Protesters on Saturday threw soup at a Monet painting in a museum in southeast France, the latest action by a campaign group that pulled a similar stunt on the Mona Lisa last month.
The Musee des Beaux-Arts in France’s third-largest city said in a communique that the attack on Claude Monet’s Le Printemps took place at 3:30pm.
The 1872 painting was protected by glass, but is still to undergo a close inspection and restoration, the museum said, adding that it would file a complaint and two activists had been arrested.
Riposte Alimentaire (Food Counterattack) claimed the attack in a posting on X, with a woman identifying herself as 20-year-old Ilona saying: “we have to act now before it is too late.”
The same group, which calls for a sustainable supply of healthy food for all, also claimed last month’s soup attack on the Louvre museum’s Mona Lisa painting, which was also behind glass.
The two militants who carried out the attack on Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic work were condemned by a Paris court to carry out volunteer work for a charity association.
Riposte Alimentaire calls itself a “French civil resistance movement which aims to spur a radical societal change for the environment and society.”
“We love art, but future artists will have nothing to paint on a burning planet,” it says.
In a posting on X, Lyon’s mayor, who is from an ecological party, said he “regretted the action,” but said that “in the face of climate emergencies, anguish is legitimate. We will respond with determined actions.”
It was not the first time a Monet painting has been targeted by ecologist activists. In October 2022, protesters from the German branch of Last Generation flung mash at Les Meules (The Haystacks) in a museum in Potsdam. It too was protected by glass.
In June last year, activists in Stockholm smeared red paint and glued their hands to the glass covering of Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Giverny.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant