The famous painting death and life by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was sprayed with a black liquid by climate activists on Tuesday, the Leopold Museum in Vienna announced.
“Restorers are working to determine if the painting protected by ice has been damaged,” spokesman Klaus Pokorny told AFP.
The group “Letzte Generation” (Last generation), which brings together German and Austrian activists, took responsibility for the action on Twitter by posting images.
We see two men vandalizing the work, one sticking his hand to the window, before being neutralized by an employee. “Stop the destruction (of humanity) by fossil fuels. We are rushing into climatic hell,” they shouted.
Admission was free on Tuesday as part of a day sponsored by the Austrian oil group OMV.
This group defines itself as “the first generation to feel the onset of climate collapse — and the last to still be able to stop it”.
In recent weeks, environmental activists have multiplied actions around the world targeting works of art to alert public opinion to global warming.
For example, they stuck their hands on a painting by Goya in Madrid or on the famous serigraphy Campbell’s Soup of Andy Warhol exposed in Australia, projected tomato soup on The sunflowers of Van Gogh in London and smeared mashed potatoes on a masterpiece by Claude Monet in Potsdam, near Berlin.
If the paintings remained unscathed, the incident of the Sunflowers resulted in slight damage to the frame of the canvas.
Nearly a hundred international museums, such as the Prado in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, or the Guggenheim Museum in New York, declared themselves last week “deeply shocked by (the) reckless endangerment” of these works ” irreplaceable”.