Art world experts have slammed recent attacks on famous paintings by climate protesters as a “counterproductive” and dangerous act of vandalism.
While some of the major French and British museums polled by AFP, including the Louvre, the National Gallery and the Tate in London, are keeping a low profile on the issue, others are calling for tougher safeguards against such acts.
“Art is defenseless and we condemn in the strongest terms any attempt to damage it for any reason whatsoever,” the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague said in a statement.
In the Mauritshuis this week, Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece The Girl with a Pearl Earring was targeted by climate activists.
Two activists taped themselves to the painting and the adjacent wall while another threw a thick red substance, but the artwork was behind glass and undamaged and was on public display again on Friday.
Social media images showed the activists wearing Just Stop Oil t-shirts.
“How do you feel?” one of them asked. “This painting is protected by glass, but… our children’s future is not protected.”
This attack came after environmental activists splashed tomato soup on Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London and threw mashed potatoes over a painting by Claude Monet at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam.
Bernard Blistene, honorary president of the Center Pompidou for modern art in Paris, said all museum managers had taken precautions against vandalism for a very long time.
“Shall we take more? No doubt,” he said.
– Bag ban? –
Ortrud Westheider, director of the Museum Barberini, said the recent attacks showed that “international security standards to protect works of art in the event of activist attacks are not sufficient”.
Environmental activists from the group Last Generation threw mashed potatoes at Monet’s “Les Meules” (Haystacks) at the museum.
The group later posted a video on social media, writing, “If it takes a painting – with #MashedPotatoes or #TomatoSoup thrown on it – to remind society that the course of fossil fuels is killing us all: Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!”
The museum said the painting is protected by glass and suffered no damage.
In a similar stunt on October 14, two environmental protesters attacked van Gogh’s world-famous Tomato Soup work in London. The gallery said the protesters caused “minor damage” to the frame but the painting was “intact”.
Remigiusz Plath, security expert for the German Museums Association DMB and the Hasso Plattner Foundation, said the chain of art attacks was “clearly a kind of escalation process”.
“There are different ways to react and of course all museums have to think about extended security measures – measures that have been very unusual for museums in Germany and Europe so far, that were perhaps only known in the USA,” he said.
Such measures could include a total ban on bags and jackets and security searches.
“Of course, the environmental catastrophe and the climate crisis also concern us … But we absolutely do not tolerate vandalism,” he added.
The Prado Museum in the Spanish capital said it was “on alert”.
At the Queen Sofia Museum in Madrid, conservation expert Jorge Garcia Gomez-Tejedo told Spanish media this week that only the most endangered works are on display behind bulletproof glass.
– “nihilism” –
Adam Weinberg of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has questioned the activists’ approach.
“It’s people putting themselves on a stage to draw attention to something, but you have to ask, does that really make a difference?” he said at a discussion in Qatar on Wednesday, according to ARTNews.
Tristram Hunt of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum expressed concern at the “nihilistic language surrounding the protests that there is no place for art in times of crisis”.
“I don’t agree,” he said at the same event.
France’s Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak has “urged all national museums to redouble their vigilance”.
“How can … defending the climate lead to wanting to destroy a work of art? It’s absolutely absurd,” she told Le Parisien newspaper.
In May, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ was thrown in the face at the Louvre in Paris, but the artwork’s thick bulletproof shell ensured it sustained no damage.
Her attacker said he was targeting artists who didn’t focus enough on “the planet.”
For Didier Rykner, founder of the French online magazine La Tribune de l’art, these protest actions are “counterproductive” and “the more visibility they are given, the more they will do it again”.
But “as these acts become commonplace, they undoubtedly lose their power,” he argued.
