Activist Deborah de Robertis, who tagged “Me Too” on five works on display at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, including Gustave Courbet’s painting “L’origine du monde”, has just been indicted.
Militant damage
The French-Luxembourg artist who claims to be behind the action at the beginning of May at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where five works, including Courbet’s painting “L’origine du monde”, were tagged and another stolen, has just been indicted, according to the Metz public prosecutor’s office.
She has been charged with “deliberate degradation or deterioration of cultural property” as well as theft of cultural property as part of a group, the magistrate said.
At a time when Judith Godrèche is moving the film world, Déborah de Robertis is shocking the art world, where the Me Too revolution is not widespread. Controversial, Déborah de Robertis is kept at arm’s length by her peers, who disqualify her artistic excesses and her position as a victim.
Embroidery by Annette Messager
To justify her action, the performer posted a seventeen-minute video on Vimeo, shot some ten years earlier. The film is presented as an “artistic work” and has since been removed from the platform.
It reveals the artist’s intimate relationship with Bernard Marcadé at the time. He, dressed on the bed. She, naked behind the camera. The exchange is raw. “I want you to suck me. It’s the only thing that will give me a hard-on”, says the art historian, before the camera zooms in on an embroidery by Annette Messager, hanging above her bed.
“Being placed in police custody is totally disproportionate”
Deborah de Robertis had claimed to have “reappropriated” this embroidery by Annette Messager, which came from the personal collection of an art critic who was also curator of the “Lacan, quand l’art rencontre la psychanalyse” exhibition.
Deborah de Robertis reacted: “To be placed in police custody and indicted for using my artistic freedom and my freedom of expression is completely disproportionate.” Alongside her action at the museum, she had filed a report with the Paris public prosecutor’s office against several men in the contemporary art world, describing them as “calculators”, “predators” or “censors”.
A series of militant actions
Painted in 1866, the “Origin of the World” depicts a woman’s sex. Entering the Musée d’Orsay collections in 1995, it was loaned to the Centre Pompidou-Metz as part of an exhibition dedicated to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who was its last private owner.
Back in 2014, Deborah de Robertis posed half-naked, thighs spread, beneath L’Origine du monde (1866) at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The aim was to denounce the place of women in the art world. The Franco-Luxembourg artist was given a reminder of the law after a few hours in police custody.
Fined for stripping naked in front of the Lourdes grotto in 2018, Deborah de Robertis was released after other similar actions, notably in 2017 for showing her sex at the Louvre museum in front of “La Joconde”.