Climate Activist Defaces Monet at Musée D'Orsay - Artforum

Climate Activist Defaces Monet at Musée D’Orsay

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A climate activist with Riposte Alimentaire(Food Response) on June 1 stuck an adhesive poster to the glass protecting Claude Monet’s 1873 Coquelicots (Poppies) at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Depicting a blood-red and barren landscape that contrasted sharply with Monet’s bucolic image of a woman and child strolling through a lushly blooming field, the poster was meant to show what the young demonstrator described as the “nightmarish image [that] awaits us if no alternative is put in place.” Speaking to those present in the gallery, with one hand raised and the other glued to the wall behind her, the protester asserted, “At four more degrees, hell awaits us.”

Her words referenced earlier predictions that the world would warm by 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels in the coming years. Though nations’ commitments to cleaner energy have caused such dire predictions to be largely abandoned, more recent ones are only marginally less terrifying, showing a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the 2030s, spiking to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by century’s end. The world is still struggling to keep fossil fuel emissions down, with each fractional rise in temperature stoking catastrophic weather events that in turn spur famine, disease, and displacement. “I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” ecologist Gretta Pecl, of the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian earlier this year. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”

Multiple sources reported that the protester was arrested; French news agency AFP has said that the museum intends to file criminal charges against her. The institution confirmed that the painting was undamaged by the action and is already back on view.

French culture minister Rachida Dati in a post on X decried the defacement, writing, “This destruction of art by delinquents cannot be justified in any way. It must stop!” Dati noted that she intended to work with the country’s minister of justice to establish a policy for punishing such acts of protest.

Riposte Alimentaire were blunt in their description of the vandalization. “This is what Claude Monet would probably have painted in 2100 if no radical measures are taken to stop climate change by then,” the group wrote on X.