Two people were arrested on Sunday morning at the entrance to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, suspected of having attempted to damage classified property. The two people were arrested on Sunday around 11:30 a.m. and placed in police custody, as part of a preliminary investigation opened for “attempted destruction of cultural property during a meeting,” said the Paris prosecutor’s office.
They were “in possession of a white liquid – glue and a viscous whitish mixture – and were wearing flocked “Food Response” t-shirts”, an environmentalist movement, specifies a source close to the matter. According to her, these two people are “already known for previous acts of obstructing traffic”. “At this stage, the alleged membership of the Food Response movement is not confirmed,” however, qualified the public prosecutor.
The Food Response movement (formerly Last Renovation) had made headlines in recent months, by spraying soup on the window in front of the Mona Lisa in January and then Claude Monet’s painting, Spring, in February at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. In a press release sent to AFP last January, the collective presented itself as “a French civil resistance campaign which aims to bring about a radical change in society on a climatic and social level”.
Since the fall of 2022, mainly in Europe, environmental activists have increased actions targeting works of art to alert public opinion about global warming. For example, they stuck their hands on a Goya painting in Madrid, threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London and spread mashed potatoes on a Claude Monet masterpiece in Potsdam, near Berlin.