Art destruction

Natural destruction

• The Great Sphinx of Giza is slowly eroding. Most experts believe it is a natural process, but some believe acid rain is accelerating the process.
• It is estimated that tens of thousands of works of Japanese art dating as far back as the 13th century were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and the ensuing firestorm that destroyed much of central Tokyo.
• 1,400 artworks were damaged beyond repair in the November 4, 1966 floods that devastated Florence, Italy, including Cimabue's The Crucifixion.
• Ribeira Palace destroyed during 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Inside, the 70,000-volume royal library as well as hundreds of works of art, including paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Correggio, were lost. The royal archives disappeared together with detailed historical records of explorations by Vasco da Gama and other early navigators.
• Royal Alcazar of Madrid was destroyed by fire on the Christmas Eve of 1734 with its gallery

  Accidental destruction

• On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed near Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, killing 229 people. Pablo Picasso's 1963 work Le Peintre had been loaded on the flight as cargo and was also destroyed.
• In May 2004 a fire destroyed the Momart warehouse in east London. More than 50 works by abstract painter Patrick Heron and works by other artists were lost.

  Intentional destruction

Of artwork designed to be destroyed

• Street painting
• Sand mandala
• Ice sculpture
• Sand castles
• Food art or Edible art

• The week-long Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada, which began in 1986 with tens of thousands of participants who must pay a fee to attend, an entire city of art and self-expression is created. The focal point of the festival is a temple designed and built by artists. On the last day of the festival there is a ceremony known as a Temple Burn where the temple goes up in flames.
• The Semana Santa festival in Antigua, Guatemala, where designs made out of flowers and colored sawdust are created in the street prior to being trampled by a religious parade.
• The burning of Zozobra during Fiestas de Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, usually during the second week of September.
• The burning of falles in Valencia, Spain.

  Of artwork not designed to be destroyed

• Iconoclasm is the general destruction of a type of work of art for religious or ideological reasons. Most publicly visible classical art showing religious subjects was destroyed or disfigured by Christians, mostly after theirs had become the state religion. The same process was inflicted on classical and pagan art after the Muslim conquests, a process which continued for centuries, especially in India.
• The Byzantine iconoclasm was an internal process within the Greek Orthodox Church, led by changes of Byzantine Emperor, which was reversed after nearly a century.
• In the Protestant Reformation, a great deal of Medieval and Renaissance religious art was destroyed in Protestant areas, mostly in orderly official removals, but sometimes in riotous attacks, of which the most notable was the Beeldenstorm which swept the Low Countries in the summer of 1566 kicking off the Dutch Revolt.
• The French Revolution ushered in a period of widespread art destruction, motivated by anti religious and anti royalist ideology, both in France itself and other countries conquered in the French Revolutionary Wars. Similar destruction occurred for similar ideological motives following other revolutions such as the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the wars that sometimes followed them.
• In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi Germany destroyed works of art they labeled "degenerate art". These were often non-realistic forms of art such as cubism and surrealism. Art created by Jewish artists was also destroyed.
• Tens of thousands of works of art were destroyed in military actions in World War II. One of the best-known examples in Europe is Courbet's The Stone Breakers, which was destroyed in Dresden in 1945 during the Allied bombings. The original of Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, a work with an iconic status in the US, was destroyed in a British bombing of Bremen. Other works of art were destroyed in the Blitz, in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and throughout Southeast Asia.
• Artworks destroyed in the September 11 attacks in the United States included a painted wood relief by Louise Nevelson, a painting from Roy Lichtenstein's Entablature series and a Joan Miró tapestry. The total value of artwork lost in the September 11 attacks is said to have been in excess of $100 million
• Corridart was a six-kilometer exhibit of artworks in Montreal, intended to be part of the arts and cultural component of the 1976 Summer Olympics. Mayor Jean Drapeau, who deemed the artworks ugly, had them torn down two days before the Olympic games began.
• In 1956, a vandal threw acid at the Louvre museum's Mona Lisa, damaging it.
• In 2017, a terror suspect attacked guards of the Louvre with machetes and was found carrying "bombs of aerosol paint" intended to "disfigure the masterpieces of the museum."