Climate Change Demonstrator Douses Picasso with Pink Paint at Montreal Museum
159June 24, 2025
A twenty-one-year-old man affiliated with the civil resistance groupLast Generation Canadasplashed pink paint across the glass protectingPablo Picasso’s 1901L’hétaïreat theMontreal Museum of Fine Artson the morning of June 19. The work, borrowed from Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, Italy, and on view in the exhibition “Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde,” was swiftly removed from the gallery wall, and the exhibition reopened shortly thereafter. TheArt Newspaperreported that the activist, identified only as Marcel, was arrested and charged with criminal mischief under $5,000 before being released. According toThe Independent,two people who filmed the protest were detained but let go without charges.
The action recalled those that have taken place across Europe in recent years and was part of a three-week effort by Last Generation Canada to draw attention to climate change spurred by the burning of fossil fuels. As of June 22, Canada had more thanthree hundred active wildfires burning, a third of which were out of control, with more than two thousand blazes springing up across the country so far this year.
“We value paint strokes and color composition over life itself,” said Marcel in a statement. “A lot more resources have been put in place to secure and protect this artwork than to protect living, breathing people. So, what do the elite actually value? We are now facing a dilemma: to protect art made by long dead artists for no one to see, or to protect the new and future artistic geniuses for their works to be seen by our children and grandchildren. Art only flourishes when people live, not when they survive. Who in Manitoba, where wildfires have been raging, even has the time and energy right now to become the next Picasso?”
Stéphane Aquin, the museum’s director, in a statement described the institution as “deeply dismayed by this incident.” Said Aquin, “It is most unfortunate that this act carried out in the name of environmental activism targeted a work belonging to our global cultural heritage and under safekeeping for the benefit of future generations. Art is another powerful tool for social change. Museums and artists alike are allies in the fight for a better world.”
Museum officials told the Montreal Gazette that they had “found no immediate signs of damage to the painting, which was safeguarded under protective glass,” but that they would conduct a more thorough investigation into the canvas’s condition.