Artists plead for activists who threw soup on a Van Gogh to be spared jail

More than 100 artists, curators and art historians are making a plea for two activists who hurled tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to be spared a jail sentence.

There was no damage to the picture, which is one of the Dutch artist’s most famous paintings and worth millions of pounds, but it did cause minor damage to the frame.

Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland will be sentenced on Friday after being found guilty of criminal damage in a protest action at the National Gallery in London in October 2022 under the auspices of the Just Stop Oil campaign.

Judge Christopher Hehir, who months ago sentenced a group of Just Stop Oil activists to multiyear sentences over a campaign to disrupt traffic on the M25, has already told them to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison”.

But artists including Fiona Banner, Peter Kennard and Love Ssega, the actor Juliet Stevenson, and arts academics from Essex, Goldsmiths, Queen Mary, New York and Copenhagen universities, have said the act was in keeping with the ethos of the arts.

In a letter coordinated by Greenpeace UK , the environmental campaign group, and Liberate Tate, which campaigns against fossil fuel industry involvement in the arts, they said: “As artists, art workers and art historians, we are concerned by the courts’ defence of a false notion of artistic purity in their judgment and sentencing.

“Art can be, and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.”

Such iconoclasm had been a recognised part of art practice for more than 120 years, they argue, citing the work of the Dadaists, Gustav Metzger, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Banksy, among others. “The work of all these iconoclasts, often far more physically destructive than the work of JSO, is now venerated in museums around the world.”

“Plummer and Holland’s protest might have given a nod to art history by using Campbell’s soup instead of Heinz,” the letter said, but it nevertheless belongs to the same “well-established tradition of creative iconoclasm”.

“On September the 27th, Judge Hehir should refrain from punishing Plummer and Holland with custodial sentences for upholding a centuries-old tradition of calling on our social conscience through art.”

Areeba Hamid, a co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: “We sincerely hope the judge will listen carefully to the artists’ arguments. We need to stop locking away peaceful protesters in our overcrowded prisons simply for raising the alarm on a burning planet.”

Darren Sutton, from Liberate Tate, said: “When Liberate Tate started making performance interventions to protest BP sponsorship of Tate in 2010, while the Deepwater Horizon disaster raged, we were dismissed as irreverent outsiders as we spilled oil-like molasses on pristine Tate marble.

“Now, 14 years on, our campaign is long won, museum and gallery directors vie for the strength of their position on tackling climate change, and all but one have shunned oil sponsorship.

“The initial reaction to soup thrown will undoubtedly shift as we as a society catch up with the threat climate change poses to our way of life. Phoebe and Anna’s act will be seen as the poetic protest it surely is, unworthy of custodial punishment.”