The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

LONDON—British authorities are searching for a man who took responsibility for defacing a valuable Mark Rothko canvas with black paint at the Tate Modern museum on Sunday afternoon.

The man walked up to one of Rothko's murals—an untitled 1958 painting often referred to as "Black on Maroon"—and tagged it with the words: "Vladimir Umanets '12, a potential piece of yellowism." The vandal then quickly left the building.

The incident was witnessed by Tim Wright, a 23-year-old marketing executive from Bristol, England, who said he "turned around and heard this scratching sound," only to see a young man finishing his letters on the Rothko painting.

"It was all very surreal," Mr. Wright said. "One minute he was sat down, and the next he had climbed over a little barrier and was knelt down doing his tag." Mr. Wright snapped a picture of the defaced painting—marked with the black letters in the bottom corner— and uploaded it to Twitter.

Vladimir Umanets, an artist working in London who has published a "Manifesto of Yellowism," claimed in several British media outlets on Monday, including ITV and the Guardian and Evening Standard newspapers, that he had defaced the painting, describing his act as art. Mr. Umanets told the Guardian that the incident would increase the value of the Rothko canvas.

"I don't want to spend a few months, even a few weeks, in jail." Mr. Umanets told ITV News. "But I do strongly believe in what I am doing, I have dedicated my life to this."

Mr. Umanets declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said authorities are looking for a suspect described as a white man in his 20s and have taken note of reports in the British media naming the alleged suspect.

Rothko, a Russian-American painter known for his abstract color fields, painted the murals in the late 1950s for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building. The artist's decision to accept the commission was subversive, according to a Harper's Magazine piece by the late editor John Fischer, who famously recounted Rothko's hope that the art would "ruin the appetite of every son of a b— who ever eats in that room."

The paintings were never exhibited in the New York restaurant because Rothko decided to keep them. He gave a set of the now-famous murals to the Tate in 1969, just before he committed suicide.

The murals are an important part of Rothko's oeuvre because they mark the first time he created multiple paintings designed to surround the viewer, according to David Anfam, a Rothko expert and commissioning editor of fine art at British publisher Phaidon. Mr. Anfam says he thinks conservators will be able to repair the Tate's damaged canvas, which he says is likely worth tens of millions of dollars. In May, Rothko's 1961 painting "Orange Red Yellow" was sold at Christie's in New York for $86.9 million, becoming the most expensive Rothko work ever sold.

The Tate declined to comment on potential restoration.

"With the Seagram Murals, this was Rothko's first and seminal bid to create an entire environment—which is absolutely key—rather than just isolated individual works on canvas," Mr. Anfam said.

The incident Sunday served as a reminder of how vulnerable prized paintings can be when on display in high-traffic museums.

At the Tate on Sunday, two staffers who had been manning the room ran to summon security, but the vandal had left by time the guards arrived, Mr. Wright said. He said the museum soon evacuated the entire building, located across the Thames River from St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Tate confirmed in a statement that a visitor defaced one of Rothko's Seagram murals "by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting." The museum declined to comment further.

Rothko's children, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, also issued a statement, saying: "The Rothko family is greatly troubled by yesterday's occurrence but has full confidence that the Tate Gallery will do all in its power to remedy the situation."

The Rothko mural isn't the first work of art to be attacked in the name of art. In 2000, also at the Tate Modern, two performance artists urinated on Marcel Duchamp's sculpture "Fountain," itself a urinal. Four years earlier, Canadian artist Jubal Brown ate blue foods and purposefully vomited on a Piet Mondrian painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A few months before, he had vomited in red hues on a different painting in Toronto.

-By Paul Sonne

The National YoungArts Foundation has purchased the famous Bacardi complex in Miami, with plans to create — with Frank Gehry’s help — a new center of arts activity.

A pair of historic, glittering buildings sat empty beside a busy Miami thoroughfare. An arts foundation with a nomadic background was looking for a place to plant permanent roots and expand.

That is how the National YoungArts Foundation, founded 31 years ago by Ted and Lin Arison, came to find its new home: the iconic Bacardi Tower and Museum complex along Biscayne Boulevard. The campus will get a Frank Gehry-designed master plan and year-round programming to link downtown’s burgeoning arts scene with the hip Wynwood and Design District neighborhoods.

Officials with the organization and company will announce the news Wednesday.

“This was really, I believe, a match made in heaven,” said Paul T. Lehr, executive director of YoungArts. “There was no better place for us to go and there was no better purchaser for this campus than us and what we were going to do.”

Lehr said Bacardi U.S.A. sold the 3.3-acre site at 2100 Biscayne Blvd. to the foundation for $10 million, though the market value was over $20 million. The blue and white tiled tower, by architect Enrique Gutiérrez, was completed in 1963. The mosaic square known as the “jewel box,” designed by Ignacio Carrera-Justiz, was added in 1975.

They were designated as historic in 2009 by Miami’s historic preservation board.

Facundo L. Bacardi, chairman of the board of spirits producer Bacardi Limited, said the sale wasn’t about making money. The privately held company moved its Americas headquarters to Coral Gables in 2009 and has maintained the Biscayne Boulevard site but used it only rarely.

When Lehr approached him with the idea about nine months ago and discussions started within the company, “it was kind of like a light bulb went off,” Bacardi said.

“We were looking for somebody to extend the legacy of the property and how much it means to us,” he said. “I don’t think we could’ve come up with a better partner.”

While closely guarded, the news had been shared with some YoungArts supporters in recent days. Reactions were enthusiastic.

