France, feminists mark Courbet's Origine du Monde with paint. One work also stolen

Five works marked with paint and one stolen yesterday, at 1:50 p.m., at the Centre Pompidou in Metz, a provincial branch of the large Paris museum: some feminist activists in fact went to the museum and, while some of them “created a diversion with the security staff,” the museum informs, others broke into the halls, where the exhibition Lacan is underway. Quand l’art rencontre la psychanalyse (“Lacan. When art meets psychoanalysis,” dedicated to the great psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his relationship with art) by affixing the inscription “Metoo” to five works, including Gustave Courbet’s celebrated L’origine du monde , on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The other vandalized works are by Louise Bourgeois, Rosemarie Trockel, Valie Export and Deborah De Robertis. The work that was stolen after being vandalized like the others, however, is by Annette Messager.

All works are currently under observation by restorers to see if they have been damaged. An investigation has also been opened. The gesture was then avenged, with a video posted on her social channels, by Deborah De Robertis herself, a Luxembourgian artist who is no stranger to this kind of provocation, which curiously had already targeted Courbet’s masterpiece in the past: in fact, it was 2014 when De Robertis stripped beneath L’Origine du Monde at the Musée d’Orsay. On the 10-year anniversary of that provocation, the artist decided to commemorate the anniversary in his own way. “I organized a performance at the Pompidou Metz center,” she wrote on Instagram. “I reappropriated the Annette Messager piece whose owner is Bernard Marcadé, the curator of the exhibition. For the occasion I diverted its initial message ’Let’s not separate the woman from the artist.’ I consider this work mine, she owes it to me.” De Robertis added, “the works were neither vandalized nor damaged, as the ’paint’ erases in a second and without damage, which I made sure of. Director Chiara Parisi and exhibition curators Bernard Marcadé and Marie-Laure Bernadac say they are shocked and condemn my performance. Does that shock you? And do you condemn it?”

De Robertis is currently wanted, while two other young people who took part in the action, a 31-year-old and a 37-year-old, were arrested in flagrante delicto. The two have no priors and are not from Metz, the French city’s prosecutor’s office specified.

“With all the respect we have for feminist movements,” commented Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre Pompidou Metz, “we are shocked to see the works of artists vandalized, particularly feminist artists, who are at the center of the struggles of art history. We condemn acts of vandalism against works of art preserved and presented in museums.”

Metz Mayor François Grosdidier said, “A criminal act against an important work of our heritage. I condemn with the utmost vigor this new attack against culture, this time produced by feminist fanatics.” Words of condemnation also came from French Culture Minister Rachida Dati: “To the ’activists’ who think that art is not powerful enough on its own to carry a message, it must be said again: a work is not a sign that can color the message of the day. Total support for the museums and teams that are victims of these attacks. We will continue to protect the works against the new iconoclasts.”

For the rest of the day on Monday, the museum remained closed to the public. Today it will remain closed for its normal weekly closing day, and staff hope to reopen as early as tomorrow.

Feminist action at the Centre Pompidou

Feminist action at the Centre Pompidou

Feminist action at theidou Metz

France, feminists mark Courbet's Origine du Monde with paint. One work also stolen

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