Police arrested two German protesters who threw mashed potatoes Sunday at the famous Claude Monet painting, „Les Meules”, that once sold for over $110 million.
Authorities said they are investigating the protesters, whom police did not name, for property damage and trespassing after the incident at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam.
An „immediate conservation investigation” found that the painting sustained no damage from the stunt, as it lies behind a layer of protective glass, the museum said in a statement on Twitter. The painting will be back on display by Wednesday, the museum added.
A Brandenburg police spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about why the protesters were being investigated for property damage given that the painting was unharmed.
Video posted to the Twitter account of the Last Generation, the German climate group that claimed responsibility, shows two protesters hurling mashed potatoes at the painting and then kneeling in front of it and seeming to glue their hands to the wall.
The stunt was similar to one this month at London’s National Gallery, where two protesters from the U.K. group Just Stop Oil threw what appeared to be tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers,” which sold for nearly $40 million in 1987, to protest the country’s cost-of-living crisis. That painting was also behind protective glass and unharmed, according to the museum.
On Sunday, the German activists referred to the U.K. protest as they carried out their own.
„We are in a climate catastrophe. And all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a painting”, one of the protesters says, according to an English-subtitled version of the video.
Last week, activists from Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London.
