Demonstrators against the war in Palestine co-opted a tactic of climate change activists, targeting a Pablo Picasso painting for a protest at the National Gallery in London. Two members of the group Youth Demand taped a photograph of a Gazan mother and child over the Spanish artist’s 1901 work Motherhood (La Maternité), and poured red paint on the gallery floor.
“Police attended and arrested the pair. The room is currently closed. There has been no damage to any paintings,” the museum told Agence France Presse.
Video of the action provided by Youth Demand shows Jai Halai, a 23-year-old National Health Service worker, and Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, a 21-year-old student, unfold the photo and briefly stick it to the glass covering the Picasso. A security guard quickly removed Halai from the gallery as the activist chanted “free Palestine.”
Rosenfeld then spilled the blood red paint. As a second guard began calling on his walkie talkie for backup and asking visitors to leave the room, Rosenfeld, sitting on the gallery floor, revealed a shirt reading “Stop Arming Israel.”
“The U.K. is complicit in genocide,” she proclaimed. “Weapons being manufactured in the U.K. are being used to kill Palestinian children, and their mothers, and entire families.”
The photo the two affixed to the protective glass on the Picasso painting is by Palestinian journalist Ali Jadallah. The harrowing image shows a sobbing mother embracing her bloodied child in a Gaza hospital following an Israeli airstrike.
A sobbing mom holds her injured child in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike on October 18, 2023. Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images.
Israel declared war on Hamas following the attacks of October 7, 2023. But while Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, the bombings that followed have been far more deadly, claiming 41,870 lives, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas.
“I’m taking action because as a Jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza,” Rosenfeld said in a statement. “I want the world to know this isn’t in the Jewish name and I want to see a free Palestine.”
Targeting famous works of art at museums—by covering them with other images; gluing one’s self to the frame, glass, or floor; or throwing paint and foodstuffs at paintings—has become a favored tactic of climate activists the past two years.
Such demonstrations began in May 2022, with a man smearing cake on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris. Just Stop Oil followed with a string of demonstrations at four U.K. museums the following month, and the trend spread from there. (Youth Demand is a student branch of Just Stop Oil.)
Pro-Palestinian activists have staged high-profile demonstrations at several museums over the past year, but the only painting targeted thus far was at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College, not a museum.
Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland from Just Stop Oil addressing the public after throwing tomato soup on Vincent Van Gogh’s Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (1888). Screenshot from @damiengayle.
Using art—and risking permanently damaging it—as a means of raising awareness of the climate crisis has proved controversial. It can also have serious legal consequences.
Last month, two Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to jail, one for two years and the other for 20 months, for throwing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery. (Separately, a judge ruled that two activists who glued themselves to a Manchester Art Gallery J.M.W. Turner painting’s frame, were not guilty.)
Hours after the court announced the sentencing for the Sunflowers incident, a trio of protestors hit the painting again, as well as a second Van Gogh canvas. The three Just Stop Oil activists have pled not guilty to criminal damage charges.