Tea at Trianon: Climate Activists Throw Oil on Klimt Painting

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 18, 2022

Climate Activists Throw Oil on Klimt Painting

Even the Soviets respected great art. From Art News:

Climate activists in Vienna took to the Leopold Museum, where they splashed oil on a treasured Gustav Klimt painting. The work itself was not damaged. The gesture is one of a string of recent ones intended to push governments across the world to take quicker action to combat the effects of climate change. Past actions have seen tomato soup hurled at a van Gogh in London, mashed potatoes tossed at a Monet in Germany, and maple syrup spilled on an Emily Carr in Vancouver. The action on Tuesday was done by Letzte Generation, the Germany-based group that also conducted the Monet action. (Read more.)