NBC news intern with quite a sense of snark
Climate protesters hit a $110M Monet with mashed potatoes
— but a glass barrier prevented them making an impression on the artwork.
German protesters arrested after throwing mashed potatoes at Monet painting that sold for $110 million
“This painting is not going to be worth anything if we have to fight over food,” said one of the two activists protesting climate change. The painting was unharmed, the museum said
Police arrested a pair of German protesters who, in a bid to bring attention to the perils of climate change, threw mashed potatoes Sunday at a Claude Monet painting that once sold for more than $110 million.
Authorities said they are investigating the protesters, whom police did not name, for property damage and trespassing after the incident at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam, the capital of the state of Brandenburg, about 20 miles southwest of Berlin.
An “immediate conservation investigation” found that “Grainstacks,” which Monet painted in 1890 and which sold for $110.7 million at a 2019 auction, sustained no damage from the stunt, as it lies behind a layer of protective glass, the museum said in a statement on Twitter. The painting will be back on display by Wednesday, the museum added.
A Brandenburg police spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about why the protesters were being investigated for property damage given that the painting was unharmed.
Video posted to the Twitter account of the Last Generation, the German climate group that claimed responsibility, shows two protesters hurling mashed potatoes at the painting and then kneeling in front of it and seeming to glue their hands to the wall.
The stunt was similar to one this month at London’s National Gallery, where two protesters from the U.K. group Just Stop Oil threw what appeared to be tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers,” which sold for nearly $40 million in 1987, to protest the country’s cost-of-living crisis. That painting was also behind protective glass and unharmed, according to the museum.
On Sunday, the German activists referred to the U.K. protest as they carried out their own.