Paris:

A top French museum has filed a police complaint after two women spray-painted a famous 19th-century painting by Gustave Courbet which it had loaned to another gallery, official said Friday.

The women have been charged with spraying the words “MeToo” on “The Origin of the World”, a nude painted by French artist Courbet, and four other works.

The 1866 painting was on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris to the Pompidou-Metz in the northeastern city of Metz. It was protected by a glass pane on which the words were scrawled.

“Stained with red paint, the work was taken down for examination by a qualified restorer. The frame has received numerous splashes of paint that could have lasting marks even after restoration,” the Musee d’Orsay said in a statement, adding that it had “filed a complaint”.

The museum said the painting would not return to the Metz exhibition that closes in May.

Metz prosecutor Yves Badorc said five works had been sprayed with the words “MeToo” and one was stolen.

French-Luxembourg performance artist Deborah de Robertis told AFP she organised the operation carried out by two other people, as part of a performance titled: “You Don’t Separate the Woman from the Artist”.

In a video sent to AFP by de Robertis, one woman tagged Courbet’s work with red paint and then a second sprays another. They then chant “MeToo” before being dragged away by security guards.

In an open letter, de Robertis denounced the behaviour of six men in the art world, describing them as “predators” and “censors”.

De Robertis said they had also seized an embroidery work by French artist Annette Messager as “reappropriation”.

The prosecutor said a third person — who was not arrested — could have been behind the disappearance of the 1991 Messager work titled “I Think Therefore I Suck”.

De Robertis has a work on display at the venue in Metz — a photograph of a 2014 performance at the Musee d’Orsay in which she posed naked underneath Courbet’s painting.

A French court in 2020 ordered de Robertis to pay a 2,000-euro ($2,150) fine for appearing naked in 2018 in Lourdes in southwest France, a Catholic pilgrimage site for those who believe the Virgin Mary appeared there.

She has also shown herself naked in front of the “Mona Lisa” painting at the Louvre in Paris.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Impression, Sunrise by French painter Claude Monet on display at the Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism show in Paris.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Orsay Museum in Paris is marking 150 years of Impressionism from March 26 with an unprecedented reassembling of the masterpieces that launched the movement, and a virtual reality experience that takes visitors back in time.

Using VR technology, visitors to Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism can take a plunge into the streets, salons and beauty spots that marked a revolution in art.

Through VR helmets, they can walk alongside the likes of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne on April 15, 1874, when, tired of being rejected by the conservative gatekeepers of the official art Salon, these rebellious young painters put on their own independent show, later seen as the birth of Impressionism.

Strong ‘impression’

The Orsay has brought together 160 paintings from that year, including dozens of masterpieces from that show, including the blood-red sun of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, credited with giving the movement its name, and his Boulevard des Capucines where the exhibition took place.

In rapid, spontaneous brushstrokes, the Impressionists captured everyday scenes of modern life, from Degas’s ballet dancers to Camille Pissaro’s countryside idylls to Auguste Renoir’s riverside party in Bal du Moulin de la Galette.

They came to define the excitement and restlessness of a new, modern age emerging out of a devastating war with Prussia and a short-lived Parisian revolt a few years earlier. “The Impressionists wanted to paint the world as it is, one in the midst of major change,” said Sylvie Patry, co-curator of the exhibition.

“They were interested in new subjects: railways, tourism, the world of entertainment… They wanted to put sensations, impressions, the immediate moment at the heart of their painting,” she added.

Thanks to loans from the National Gallery in Washington and other museums, it is the first time that many of the paintings — including Renoir’s The Parisian Girl and The Dancer — have hung together in 150 years.

Rejecting ‘tradition’

The exhibition also includes works from that year’s official Salon, showing how the Impressionists rejected the stiff formalism of traditionalists and their obsession with great battles and mythological tales, but also how there was some cross-over, as all sorts of painters gradually adopted new styles.

“The story of that exhibition is more nuanced than we think,” said Ms. Patry. “The artists all knew each other and had begun painting in this different style from the 1860s.”

Impressionism did not take off immediately: only some 3,500 people came to the first show, compared with 3,00,000 to the Salon, and only four paintings were sold out of some 200 works. It would take several more exhibitions in the following years for the movement to make its mark.

The Orsay exhibition runs to July 14 and moves to Washington from September.