In 1914 a suffragist was linked to stab wounds with the Venus of the Mirror Velázquez at the National Gallery in London.
Stalinist communism banned Cubism, Fauvism, Impressionism, Surrealism and Abstractionism because they represented a formalist, elitist, bourgeois and cosmopolitan art that went against communist ideology and the interests of the proletariat. Socialist realism prevailed and many works were destroyed or hidden until the 1980s.
In those same 1930s the Nazis banned the degenerate art of the avant-garde accusing him of Bolshevik, Jewish, obscene, typical of the black and subjectivist. In its place, heroic realism was upheld which glorified Aryan racial values and purity. Some requisitioned works were sold abroad and others, most of them degenerate or less salable, burned in Berlin’s Köpenickerstrasse in March 1939 (I note the attention to the non-random temporal and conceptual parallelism between Communists and Nazis).
In November 1971, a group of fascists in blue berets and shirts stormed Madrid’s Theo gallery, throwing paint and acid on Picasso’s works on display. Other attacks in Madrid and Barcelona took place, including with Molotov cocktails, against galleries and bookstores that exhibited works by the Malagasy painter on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday.
In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan for offending Islam.
All the attackers had values to defend at the cost of destroying works of art, be it the vote of women, the communist revolution, Aryan racial purity, Phalangism or Islam. Now the cause is environmentalism. Three fanatical militants from the Just Stop Oil movement attacked The Pearl Girl by Vermeer in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. A few days earlier, other militants from the same organization attacked Sunflowers by Van Gogh at the National Gallery and others from the Last Generation environmental group a painting from the series millstones by Monet at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam. On 9 October it was attacked, again in the name of the climatic cause, massacre in Korea by Picasso at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In no case have the works, protected by glass, been damaged. But beware of the pull effect. These fanatical assholes have such an important cause that their defense justifies everything.
