Vandal or a visitor? It’s hard to tell
Fearful of a mishap, museums struggle to stop climate activists
LONDON — For Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the director of Vienna’s Leopold Museum, the past few weeks have been challenging.
As climate protesters across Europe stepped up their attacks against art, Wipplinger took measures to protect his storied collection, which includes famous paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Bags were banned; coats too. The museum hired extra guards to patrol its five floors. It didn’t work.
Members of a group called Last Generation walked into the museum last month and threw black liquid at one of Klimt’s major works, “Death and Life.”
The Klimt, protected by glass, was unharmed.
But Wipplinger said his security team could only have stopped the attack by subjecting visitors to body searches, “like at the airport.”
With the attacks showing no sign of abating, museum directors across Europe are settling into a nervous new equilibrium, fearful for the works in their care but unwilling to compromise on making visitors feel welcome.
Nothing has been permanently damaged. But many fear that an accident or an escalation in the protesters’ tactics could result in a masterpiece being destroyed.
The actions, which began in Britain in June, are increasing in frequency and daring.
At first, protesters glued themselves to the frames of paintings, but since footage of activists splattering Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” with tomato soup spread on social media
in October, masterpieces have been doused in pea soup, mashed potatoes and flour.
Those works were all protected by glass.
Yet, protesters in Paris poured orange paint directly onto a silver Charles Ray sculpture outside the Bourse de Commerce contemporary art space.
A Bourse de Commerce spokesperson said the sculpture was cleaned within a few hours.
In a statement in November signed by the leaders of more than 90 of the world’s largest art institutions, museum administrators said they were “deeply shaken” by the protesters’ “risky endangerment” of artworks.
The activists “severely underestimate the fragility of these irreplaceable objects,” the statement
added.
Yet, few museums appear to have taken bold steps to protect their collections.
Norway’s National Museum and the Barberini Museum in Potsdam, Germany, have, like the Leopold Museum, banned visitors from taking bags or jackets into their exhibition halls.
Others have made no changes.
In London, visitors may still carry bags around museums including the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the British Museum. All four inspect bags at their entrances, but the checks are often cursory.
At Tate Britain recently, security guards waved through several visitors without looking inside their backpacks.
Wipplinger said there was
little that a bag check could achieve, anyway, since items such as tubes of glue were easy to conceal.
“If a person wants to attack an art piece, they will find a way,” he said.
With museums reluctant to act, politicians are beginning to weigh in.
Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, said in a news release that his department was considering the actions it could take, including a requirement to cover all paintings in Italy’s museums with glass. But such a program would be expensive and museum entrance fees would rise as a result.
Wipplinger said his teams had been protectively glazing works in its collection for decades but couldn’t do that quickly for every remaining piece. Nonreflective glass
was costly, he said: Work on a painting of moderate size — a square yard, say — could come in at around $1,000.
Robert Read, head of art at insurance company Hiscox, said he was advising museum clients to put more works in their collections behind glass, but Hiscox’s policies did not require it.
And sometimes a barrier between a painting and its audience is contrary to the work’s spirit.
Mabel Tapia, deputy artistic director of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, said she would never allow that collection’s highlight, Pablo Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece, “Guernica,” to be displayed behind glass. It was “a symbol of freedom and of the fight against fascism,” she added.
Tapia said she had recently redeployed security guards so they could focus on high-profile works — something she commonly does at times of protest — but she felt there was little more she could do.
“The only measure that would actually do something is if we closed the museum,” Tapia said, “and we’re not going to do that.”
Florian Wagner, 30, the member of Last Generation who threw the black mixture at the Klimt painting in the Leopold Museum, said he knew before the protest that the work was protected by glass. He practiced the stunt five times at home, he said, and was convinced it would not disfigure the painting.
“We are not trying to destroy beautiful pieces of art,” Wagner said, but to “shock people” into acting on climate change.