Emmanuel Macron "condemned" Monday "the act of vandalism" occurred the day before at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where a controversial work was sprayed with paint by an individual who acted alone, the president denouncing an attack "on our values". "On this May 8, when we celebrate the victory of freedom, I condemn the act of vandalism committed yesterday at the Palais de Tokyo," tweeted the head of state, who was to pay tribute to Jean Moulin and the Resistance, Monday in Lyon, after the traditional ceremony of the Victory against Nazi Germany at the Arc de Triomphe.
«
To attack a work is to attack our values. In France, art is always free and respect for cultural creation is guaranteed," added the President. Entitled Fuck abstraction!, the work by Swiss artist Miriam Cahn, exhibited since mid-February by the Parisian contemporary art center, represents a person with tied hands, forced to perform oral sex by a powerful man without a face. For his detractors, the victim is a child, which the artist denies, invoking the representation of rape as a weapon of war and crime against humanity.
" READ ALSO The painting "Fuck Abstraction", at the heart of a controversy, degraded at the Palais de Tokyo
On Sunday afternoon, a man described as elderly by a source close to the case projected purple paint on this painting, "unhappy with the sexual staging of a child and an adult represented according to him", without being part of an activist group. The associations Juristes pour l'enfance, l'Enfance en partage, Face à l'inceste and Innocence en danger, considering the child pornography table, demanded its removal but were rejected in the spring by the administrative court of Paris and then by the Council of State.
On Sunday, the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, denounced the "instrumentalization" of this case by the National Rally "to arouse controversy and attack the freedom of creation of artists" and without which, according to her, "we would certainly not have reached this point". The Palais de Tokyo said it would file a complaint and continue "to present the painting and the exhibition", which attracted 80,000 visitors, "with traces of the degradation until the scheduled end of the season, on May 14".