On April 27, 2023, two protestors walked into the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and smeared black and red paint on the Plexiglas case housing Edgar Degas’s famed Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878-1881). Sitting on the floor in front of the sculpture, the protestors suggested that its young subject was symbolic of all children who would suffer the consequences of government inaction on climate change.

Little Dancer was just one of many works of art defaced by climate protestors in a series of uncoordinated attacks throughout the Western world that began in summer 2022 and continue to this day. Just last week, activists threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery of Art in London.

We turned to art history professor Nika Elder to shed more light on this topic.

Why are climate activists attacking art? What is the history behind this practice, and does it spark change?

The history of iconoclasm can help put these protests—as well as their failure to marshal support for their cause—into perspective. Since ancient times, people have attacked works of art as symbols of their ideological opponents and enemies. Initially the practice targeted icons for religious reasons, but, by the modern era, its focus became political adversaries.

In 1776, a crowd in New York City removed an equestrian statue of George III from its pedestal. In the wake of the Civil War, freed people disfigured and repurposed portraits of planters and enslavers. In 1974, artist and activist Tony Shafrazi spraypainted “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica to protest Nixon’s release of a man convicted for his role in the My Lai Massacre. And, as recently as 2020, among other official and unofficial actions executed in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, British protestors removed a statue of slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it into Bristol Harbour. In each of these cases, protestors targeted works of art that depicted their political enemies. (In Shafrazi’s case the target was war itself, whose horrors Guernica had come to symbolize.)

Paintings and sculptures in museums throughout the Western world have become the most recent targets in this long history of iconoclasm. What sets apart the actions of contemporary climate activists from most earlier instances of iconoclasm is their focus on paintings that represent the subject that they are so desperately trying to defend. 

In addition to well-known masterpieces like the Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and The Scream, many of the paintings that they defaced were depictions of the natural world: works such as Monet’s Haystacks, Constable’s The Hay Wain, and Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom and The Sower.

The attacks were meant to urge the public to ask themselves why they are more concerned about paintings of landscapes than about nature itself. But, by all accounts, their efforts failed; their actions alienated the public rather than drawing them to their cause. 

Rather than their enemies, the activists targeted their allies. For hundreds of years, works of art—Constable’s Hay Wain among them—have drawn attention to the environmental and human consequences of unchecked industry, climate change, and their consequences. To decipher their messages and heed their warnings, the activists should have given them the same attention and care that they would like to see the public grant the people and places that the paintings represent.

About Professor Nika Elder

Nika Elder specializes in North American art from the colonial period to the present, including African-American art and the history of photography. Her current research and courses examine the mutually constitutive relationship between art and race throughout modern American history. Her first book, William Harnett’s Curious Objects: Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War (2022, University of California Press), charts the politics of painting in the Gilded Age. She is currently at work on a new project that locates and interprets the work of 18th-century Anglo-American painter John Singleton Copley in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to these book projects, Prof. Elder has published essays on contemporary artists Lorna Simpson (Art Journal, spring 2018), Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson (The Routledge Companion to African American Art).

Her research has been supported by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Wyeth Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. From 2022-2024, she is serving as Field Editor for American Art for caa.reviews, and she was chair of the 2023 Feminist Art History Conference at American University.

For more on Prof. Elder's research and teaching, see her website.

Image: Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878-1881. Pigmented beeswax, clay, metal armature, rope, paintbrushes, human hair, silk and linen ribbon, cotton faille bodice, cotton and silk tutu, linen slippers, on wooden base, 38 15/16 x 13 11/16 x 13 7/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1999.80.28.