A performance artist scrawled “Me Too” in bright red paint over several works of art in a French gallery Monday — including an iconic 19th-century female nude — in a stunt ripped as a “criminal act” by “feminist fanatics.”
French-Luxembourgish artist Deborah de Robertis and a second, unidentified woman raced around the Centre Pompidou-Metz tagging at least five artworks, including Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” which depicts the lower half of a nude woman with her vulva exposed.
Shocking video footage shared by de Robertis showed the pair running past stunned museum-goers and then chanting “Me Too” as baffled-looking staffers looked on.
As well as Courbet’s 1866 painting, the duo also scrawled over a work by Louise Bourgeouis and de Robertis’ own photograph, titled “Mirror of Origin,” according to a statement from the museum.
However, all five were protected by glass panes and were not permanently damaged, a museum spokesperson told Agence France-Presse.
The museum also claimed that an embroidery by Annette Messager was taken during the stunt — which De Robertis later admitted taking.
“I am in possession of Annette Messager’s work which I have reappropriated and which is now mine,” she wrote on X of the 1991 embroidery titled “I Think Therefore I Suck.”
The women were eventually dragged away by security and arrested, though it was not clear if they were formally charged.
“I am the sole organizer of this performance and am waiting to be summoned by the police who know who my lawyer is,” de Robertis said on X early Tuesday.
The protest was to highlight the “misogynistic divide” in the art world, De Robertis said, according to the Art Newspaper.
The stunt, however, was quickly slammed by officials, including museum director Chiara Parisi, who said the institution was “shocked” by De Robertis’ actions.
“To ‘activists’ who think that art is not powerful enough to carry a message alone … An artwork is not a poster to color in with the day’s message,” French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati seethed on X.
Metz mayor François Grosdidier wrote that he was “outraged” by the incident, and called the decision to target the Courbet painting specifically “a criminal act against a major work of our heritage” by “feminist fanatics.”
Completed in 1866, “The Origin of the World” is currently on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the Centre Pompidou-Metz for an exhibition on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who owned the painting from 1955 until his death in 1981 .
De Robertis has a long history of appropriating famous artworks in her own demonstrations: She famously targeted “The Origin of the World” for the first time in 2014, when she when she sat on the floor in front of the frame and exposed herself by mimicking the subject’s pose, the Independent reported.
Two years later, she caused a stir by laying down in front of another famous 19th-century nude – Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” – with a camera around her neck.
In 2020, De Robertis was fined over $2,000 for appearing naked in front of a cave in the French pilgrimage town of Lourdes in southwestern France, the AFP added.
