In October, two anti-oil protestors inside London’s National Gallery hurled tomato soup onto Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting. After the incident, you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief when news outlets reported that the masterpiece was unharmed.
In similar events, multiple other activists targeted beloved masterpieces earlier this year. It’s a type of demonstration that has persisted for more than a century, long before the seeds of social media and viral content. In 1914, also at London’s National Gallery, suffragette Mary Richardson slashed Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver. In 1974, a man spray-painted “kill lies all” across Picasso’s Guernica at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. The Mona Lisa is also no stranger to harm. People have flung acid, hot coffee, a rock and even cake in her direction.
Fortunately, many of today’s museums use protective glass to shield their most vulnerable masterpieces from such insults. When paintings do get damaged, however, it’s the work of conservators to restore them to their former glory.
