Art News

"The danger isn't over when the art emerges from its package. Skluzacek remembers the damage to a valuable canvas caused by a King Charles spaniel. "The dog attacked a 19th-century British landscape painting that had a hunting scene with a rabbit in it," says Skluzacek, who was asked to appraise the damage. "The dog ate the rabbit," she explains. One of heiress Doris Duke's dogs walked through a painting, according to Charles von Nostitz, a New York restorer, but it wasn't clear what the dog was after.

Cats can be destructive, too. Dorit Straus, vice president and worldwide fine-art manager at Chubb, received a claim for a large Abstract Expressionist painting that had been damaged when a cat urinated on it while spinning in the air in an epileptic fit. Von Nostitz once worked on a Roberto Matta painting worth several hundred thousand dollars that had been knocked into a lamp and torn to pieces by a cat. "This was one of the cats in the Friskies commercials," von Nostitz adds, in recognition of the temperamental nature of celebrities. "