The two women, whose name tags said "Emma" and "Maj," smeared paint on The Artist's Garden at Giverny (1900), a colorful landscape painting by a French Impressionist artist that showed pink and purple irises. The picture is on display at the National Museum as part of the show "The Garden: Six Centuries of Art and Nature." The Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it was bought in 1983, lent it to the museum for the show. The two protesters wore T-shirts with the name of the environmental group Återställ Våtmarker (Restore Wetlands), which posted a video of the protest on Twitter and Facebook. In an interview with AFP, it also took credit for it and said that "beautiful gardens like the ones in Monet's painting will soon be a thing of the past." Helen Wahlgren, a spokeswoman for Återställ Våtmarker, told that a climate disaster "is also a health crisis" and that "millions of people are already dying from the climate disaster." She also said that the Swedish government needed to do more to live up to its foreign commitments about climate change. "We should cut down on our pollution by 31%. But our pollution is still getting worse. It's not right."
The press office at the museum told that conservators are now looking at the picture, which is protected by glass, to see if it is damaged. Police were told, and the two women were taken into custody, according to a news release from the Stockholm Region police, which said, "The crime is currently being treated as aggravated vandalism. It's not clear if the incident involved more than the two people who were arrested, but a number of people have been checked, and the police will, among other things, use the museum's video cameras to look at what happened." The police also changed their press statement to say that the two women had been charged with "suspicion of serious damage." The incident at the National Museum in Stockholm comes after a wave of climate protests at museums and art institutions in Canada, the United States, and Europe. All of these protests were meant to bring attention to the fact that the government gives fossil fuel companies a lot of money and that climate change is getting worse all over the world. The museum's acting superintendent, Per Hedstrom, said, "Cultural heritage has a lot of symbolic value, and it is not okay to attack or destroy it for any reason."
Selena Mattei
