A trip to the National Gallery may start to resemble a journey through Heathrow, thanks to the vandalism of environmental activists. The Gallery announced yesterday that visitors will now not be allowed to bring liquids into the building, which means taking the existing checks on bags to a new level. There are already queues to get into the Gallery and now the wait to get in will take that bit longer; I wonder how warmly the visitors waiting to have their water bottles confiscated will feel about Just Stop Oil and the other environmental organisations which were behind the five attacks on pictures at the gallery since July 2022 which made the security regime necessary.
I had a taster when I went to the press view for the (excellent) new Constable exhibition this week. I went via the Fortnum’s food hall for a few bits and pieces including some pasta sauce…tomato. And it was only when I got to the bag check and the nice security guard looked at it that it dawned on me that this wasn’t the thing to bring into a gallery where anti-oil activists had chucked tins of Heinz soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers the other week.
But then, I don’t think of a visit to a gallery in the same way as international air travel where our lives are made miserable by security checks. So, I handed in the bag, got a ticket to retrieve it and learned my lesson. Did it make me want to curb my carbon emissions or vote Green? Reader, it did not. It made me want to kick a polar bear, or, better still, an environmental activist. I felt an animus against the entire cause.
That Heinz soup attack on the Sunflowers had another effect of course. It meant the gallery temporarily closing the exhibition for which people had booked tickets in advance, including, no doubt, visitors who had to travel to London to see it. In other words, it caused inconvenience, expense and vexation to people seeking harmless pleasure.
This is philistinism masquerading as environmental action
Then there was the attack on Constable’s Haywain, which is one of the best-loved pictures in the entire collection and which the new exhibition seeks to make us see afresh. What was it about this depiction of the landscape Constable called home that made it a target for soup? This is philistinism masquerading as environmental action.
The activists say that they don’t actually damage pictures or seek to. Well, are they restorers or what? As the National Museum Directors’ Council said last week: “The collections we hold are irreplaceable and with each attack we are forced to consider putting more barriers between the people and their artworks to preserve these fragile objects for future generations”.
Look, paintings that, like the Haywain, are 200 years old, aren’t just wipe-clean. They can be damaged irreparably. So can their historic frames. To protect them pictures may have to be put behind layers of glass, which actually stops the viewer looking at them properly. You have to shift to avoid the glare.
Two Just Stop Oil campaigners, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, were jailed in September after being convicted of criminal damage for throwing, yes, tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers 1888 and 1889 works in October 2022 in the gallery – yep, the very same pictures that fellow activists attacked at the gallery an hour after the sentence was passed. (What have they got against Van Gogh?)
Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years in prison for causing an estimated £10,000 of damage to the frame. Her co-defendant, Anna Holland, 22, received 20 months for the same offence. One of the attackers declared that ““Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history”. No, they won’t, mate. They’ll think of these smug entitled young women as enemies of art.
The National Gallery, now celebrating its bicentenary, is actually making heroic efforts to make more people come to the gallery, including groups that don’t normally visit. The new Constable exhibition, for instance, is free. So while they’re trying to make their work more accessible, they’ve got to set up security checks which will actually make a visit less inviting. Their security costs will go up and so, no doubt, will their insurance. Is that what counts as a win for Just Stop Oil?
