Claude Monet has become the latest artist to be at the center of food-related climate protests, after members of a German environmental group threw mashed potatoes on one of his paintings in a museum on Sunday of Potsdam.
Nine days later Just Stop Oil Drained Tomato Soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, two activists from the last generation (Dernière Génération) entered the Barberini Museum and sprinkled Monet Millstones (Haystacks) with potato before sticking hands to wall.
Protesters said the waterfall was intended as a wake-up call for a climate catastrophe. “People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying,” one of the activists said in a video of the incident tweeted by Letzte Generation.
“We are in a climate catastrophe and all you fear is tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a chalkboard. Do you know what I’m afraid of? I’m scared because science tells us we won’t be able to feed our families in 2050,” the protester said. “Does it take mashed potatoes on a board to make you listen? This painting will be worth nothing if we have to fight for food. When will you finally start listening? When will you finally start listening and shutting down business as usual? »
The band said they decided to make “this Monet the stage and the audience the audience” in an attempt to get their message across. “If you have to scratch a board with mashed potatoes or tomato soup to remind society that the course of fossils is killing us all, then we give you mashed potatoes on a board “, he added.
A museum spokesperson said the painting was protected by glass, and the museum later said it appeared to be undamaged.
The spokesperson said police arrived quickly and protesters’ hands came off the wall “relatively easily”.
Last year the members of Letzte Generation go on a hunger strike outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest the lack of political action on the climate emergency. Earlier this year they stuck together to some of Germany’s busiest motorways.
The group, which accuses the German government of ignoring all warnings and bringing the country “to the brink”, claims to be part of the latest generation who can prevent society from collapsing.
“Faced with this reality, we accept loudly [fines]criminal charges and undeterred deprivation of liberty,” he says on his website.
Art galleries have recently become popular venues for attention-grabbing events. In July, two members of the Italian climate activist group Ultima Generazione (also Last Generation) glued their palms to the glass protecting Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and unfurled a banner reading “Last generation without gas or coal” (Latest Generation, Without Gas, Without Coal).
A fortnight earlier, activists from Just Stop Oil stuck together as part of a 500 year old painting of The Last Supper at the Royal Academy in London.