Then, suddenly, two visitors broke the reverent atmosphere. At 2:15 p.m., Eben Lazarus, 22, a music student, pulled three posters from a pipe. Then, with the help of 23-year-old psychology student Hannah Hunt, she stuck them over John Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’, a famous 19th-century painting, transforming its bucolic landscape into one of aeroplanes, burning trees and a rusting car. The pair then removed their jackets to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Stop Oil’, taped to the frame of the painting and chanted about the need for action on climate change. “Art is important,” Lazarus said, his voice echoing through the gallery. But “it was not more important than the lives of my brothers and every generation we are condemning to an unlivable future.” Nearby, a school group was in the middle of the street discussing another painting. Clare MacDonnell, the teacher, seemed unfazed. “Oh, I think it’s a climate protest,” he said. “How exciting!” Over the past four years, climate protesters have become a daily occurrence in Britain, following the rise of Extinction Rebellion, an activist group that sees mass non-violent protest as the most effective way to bring about change. Some of its members are happy to be arrested, using their trials to speak out about climate issues. In 2019, hundreds of his supporters repeatedly occupied streets and bridges around the British Parliament, effectively shutting down that part of the capital. Last year, Insulate Britain, an affiliated group, began occupying motorways, while Just Stop Oil blocked fuel depots this year and took to the track at the British Grand Prix, a major motorsport event, at the weekend. The events of the past week suggest that protesters now see art as a useful prop, though it is far from the first time museums here have faced political protests. In 1914, suffragist Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery with an ax hidden in her muff and then hacked down a Velázquez nude in protest at the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst. In more recent years, the British Museum, the Science Museum and the Tate art museum group have faced theatrical protests denouncing their acceptance of sponsorship from oil companies. (BP ended its sponsorship of the Tate museums in 2016.) But activists latching onto works of art is a new tactic. Sarah Pickard, a lecturer at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in France who has studied the Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots, said in a telephone interview that the museums were not so much an end in themselves as a means of getting publicity. The teams’ “whole strategy” is to take action that gets media attention, “and then move on to the next thing that creates a spark,” he said. During last week’s events, Just Stop Oil said some of the paintings were chosen for specific reasons, such as their significance or because they highlighted issues related to climate change. Pickard said protesters may say they have reasons to target specific paintings, but she said their choices were largely “irrelevant” because “the whole point is to be subversive” to create discussion about what they see as existential crisis. Events in Britain had the potential to be replicated elsewhere, Pickard added, as protesters in France had copied British actions in the past. At the Louvre in Paris in May, a man smeared what appeared to be cake over the glass that protects the Mona Lisa, then shouted that he was acting against “people who are destroying the planet”. Mel Carrington, a spokesman for Just Stop Oil, said in a telephone interview that targeting the museums was a way of “psychological pressure on the government” through publicity. Van Gogh’s protest had received worldwide news coverage, he said, while previous actions at oil terminals had not. Carrington said the protesters didn’t mind if people disliked their actions. they weren’t trying to win friends. None of the paintings appear to have been damaged. A spokeswoman for the National Gallery said in an emailed statement that the Constable landscape “suffered minor damage to its frame and there was also some disturbance to the varnish surface of the painting”. Returned for viewing on Tuesday. Simon Gillespie, a fine art conservator, said in a telephone interview that solvents could dissolve the glues protesters had used on the frames. “Thank God they didn’t choose to stick to oil paint, because undoing it would have been very difficult,” he added. Pressuring the boards to put up posters could also cause damage, he said, but protesters appeared to have worked to limit any damage. “They showed respect,” he said. When Extinction Rebellion emerged in 2018, it gained widespread sympathy in Britain, where environmental concerns have long been high on the public agenda. However, the group’s subversive tactics have since become a nuisance to many. In recent surveys by pollster YouGov, around 15 percent of respondents said they supported the group, while 45 percent were opposed. Nadine Dorries, Britain’s culture secretary, tweeted this week that the painting protesters were “attention-seekers” who “serve nothing but their own selfish egos”. The two protesters of the National Gallery were arrested on Monday. The Metropolitan Police said in an email on Wednesday that they had been released on bail pending further enquiries. At the museum on Monday after the protest, nine visitors said in interviews that they did not support the targeting of paintings. Luciana Pezzotti, 65, a retired teacher visiting Italy, said she cared about climate change and approved of the protest, but “why bother art with it?” Among the visitors, however, at least one young man voiced his support. Emma Baconnet, an art student from Lyon, France, said it was “very important” for climate protesters to be provocative to get their message across. “Sometimes it’s a bit too much,” he said. “But if we just talk, governments don’t listen.”
