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.
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It did not work. Last week, members of a group
called
Last Generation walked into the museum and threw black liquid at one of
Klimt’s major works, “Death and Life”. A protester had sneaked the liquid into
the museum in a hot water bottle strapped to his chest, Wipplinger said.
The Klimt, protected by glass, was unharmed. But
Wipplinger said his security team could only have stopped the attack by
subjecting visitors to invasive body searches, “like at the airport”. He did
not want to even consider that prospect, he added.
“If we start such procedures, the whole idea of what
a museum is dies,” Wipplinger said. “A museum is a place that should always be
open to the public,” he said, adding: “We can’t stop being that.”
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. So far, 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
already increasing in frequency and daring. At first, protesters glued
themselves to the frames of famous paintings, but since footage of activists
splattering
Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” with tomato soup spread rapidly on
social media last month, masterpieces have been doused in pea soup, mashed
potatoes, and flour.
Those works were all protected by glass, and the
protesters’ projectiles never touched an artist’s brushstroke. Yet, recently,
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 this month signed by the leaders of
more than 90 of the world’s largest art institutions — including Daniel Weiss,
CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern
Art, both in New York — 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 last Friday,
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. On November 20, 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. Such a program would be expensive and museum
entrance fees would rise as a result, Sangiuliano added.
Wipplinger said his teams had been protectively
glazing works in its collection for decades but could not do that quickly for
every remaining piece. Nonreflective glass was costly, he said: Work on a
painting of moderate size 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. A
contemporary art installation, for instance, simply could not be glazed, he
said.
And sometimes a barrier between a painting and its
audience is contrary to the work’s spirit. Mabel Tapia, the 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.” Museums are meant to be places where
people meet to think about important issues, she added. “We need to keep them
open.”
There was “no silver bullet” for dealing with the
protests, Read said. Museum administrators just had to hope the protesters
remained “genteel, middle-class liberals” who took steps to avoid permanent
damage, he added.
Florian Wagner, 30, the member of Last Generation
who threw the black mixture at the Klimt painting in the Leopold Museum, said
by phone that 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.
He would not be staging any more protests, he said,
adding, “I think I’ve made my point.” But he said he was sure others in Austria
and across Europe would continue. The actions would only stop, he added, once
governments “act on this crisis”.
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