The United Kingdom has entered a delicate phase of protests and confrontations in the street, and the direct victim of this state of tension has been a masterpiece by the baroque painter Diego Velázquez. Two members of the environmental movement Just Stop Oil, an organization that opposes the use of fossil fuels, broke the glass that protects the painting this Monday morning with hammer blows. The Venus of the mirror which is exhibited in the National Gallery in London. The art gallery is analyzing the status of the work.
This same Monday it was leaked to some media that the Conservative Government of Rishi Sunak, whose Government program for this electoral year will be known this Tuesday in Parliament through the King’s Speech, has decided to grant new hydrocarbon exploration and drilling licenses in the North Sea. After the decision, adopted last month, to delay several of the government’s commitments against climate change, environmental organizations have increased their confrontation with Downing Street.
At the same time that the act of vandalism occurred in the London art gallery, dozens of activists from the same organization, Just Stop Oil, were arrested nearby, on Whitehall Avenue. They were protesting with a slow march that had hindered traffic on the street where most ministries and government buildings are concentrated. In the middle of the route there is also the cenotaph that commemorates those who fell in the wars waged by the United Kingdom.
The activists who entered the museum, aged 20 and 22, carried out the action dressed in t-shirts from their organization, which demands the halt of new oil and gas projects to stop climate change. “Politics is failing us,” they said to justify the attack shortly before sitting on the ground waiting to be arrested, “millions of people are going to die.”
The two young people have linked their action with another attack suffered by the same work in 1914, when the painting was hit with an ax by the Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson, who was protesting the imprisonment of another feminist in the United Kingdom. “Women did not obtain the right to vote through the ballot box. Now is the time to move from words to actions,” shouted one of the members of Just Stop Oil.
After the attack, the staff of the National Gallery have made the rest of the visitors leave the room that contains the painting, painted around the year 1650 and considered the only remaining nude of the Spanish baroque painter, they have detained the environmentalists until the arrival of the police, and has proceeded to remove the painting, which is being examined by the museum’s conservators.
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Last year, Just Stop Oil activists poured tomato soup on Sunflowers of Van Gogh in the same museum, an action that did not cause damage to the work, which was also covered with safety glass. That protest was followed by other similar ones in various art galleries around the world, including the Prado Museum in Madrid by members of Futuro Vegetal. Just Stop Oil usually directs its actions against drivers, blocking traffic.
Sunak’s Government faces a week of tension on the streets. Next Saturday the Remembrance Day (Remembrance Day), the closest thing the United Kingdom has to a National Holiday. Several ministers have demanded that the London Metropolitan Police ban the demonstration in favor of Palestine and against the bombing of Gaza scheduled for that day. It would be the fourth consecutive weekend with protests of this type, which have seen the number of people participating in them increase exponentially.
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