaped work by the British-Indian Jewish sculptor was dubbed the “Queen’s Vagina” by media and has been vandalized three times since its installation in June in the conservative town of Versailles.
A Versailles tribunal ruled over the weekend that the graffiti should be removed but Kapoor chose instead to gild it into obscurity – what the 61-year-old described to the Figaro newspaper as his “royal response” to the vandalism.
Workers are installing an alarm system in the famed 17th -century gardens – designed by Andre Le Notre, principal gardener to King Louis XIV – to prevent further breaches of security on the sculpture.