Three climate activists supporting Just Stop Oil have thrown tomato soup over Sunflowers (1889) and Sunflowers (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh in an exhibition of his collected works at the National Gallery in London.
Their intervention comes just one hour after two fellow Just Stop Oil protestors, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, were jailed for their own attack on one of the same paintings, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), with soup two years ago.
‘There are people in prison for demanding an end to new oil and gas,’ the activists told onlooking visitors to the gallery. ‘Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.’
Plummer, 23, was sentenced today to two years in prison, while Holland, 22, received 20 months. Plummer received the additional three months in jail for interfering in public infrastructure when taking part in a protest march last year. As he passed their sentences in court Judge Christopher Hehir said: ‘You two simply had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation.’
Yesterday an open letter signed by more than 100 artists, curators and historians made a plea for Plummer and Holland to be spared a jail sentence. Published by Greenpeace UK and Liberate Tate, which campaigns against fossil fuel industry involvement in the arts, they said: ‘Art can be, and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.’
In an address to the judge in court, Plummer stated: ‘I made the choices to take actions that I knew would likely lead to my arrest and prosecution. I made those choices because I believe that non-violent civil resistance is the best, if not the only, tool that people have in order to bring about the rapid change required to protect life from the accelerating climate emergency’.
