Activists Attacking Art Climate hysteria strikes again. James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activists-attacking-art-44b29637?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
We’re still waiting for an example of a great civilization built by progressive leftists. Now there’s still another reason to doubt whether the contemporary mania to attack society’s traditions has any value at all. How can one take seriously warnings that climate change threatens civilization from people whose vandalism targets civilization itself?
“Ruining the most beautiful art in the world is probably not going to win people over to your cause,” observes RealClearPolitics President Tom Bevan on Twitter as he links to an Associated Press story about the latest attack by global warmists on a cultural treasure.
AP reports:
Two women were detained in Stockholm after they threw “some kind of paint” at a painting by French artist Claude Monet and then glued themselves to the frame, Sweden’s National Museum said Wednesday.
The painting, “The Artist’s Garden at Giverny,” was on display as part of an exhibition at the museum. Spokesperson Hanna Tottmar said artwork was encased in glass and “is now being examined by the museum’s conservators to see if any damage has occurred.”
The exhibit, titled “The Garden,” was closed but expected to reopen to visitors on Thursday. ”We naturally distance ourselves from actions where art or cultural heritage risks being damaged … regardless of the purpose,” Per Hedström, the museum’s acting director, said.
Yes, let’s all distance ourselves from this destructive zealotry, which has sadly become popular on the radical left. “Why Are Climate Activists Throwing Food at Million-Dollar Paintings?,” asked a headline last year in Smithsonian magazine. Margaret Osborne reported:
Wearing neon orange vests, two climate activists splattered mashed potatoes on the protective glass that covers Monet’s Grainstacks at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany. They then glued their hands to the wall below the painting and began to speak.
But who would want to listen when the speakers have just self-identified as unreasonable and untethered to any standard of decent behavior?
Also, what did Claude Monet ever do to them? Actually the French impressionist who died nearly a century ago has not been the only target. Climateers tossed tomato soup at a Van Gogh among other reckless stunts. “A climate protester glued his head to ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring,’ the famous painting by Johannes Vermeer that was on exhibit at a museum in The Hague,” noted Christine Chung in the New York Times last year.
But it is Monet that strikes a particular chord with this column. Your humble correspondent knows little about art but like so many others has been stunned by the beauty of Monet’s work. More generally, it’s important to recognize the threat posed by this particular variety of leftist activism. Beer drinkers can let progressives have the commodity called Bud Light because it’s easily replaced with any number of enjoyable substitutes. Macrobrews, much as we love them, are the opposite of a Monet.
Most of us will never be as committed to the creation, cultivation and preservation of beauty as Monet was, but perhaps he might inspire us to move in his direction. Paul Hayes Tucker wrote in the Journal in 2020:
Claude Monet was 73 years old in August 1914 when World War I began. Wealthy and well known throughout much of the Western world, the lauded Impressionist patriarch had been furiously working on a project that he had begun just two months earlier—monumental paintings of his beloved water lily garden that he had dug on his rural property in Giverny to create a personal Eden…
In letters to friends, he often expressed his pain and anxiety about the war, which arose not only from his inability physically to support France’s efforts, but also from the fact that his only surviving child, Michel, had been conscripted and was at the front…
He also was adamant about his commitment to his art. Even when the Germans were within miles of Giverny, causing members of his own family to flee, he defiantly told his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel that he was staying behind because he would rather die among his paintings than abandon them to the enemy.
The “Weeping Willow” paintings, which he began in 1918 when France’s fate appeared to be in the balance, embody this call to duty, especially one of the most emotive examples in the series…
Firmly rooted in the foreground but shrouded in shadow, the willow stretches toward the light like the artist himself, whose lifelong obsession had been the pursuit of the sun’s transformative powers. Here, that quest has become an epic battle appropriate for wartime, when fear and regret were pitted against hope and regeneration. Novel in Monet’s oeuvre, in fact in the history of art, the painting ultimately is an affirmation of how a highly sensitive individual, at a time of unprecedented challenges, can stand strong and true to himself while providing critical guidance for his fellow countrymen and women.
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