“It’s not only a milestone in Miami’s evolution as a cultural community, I think it’ll be a powerful magnet for talent for decades to come,” said Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has supported the organization. “The whole thing just strikes me as perfect for a cultural center for this town.”

Despite working with more than 16,000 students over the last 31 years — including alumni like Vanessa Williams and Nicki Minaj, who have become household names — YoungArts has kept a relatively low profile. The organization finds and nurtures artists 15 and older, bringing in 150 a year for a week of intensive classes with masters in their field.

Even with its new home, the foundation is also planning a huge expansion of activities beyond Miami, including year-round events in New York, a Los Angeles version of Miami’s YoungArts Week and continued presence in Washington as the only nominating agency for the Presidential Scholars in the Arts.

“It’s all coming together at once,” Lin Arison said. “That’s because it’s meant to be. We’ve been doing our quiet work for 31 years, and now it is going to become visible.”

As the foundation expands nationally, it has added Gehry, singer Plácido Domingo and dancer, choreographer and director Bill T. Jones as artistic advisors. And it has added a 10th discipline, architecture and design, to a lineup that includes cinematic arts, dance, jazz, music, photography, theater, visual arts, voice and writing.

And its YoungArts MasterClass television program, which has appeared on HBO, is being used in public schools in Miami, New York and Los Angeles with a teachers guide so educators can use lessons from mentors in their classes.

Arison, who said she sold paintings by Claude Monet and Amedeo Modigliani to support the move, envisions the new campus as a place where visual arts by alumni will be displayed year-round, popular art walks in the nearby Wynwood district will spill over and outside projections like the well-known wallcasts at the New World Center will take place. Gehry designed the new Miami Beach home for the New World Symphony, which the Arisons co-founded.

“Once people get in here, they’re going to own it,” Arison said. “The kids are going to own it, the mentors are going to own it and hopefully the community is going to own it.”

While YoungArts will move its administrative headquarters into the new building by mid-October, the timeline for the rest of the project was not yet known. Mentors in the program will be asked for input on how the space should be used, and Gehry will involve students in the overall design of the campus.

“Whatever she wants me to do, I’ll do,” Gehry said of Arison.

An office area next to the tower building will be transformed into a performance space, and a parking lot will become a park that will attach to the existing plaza and green space, Lehr said.

“It’s nice that they’re taking over a building that’s a symbol in Miami but has been underused in the last years,” said Meaghan Lloyd, a partner in Gehry’s firm. “We’re very happy to be part of that story, which is a big part of the history of Miami.”

Yara Travieso, 26, remembers the complex from her days growing up in Miami-Dade with an architect father; they would drive around admiring buildings in the area, and the Bacardi structures were a favorite.

Now a New York-based director and choreographer who attended The Juilliard School on a full scholarship thanks to her involvement in YoungArts as a student, Travieso said she is overjoyed about the organization’s new permanent home.

“I think it’s perfect timing, it’s the perfect location,” she said. “This new generation needs that.”

Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a consultant who has worked with YoungArts for more than a year, said young people are involved in much of Miami’s artistic momentum.

“This is about vibrancy and youth, which seems so fitting for this city to make this the calling card,” he said. “Arts organizations all over America are trying to find ways to engage younger people, and Miami’s going to be truly the center of activity for younger people and serious engagement for young people with the arts.”

-By Hannah Sampson

By CHAD BRAY

The artist behind the "Hope" poster that became a symbol of President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was sentenced on Friday to two years of probation and 300 hours of community service for lying during a copyright dispute involving the iconic image.

Reuters

Shepard Fairey on Friday in New York

Shepard Fairey, who also was ordered by the judge to pay a $25,000 fine to the government, in February admitted to fabricating documents and lying in a civil lawsuit he had brought against the Associated Press in 2009, after the news agency accused him of violating its copyrights. The news agency said Mr. Fairey had used a close-up AP photograph taken of Mr. Obama at a 2006 event as the basis for his poster—a red, white and blue image of Mr. Obama with the word "Hope" underneath.

Mr. Fairey had claimed that he used a different photo as the basis, but when he realized that wasn't true, prosecutors said, he created false documents and deleted electronically stored documents to hide the fact that he had indeed used the 2006 image as a reference.

"I am deeply ashamed and remorseful that I didn't live up to my own standards of honesty and integrity," Mr. Fairey said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

The 42-year-old Mr. Fairey had faced as much as six months in prison after pleading guilty in February to a single misdemeanor count of criminal contempt. Prosecutors, who sought jail time in the case, said anything less would send "a terrible message" to people who might commit similar conduct in the future.

But Daniel Gitner, Mr. Fairey's lawyer, said his client shouldn't serve any jail time because he had admitted his misconduct as soon as it was discovered and well before the government's investigation began. He also undertook efforts to settle the case and make the AP whole, despite having a valid argument on which he may have prevailed at trial in his lawsuit, Mr. Gitner said.

In a statement after the hearing, Mr. Fairey said: "My wrong-headed actions, born out of a moment of fear and embarrassment, have not only been financially and psychologically costly to myself and my family, but also helped to obscure what I was fighting for in the first place—the ability of artists everywhere to be inspired and freely create art without reprisal."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas said the artist could seek to end his probation after a year's time if he completes the community service by then.

As part of last year's settlement of the civil lawsuit, AP was paid $1.6 million, a portion of which came from insurance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Levy said.

"We hope this case will serve as a clear reminder to all of the importance of fair compensation for those who gather and produce original news content," Gary Pruitt, AP's president and chief executive, said Friday.

Write to Chad Bray at chad.bray@wsj.com