Yesterday, environmental activists attacked a painting by Claude Monet with red paint and glue at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. The painting, The artist’s garden in Giverny (1900), is unharmed and the activists have been arrested, the museum said in a statement.
The painting was loaned by the Musée d’Orsay for an exhibition at the Nationalmuseum entitled The Garden – Six centuries of art and nature. “In dialogue with the lender, we are now exploring the possibilities of reinstalling the work in the exhibition,” said Hanna Tottmar, press officer at the museum.
“We are moving away from actions where art or cultural heritage is endangered,” says Per Hedström, acting director general of the Nationalmuseum. “Cultural heritage has great symbolic value and it is unacceptable to attack or destroy it, for any purpose.”
A group called Aterstall Vatmarker (Restore Wetlands) released a video of the incident via Twitter, showing two women smearing red paint on the protective glass covering the board with one hand, while taping the other to the glass. According to the Nationalmuseum, the incident happened at 2:30 p.m. yesterday.
The attack is the latest in a series of similar artistic stunts carried out by climate activists, who threw or smeared substances such as tomato soup, mashed potatoes, paint, glue, cake and a black oily liquid on paintings by artists such as Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer and Gustav Klimt.
