French Guerilla Painter Hits Paris Museums

PARIS, April 22, 2010— -- On a busy Sunday afternoon at the Louvre museum in Paris, a middle-aged Frenchman entered Room 59 of the Sully wing on the second floor of the world's most visited museum.

Furtively looking around to confirm the absence of security guards in a space dedicated to 19th century French painters, the man suddenly plunged his right hand in his leather jacket and retrieved a small, framed painting that he immediately fixed to the wall.

He hung it between paintings from renowned French artists Pierre-Paul Prud'Hon and Théodore Géricault. The painting, called "Les Oubliés" (plural of "The Forgotten"), remained on the wall until the next day, when angry museum staff removed it.

A somewhat surprised visitor had already known that something was amiss. "This is a vanitas," he told French television. "It differs from the other paintings in this room."

He was, indeed, looking at the most recent work of guerrilla artist Pascal Guerineau, who places paintings in museums to protest the rigidity of the French museum system.

"My action is for the young artists who are starving in their studio because they don't have the means to be noticed," Guerineau said.

The "forgotten" painting he hung in the Louvre was a tribute to the struggling young artists, and it was a vanitas, as the visitor noted.

Vanitas is a kind of art in which the artist uses morbid symbolic objects such as skulls, rotting food and fading flowers to remind the viewer of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death. It became prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries, primarily in the Netherlands, Flanders and France.

"I hooked two paintings showing skulls which represent death to people. It's a bit the death of the artist," he said, lamenting the treatment of unknown artists in France.

"In France, an artist has to participate in an art show to be seen by a gallery and thus to sell his work. It costs between $4,000 and $5,500 to be in an art show."