According to NBC News, two protesters were detained after throwing mashed potatoes at a Claude Monet painting in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.
After conducting a “immediate conservation investigation,” the museum tweeted that the Monet painting “Grainstacks,” which was the target of the protest, had not been harmed. The two were ultimately accused of trespassing and causing property damage.
Grainstacks, according to Reuters, was auctioned off in 2019 for a record-breaking $110.7 million.
The incident was caused by the Last Generation, a German environmental activist group. If it takes a painting—with #MashedPotatoes or #TomatoSoup thrown at it—to remind society that the use of fossil fuels is harming us all, so be it, the tweet concludes. “Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting.”
“While I understand the activists’ urgent concern in the face of the climate catastrophe, I am shocked by the means with which they are trying to lend weight to their demands,” Ortrud Westheider, director of Museum Barberini, said in a statement, obtained by USA Today. “It is in the works of the Impressionists that we see the intense artistic engagement with nature.”