The Year in Review: When the Soup Hits the Van Gogh

Clause 40 of the Magna Carta reads: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.’ Written in 1215, it established a basic principle of British society – that each of us has inalienable rights, and that no one should be deprived of freedom without due process.

In May this year, at the British Library in London, Sue Parfitt, an 82-year-old retired reverend, and Judy Bruce, an 85-year-old former biology teacher, took a hammer and chisel to the protective casing used to exhibit one of the original copies of the Magna Carta. Unable to smash the tensile glass, the Just Stop Oil protestors left us guessing at their actions if they had broken through. Would they have ripped pages from the sacred constitutional text to make a point about climate change?

The sight of these gentle, ageing British women doing such a thing was jarring, yet it exemplified a trend of 2024. Attacks on artworks and cultural artefacts have become more frequent and more severe. Museums, in response, have become less trusting of their visitors, while the authorities have assumed a punitive stance. Parfitt and Bruce now await trial under the laws that the Magna Carta helped to secure. They will be free to have their say in court but can expect to be severely punished.

An increasingly hostile and jaded media has pushed demonstrators into an attention-seeking spiral: they are reaching for ever-more absurd methods to elicit the same reaction. Pureed food remains in vogue; tomato soup and mashed potato have all been slung at iconic works of art and historical artefacts. Glue has become a leitmotif. But now tools – or weapons – are entering the arena.

Climate activists who do not resort to such direct-action tactics have long urged the museum sector to divest from fossil fuel sponsorships without success.

On September 27, two Just Stop Oil activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, both in their early 20s, were sentenced to prison for throwing soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) at the National Gallery in London in 2022. Within an hour of their conviction, fellow activists from Just Stop Oil entered the National Gallery and threw soup over two Sunflowers paintings. 

On October 17, campaigners from another group, Youth Demand, entered the same gallery to paste an image of a Palestinian woman and her child over Pablo Picasso’s Motherhood (1901), as a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza. The gallery responded by banning virtually all liquids. To enter, visitors must now pass through metal detectors. In a statement, the National Museum Directors’ Council supported the move, calling it a necessary step to safeguard art in the current climate. Such attacks, the council said, are ‘hugely damaging’. 

This is not, it should be noted, a UK-specific issue. In June, climate activists from Riposte Alimentaire splurged adhesive over Claude Monet’s Coquelicots (Poppies, 1873) at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In January, they also threw soup over Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c.1503–06) in the Louvre. In February, they attacked another Monet painting, Springtime (1872), at the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts.

Direct action against art is not new. In 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson slashed the canvas of Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus (1647–51) in the National Gallery to protest the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst. Other suffragettes targeted artefacts at the British Museum and the Royal Academy, seeking to publicise a cause deprioritised by the establishment: women’s right to vote.

Activists have repeatedly cited this precedent. Indeed, The Rokeby Venus – now behind glass – was attacked with a hammer in November 2023 by Just Stop Oil, who claim that the existential threat posed by climate change justifies such actions. And given that the scientific community who warn us that humanity is at a tipping point continue to be ignored, perhaps provocative acts of creative protest are necessary in this age of spectacle. Defiling visions of beauty guarantees headlines, with the symbolism of the attacks using the capriciousness of the news cycle against itself.

What’s more, museums are compromised, often tied to fossil-fuel sponsorships or elite patronage. The Science Museum only ended its six-year relationship with the Adani Group in July, shortly before the company’s founder, Gautam Adani, was charged with bribery, fraud and corruption. The British Museum maintains its relationship with British Petroleum (BP) to this day.

All institutions, cultural or otherwise, need to have their feet held to the fire.

Pursue this line of thought and cultural spaces can emerge as legitimate targets. Throwing a can of soup might initially seem petty and myopic – a narcissistic spasm of performative vandalism – but it can equally be read as a critique of culture’s complicity in predatory capitalism. 

Climate activists who do not resort to such direct-action tactics have long urged the museum sector to divest from fossil fuel sponsorships without success. The British Museum’s relationship with BP dates to 1996 and seems set to continue for at least another generation. Such partnerships with fossil-fuel companies clearly undermine the national drive for sustainable policies and tarnish the reputation of museums as stewards of cultural heritage. This contradiction – loudly proclaiming educational and cultural values while quietly accepting funding from parasitic corporations – should be highlighted. All institutions, cultural or otherwise, need to have their feet held to the fire.

We face uncomfortable truths. The climate crisis is deepening; the science is clear on that. The status quo must change. As we enter 2025, do not expect these protests to disappear. Instead, we must ask once again: under the rule of law, what acts of defiance can we endure in the defence of our future?

^{Main image: Just Stop Oil protestors at the National Gallery, London, 2024. Courtesy and photograph: Just Stop Oil}