Climate activists’ mashed Monet-oes
Two climate activists hurled mashed potatoes at a Monet painting worth tens of millions of dollars in a German museum Sunday.
The activists from Letzte Generation — German for “last generation” — doused Oscar-Claude Monet’s 130-year-old “Les Meules” with yellow-tinged mash, and then glued themselves to the wall at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, social-media video showed.
The oil-on-canvas work sold for $110 million at a 2019 auction, the most expensive Monet sale ever.
“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, the video showed.
“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.”
The 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 have 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.
The Monet and the Van Gogh were unharmed by the culinary call-outs, museum officials said.
A Barberini official told German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that 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.
Left-leaning officials also condemned the action.
“The fight against the climate crisis is not strengthened by attacks on famous paintings,” Brandenburg Green Party Leader Ursula Nonnemacher tweeted. “On the contrary, we need broad social consensus.”