Two climate activists Sunday hurled mashed potatoes at a Monet painting worth tens of millions of dollars in a museum in Potsdam, Germany.
The activists pair from Letzte Generation — German for “last generation” — doused Oscar-Claude Monet’s 130-year-old work “Les Meules” with yellow-tinged mash, and then glued themselves to the wall at the Museum Barberini, video posted on social media showed.
“People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying. We are in a climate catastrophe,” protester Mirjam Herrmann yelled after sealing her hand to the wall, according to Der Tagesspeigel.
“Science says we won’t be able to feed our families by 2050,” Hermann told onlookers. “This painting will be worth nothing if we have to fight over food.”
Sunday’s incident followed a similar protest in London where two members of a group called “Just Stop Oil” splashed a tin of Heinz tomato soup on Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” which is valued at $85 million.
Just Stop Oil activists also glued themselves to the frame of an early copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and to John Constable’s “The Hay Wain” in the National Gallery.
“If it takes a painting – with #MashedPotatoes or #TomatoSoup thrown at it – to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all: Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!” Letzte Generation tweeted Sunday.
Both paintings were unharmed by the culinary call-out, according to museum officials.
Monet’s “Meules” sold for $111 million to Museum Barberini patron Hasso Plattner in 2019, Der Taggesspeigel said.
A museum official told the outlet the protesters’ hands were “detached from the wall relatively easily.”
“While I understand the activists’ urgent concern in the face of the climate catastrophe, I am shocked by the means with which they are trying to lend weight to their demands,” museum director Ortrud Westheider said in a statement.
Left-leaning government officials in Potsdam and the German state of Brandenburg condemned the action.
“The fight against the climate crisis is not strengthened by attacks on famous paintings,” Brandenburg Green Party Leader Ursula Nonnemacher posted on Twitter. “On the contrary, we need broad social consensus.”
With Post wires
