Iconoclasm is a fashionable subject. Art historians have always had an interest in it – the work of Dario Gamboni, Robin Cormack, Margaret Aston and Wendy Bellion immediately comes to mind – but there has recently been a flurry of scholarly activity on the history of the destruction of images. Last year David Freedberg, a specialist in early modern and contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon, published Iconoclasm, a collection of his pioneering texts on the subject. It followed on from a volume of essays, Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity (2016), edited by Kristine Kolrud and Marina Prusac, and Iconoclasm and Later Prehistory (2018), in which the archaeologist Henry Chapman takes the story back to the dawn of human culture. Iconoclasm has of course never gone away and it is often driven by religious and political imperatives similar to those that enflamed iconoclasts in eighth- and ninth-century Byzantium or sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, although now it attracts opprobrium about cultural destruction that would have perplexed them: the example of the international outrage prompted by the Taliban’s dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001 is not likely to be forgotten for a long time.

An even more topical context is provided by the widespread campaign to remove statues and other memorials to men guilty of involvement in the slave trade, which was given greater urgency in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The sight of the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston being tipped by protestors into Bristol Harbour in June 2020 seemed to many reminiscent of the assaults on images in Reformation Europe or the destruction of tombs of France’s monarchs in Saint-Denis after the French Revolution (although in the case of Colston the statue was rescued and is now in museum storage). It seems likely that the international headlines generated by that event were an encouragement for eco-activists to choose a new way of drawing attention to the global climate crisis, carrying out assaults on works of art in museums. If so, they could hardly have been more successful.

What seemed to be an isolated incident in June, when activists from Just Stop Oil (www.juststopoil.org) glued themselves to an 1860 painting by Horatio McCulloch, My heart’s in the Highlands, in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, to draw attention to their campaign for the British Government to commit to halting new fossil fuel licensing and production, has seemingly become an almost daily occurrence. Also in June, activists glued themselves to Vincent van Gogh’s Peach trees in blossom in the Courtauld Gallery, London; in July the targets were J.M.W. Turner’s Thomson’s Aeolian Harp at Manchester Art Gallery, Giampietrino’s Last Supper in the Royal Academy, London, and Constable’s The haywain in the National Gallery, London.

The National Gallery was attacked again in October, when a can of soup was thrown over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Such actions have not been confined to the United Kingdom. In August members of a German environmental group, Letzte Generation (Last Generation), glued themselves to four works in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, beginning with Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. A sign that this group was watching developments in England was that they too started throwing food: in October mashed potatoes were flung at one of Monet’s paintings of haystacks, on show at the Museum Barberini, Potsdam. In October two men glued themselves to Vermeer’s Girl with a pearl earring in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and last month members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) poured a black liquid intended to look like oil over the case containing Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life at the Leopold Museum, Vienna.

The objections to these actions are obvious: the distress caused to museum staff, the expense of clearing up the mess and, most of all, the inevitability that if this continues serious damage will be done to a work of art. But the fundamental objection is – what is the point? An argument put forward by Stacy Boldrick in Iconoclasm and the Museum (2020) that such actions potentially have the status of performance art is arguably undermined by the wearying repetitiveness of the attacks that have taken place since her book was published in 2020. [1]

The activists do not seem to be targeting museums that accept sponsorship money from oil companies – a long-running focus of understandable eco-activism – or because galleries and museums are conspicuous consumers of energy. The reasons they give for their choice of works of art to attack tend to be vague. Vandalising McCulloch’s painting was justified, it was announced, because ‘this landscape was painted in 1860 at the height of the highland clearances, when whole crofting communities were evicted by a new class of landlords ruthlessly pursuing their own private interests’, which seems of limited relevance to the climate cause, and Van Gogh was singled out, according to a statement made by the Just Stop Oil activist Anna Holland to Frieze magazine, because he ‘was a penniless artist’. At least with Turner there was an attempt at a logical justification: ‘According to flood-risk mapping carried out by Climate Central, the areas of London that are depicted in Turner’s painting could be regularly underwater as early as 2030’. It is puzzling, however, that the group Stop Fracking Around chose to object to the building of a pipeline in British Columbia by pouring maple syrup over Emily Carr’s painting Stumps and sky (1934) in Vancouver Art Gallery, since Carr was a pioneer in using art to draw attention to the destruction of the environment.

The lack of logical coherence behind these actions is made clear if they are compared with iconoclasm. Iconoclasts attack works because of what they mean, and the fact that a statue of a saint or of an eighteenth-century slave trader is also a work of art is to them meaningless or irrelevant. The eco-activists, by contrast, attack works of art not because of what they mean but simply because they are works of art, partly, it seems, because they regard art as being financially implicated in the structures of global capitalism that they deplore. However, the principal motive for their actions must be the knowledge that their acts will attract horrified publicity in a way that targeting, for example, car showrooms (as Just Stop Oil has done) never will. However, since there is no coherent link between the works of art and the cause for which they are attacked, these actions will rapidly become subject to the law of diminishing returns. Iconoclasm, like that at Saint-Denis or Bamiyan, echoes through the ages because it had deep cultural significance. Since the attack on works on art for the sake of publicising the climate crisis has no such obvious resonance, it is little more than a distraction from the vital cause that these activists serve.

[1] See the review by Thomas Stammers in this Magazine, 164 (2022), p.222.