A clumsy art lover ripped a six inch gash in an £80m Picasso painting when she accidentally fell against it.

The woman was visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York when she 'lost her balance'. The painting, called The Actor, depicts a gaunt male figure in a pink costume on stage and was completed in 1905. It marks Picasso's shift from his Blue Period, of images of tattered beggars and blind musicians, to his Rose Period of paintings of costumed acrobats.

The woman was uninjured, said museum spokesman Alyse Topalian, but the painting received a vertical tear in the lower right hand corner. It has been removed from the gallery and taken to the museum's conservation studio for "assessment and treatment", the statement added. Because the tear occurred in the lower portion of the canvas, the repair was expected to be "unobtrusive".

The canvas is still set to be included in the Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition scheduled to run April 27 to August 1. In 2006, Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn tore Picasso's Le Rêve with his elbow while showing it off to friends in his office. It happened just hours after he had agreed to sell the painting for a record $139million - but the sale fell through because of the accident.

I'll take it off his hands for a fiver!

To take her mind off things she took her son to the Louvre...

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