[MSN] Call for tougher penalties for art vandals. The French Culture Minster has called for stronger sanctions against those who desecrate cultural sites and works of art after intruders broke in to the Musee d'Orsay and damaged a work by the impressionist painter Claude Monet.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Call for tougher penalties for art vandals
October 9, 2007

PARIS: The French Culture Minster has called for stronger sanctions against those who desecrate cultural sites and works of art after intruders broke in to the Musee d'Orsay and damaged a work by the impressionist painter Claude Monet.

It is the latest in a series of acts of vandalism and thefts at cultural sites in France, and the minister, Christine Albanel, said she would also seek improved security at these sites.

Ms Albanel said the intruders had left a tear almost 10 centimetres long in the painting, Le Pont d'Argenteuil or The Argenteuil Bridge, painted in 1874. The break-in was "an attack against our memory and our heritage". she told Radio France.

"It would be good a thing to increase the sanctions for [people who vandalise] a church, a museum, a monument, because they are attacking our history," she said.

The intruders, believed to be four men and a woman, appeared drunk and "left various bits of filth" before "one of them stuck a fist into the magnificent masterpiece by Monet", she said.

The alarms sounded and museum personnel arrived quickly, but the intruders fled. The painting could be restored, she said.

The break-in at the Orsay, which houses a major collection of Impressionist art, happened during a yearly all-night festival of arts and music, the White Night, when thousands of people pour into the streets of Paris.

The break-in highlights the vulnerability of institutions and monuments, where there has been a spate of thefts and vandalism. Objects including plates and chalices for Communion were stolen from the Cathedral of St Jean the Baptist in Perpignan last month, and a woman is due to go on trial this week for kissing a painting by the US artist Cy Twombly that was on show in Avignon. She left lipstick smudges on the otherwise immaculate white canvas.

In February, a court upheld a suspended prison term for a self-proclaimed performance artist who attacked with a hammer the 1917 surrealist work Fountain - a urinal by Marcel Duchamp - at the Pompidou Centre in Paris early last year.

Monet's Cliffs near Dieppe was among four paintings stolen in August when an armed gang broke into the Fine Arts Museum in Nice. French museums hold about 100 works by Monet.

http://www.smh.com.au