Updated at 7:36 p.m. ET: LONDON -- A 26-year-old man was arrested Monday for the defacement of a Mark Rothko painting at London's leading contemporary art museum.

The incident took place on Sunday when a visitor to Tate Modern applied "a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting," to a painting titled "Black on Maroon" by the Russian-American artist.

The man arrested signed his name on the painting: Vladimir Umanets. He was placed in custody around 9 p.m. local time.

---

Photographs of the damage showed the text "VLADIMIR UMANETS '12, A POTENTIAL PIECE OF YELLOWISM'' scrawled on Rothko's 1958 canvas "Black on Maroon.

'Not art or anti-art'
Using a phone number posted on on the so-called "Yellowism" movement's website, a Reuters journalist spoke to a man answering to the name Vladimir Umanets who said he carried out the attack.

"I'm aware they (the police) will come at some point and arrest me,'' he told Reuters. "It was an artistic statement, but it was more about having the opportunity to speak about galleries and art."

A manifesto posted on the website reads: "Yellowism is not art or anti-art. Examples of Yellowism can look like works of art but are not works of art ... Art is forever developing 'diverse whole'. Yellowism is forever expaning 'homogeneous mass'."

Tim Wright who witnessed the incident described it as "surreal." He posted a picture on Twitter and described how "this guy calmly walked up, took out a marker pen and tagged it."

In another tweet, Wright wrote: "Very bizarre, he sat there for a while then just went for it and made a quick exit."

Amy Griffin, an art restorer at London's Simon Gillespie Studio, said she was optimistic that the painting could be repaired.

"The exact material the graffiti was done in will determine how quickly it can be removed," she said. "If it is water soluble this may be done quickly but if it has stained the original paint the conservation may take longer and some retouching might be needed."

Griffin said that while the painting wasn't on the market, the value would only be affected if the new black paint couldn't be removed.

"Removing graffiti or accidental damage to paintings done with pens, paint or even old restoration is a daily part of a conservator's job and the Tate conservation department is one of the best in the world," she said.

The damaged painting is part of Rothko's Seagram series. Originally commissioned for the Four Seasons' restaurant in New York, the artist changed his mind about the project and gave the works to galleries, including Tate Modern.

Much of Rothko's work is characterized by canvases with large rectangular blocks of color.

The last major piece by the artist to be sold was his "Orange, Red, Yellow". It  fetched $87 million at an auction in New York earlier this year.

The Tate Modern is no stranger to action by so-called artists. In 2000, two Chinese performance artists tried to relieve themselves in one of the gallery's most famous sculptures: a urinal by Marcel Duchamp.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed to NBC News that they were investigating the incident but said Monday that no arrests had been made.

Reuters contributed to this report.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Debt-choked Greece aims to sell off islands, marinas, more
• Abu Hamza, 4 others tied to al-Qaida arrive in US
• New role for rescued bear cubs
• Americans travel to Pakistan to protest US drone strikes
• Court: Kenyans tortured by colonial regime can sue UK
• Tourists fined as Rome declares 'War on the Sandwich'
• Stay informed: Sign up for our newsletter

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

Artist Andy Warhol, creator of now legendary paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, is the inspiration for a major new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, opening Sept. 18.

Called “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” the exhibit displays almost 50 works by Warhol — paintings, sculpture and films — alongside 100 works by some 60 other artists inspired by his creations. The museum says it is the first major exhibition to explore Warhol's full impact on the contemporary art world. 

The exhibit also coincides with the 50th anniversary of Warhol’s first major one-man show, at a Los Angeles gallery, of his “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans,” individual paintings of 32 varieties of soup that were displayed side-by-side, like cans of soup on a grocery store shelf.

---

The Metropolitan’s exhibit divides the works of Warhol and others into five sections: his interest in daily news found in newspapers and magazines; his interest in portraits, particularly of celebrities like Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe; how Warhol  broke new ground representing issues of sexuality and gender; his use of famous paintings — like the “Mona Lisa” — and photographs by others in his work; and his partnerships in filmmaking, design and magazine publishing. (He founded the pop culture magazine, “Interview,” in 1969.) Contemporary artists whose work is featured in the exhibit include Ai Weiwei, Richard Avedon, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Chuck Close, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman; the exhibit’s catalogue contains interviews with Baldessari, Close, Katz and Koons, among others.

 

Mark Rosenthal, a curator of the exhibit, said in its catalogue that from almost the start of his career, Warhol “cast a very broad shadow over the art world, one that covers a period of about fifty years and has had a sweeping effect on a group of far more than that number of artists from around the globe. Among his influential pursuits, he made art the province of all manner of prosaic themes and sources; he put photography, appropriation and serial composition at the center of his methodology; and he gave permission to do virtually anything in the name of art.  By his example, the premises and practices of art-making were dramatically transformed.”

Related: Andy Warhol's estate to sell off all of his remaining works

In addition to the exhibit, on display through Dec. 31, 2012, the museum is offering a series of related concerts, talks and tours, including a tribute by singer Patti Smith and a discussion of Warhol and reality TV. Warhol — whose quote, “In the future everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” is now itself world-famous — developed his own TV series, “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes,” for MTV in 1985.

Andy Cohen, producer of “Real Housewives” and “Top Chef,” and a participant in the museum’s reality TV discussion, said, “We now live in a world where everybody is famous. Warhol was amused by the success of the first reality show, ‘An American Family.’  His philosophy was everybody is a star. I think he’d be amused” by reality TV today.