It’s a Frame-Up: Old Masters Come Under Assault in Climate Protests

The fight for the climate apparently now encompasses a war against art, as masterpieces are being targeted by activists intent on using galleries and museums as staging grounds for protests. Silent sentinels of the past are now being conscripted into a pitched battle for the planetary future. Go figure.Works by Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, John Constable, and Joseph Mallord William Turner have in recent weeks come under attack. This intensifying effort to bend culture to the climate cause suggests that the preservation of art is increasingly endangered by those seeking to preserve the environment.The British group under whose auspices these demonstrations have taken place, Just Stop Oil, calls for the British government to “immediately halt all future licensing and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK.” JSO promises to “continue to peacefully disrupt whatever it takes until the government agrees to halt all new fossil fuel projects.” To that end, they call for “NonViolent Civil Resistance” to “withdraw their cooperation from the state” and for art institutions to join them in “civil resistance.” In London’s National Gallery on Monday, two climate activists glued themselves to the frame of John Constable’s “The Hay Wain.” They unfurled what they called an “apocalyptic vision of the future” over the masterpiece. The overlay placed over Turner’s rural Suffolk countryside depicted an old car, two airplanes, and a junked washing machine.JSO offered that the “reimagined version” of Constable’s art “carries a nightmare scene that demonstrates how oil will destroy our countryside. The river has gone, to be replaced by a road, airplanes fill the sky, pollution belches from cities on the horizon,” and “an old car is dumped in front of the Mill.”“The Hay Wain” dates from 1821, and a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Emily Burns, notes how it is “one of the most iconic paintings in the history of British art.” The National Gallery found that the painting suffered “minor damage,” and that “there was also some disruption to the surface of the varnish on the painting.” The painting has been rehung. At the Royal Academy of Arts on Tuesday, activists targeted “Copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper,” This replica, the Royal Academy notes, “shows details that are not now visible” in da Vinci’s faded original, which hangs in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie at Milan.The duplicate dates from around 1520. It was likely executed by Giampietrino and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, pupils of the Florentine master. When it was acquired in 1821, it was the most expensive piece ever purchased for the Academy’s collection. It made vivid what from the original had faded — an overturned salt shaker, Jesus’s feet. The duplicate thus served as a teaching tool to generations of artists.A five-person squad from JSO chained their hands to the painting’s frame and spray-painted “No New Oil” just below it. They were arrested by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of criminal damage. The British Broadcasting Company reports that one of the protesters explained: “I am an art student but there is no place for me to follow my calling as an artist in a world where I have no future.”For JSO, ensuring that future appears increasingly tied to staging protests that take aim at the past. In addition to “The Hay Wain” and the “Copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper,” van Gogh’s “Peach Trees in Blossom,” hanging in the Courtauld Gallery, was the subject of a gluing attack last week. At Manchester Art Gallery on July 1, “Tomson’s Aeolian Harp,” by Turner, was targeted during a gluing protest.Of the Turner painting, resplendent in verdant green, JSO notes that “according to flood risk mapping carried out by Climate Central, the areas of London that are depicted in Turner’s painting could be regularly underwater as early as 2030.”Also targeted last week was Horatio McCulloch’s “My Heart’s In The Highlands,” a sky-brightened landscape from 1860 that resides at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in Glasgow. The painting’s name is lifted from a 1789 poem by Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, which reads in part, “Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,/ The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth.”Before this recent burst of “civil resistance,” the highest-profile climate demonstration had targeted what is likely the most famous painting in history, da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” In May, a man disguised as an elderly woman jumped out of a wheelchair and smeared a cake on the glass shield protecting the masterpiece.Of that eternally enigmatic countenance, the English art critic Walter Pater once wrote, “She is older than the rocks among which she sits.” She is also no stranger to controversy, having been both stolen and the subject of attempted vandalism. The artist Salvador Dalí noted its “power, unique in all art history, to provoke the most violent and different kinds of aggressions.” Agence France-Presse reports that the cake-wielding assailant yelled, “There are people who are destroying the Earth,” and, “All artists, think about the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.” While JSO maintained it had no affiliation with the attack, it did laud the “act of resistance” as one that highlighted “the destruction of our only home.”That glass, known as “Guardian Clarity,” was manufactured by a subsidiary of Koch Industries, which has itself been the target of attacks from climate activists. In a statement, Koch noted: “Other than needing a quick wipe down, the glass served as the unseen hero protecting this and many other priceless world treasures and works of art around the globe.”The statement went on to promise that the glass would “protect these treasures from 100% of pastry-smearing incidents.” The USGlass News Network notes that the glass can “reduce reflections from around 8 percent to 0.7 percent.”In 2019, an activist group called Rise and Resist demanded that the Metropolitan Museum of Art stop accepting donations from the Koch family. The year before, the art critic Jerry Saltz taped “climate change denier” over the dedication to David Koch in the Met’s plaza. Mr. Saltz later explained: “I think I had hysterical blindness. I really didn’t know what was going on around me. I was just lost for that moment.” While these protests, dessert-based and otherwise, have thus far been mainly in the United Kingdom, rising rage in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which limited the agency’s ability to regulate fossil fuels without congressional action, could portend an era of unrest on these shores as well.

It’s a Frame-Up: Old Masters Come Under Assault in Climate Protests

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