A politician from Greece’s rightwing religious Niki party has attacked four works in The National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum in Athens. The focus of Nikolaos Papadopoulos’s ire were contemporary engravings by Christophoros Katsadiotis with religious themes. The institution temporarily closed after the incident and Papadopoulos was taken away by police.
Icon 1, Icon 16, Icon 17 and Saint Christopher are all featured in the group show The Allure of the Bizarre, an exhibition that runs alongside a show of 80 engravings by Francisco Goya.
On Monday, Papadopoulos and an accomplice entered the museum and removed the works from the wall, threw them to ground and stamped on them. Previously Papadopoulos had raised what he called the artist’s blasphemy with Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni through a parliamentary question.
The Niki party hold ten seats of the 300 in the Greek parliament and advocates a fundamentalist vision of Greek Orthodox Christianity. Lawyers for Papadopoulos claimed their client was being ‘illegally held’ at the museum, citing Greek law that forbids the arrest of politicians without the permission of parliament.
Politicians from across the spectrum condemned the lawmaker’s actions. In a statement to Kathimerini, New Left said ‘the vandalism of works of art by Niki party MP Nikos Papadopoulos at the National Gallery is a brutal act of disrespect, regression and medievalism. ‘Niki, behind its supposedly Christian cloak, has shown its true face again: misanthropic, reactionary, aggressive and a danger to democracy and culture.’
