By Shirley Farmer 
Two weeks ago, two Just Stop Oil activists threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Twelve Sunflower in a Vase, which is on display at the National Gallery in London. Objective: To put an end to new oil or gas exploration projects in the UK.
The Just Stop Oil movement, known for wanting the British government to order an immediate termination of any new oil or gas project, has drawn attention specifically to directing its work against artworks in museums.
What is more important, art or life? Are they more concerned with protecting the business than protecting the planet and people? They denounced that “millions of hungry, cold families cannot buy oil, and cannot even heat a can of soup.”
But the most curious thing is to understand who is behind these organizations. That is, who finances it directly. According to El Confidencial, the Just Stop Oil group’s funding comes from the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), an organization founded in 2019 by wealthy Americans in Los Angeles.
Although it has opened a donation channel – with 323 donors and has raised just over £2,000 since working against the painting – the group receives money from this organization which, according to its official website, has distributed up to four million dollars to 39 activist groups. . Brave and ambitious. In addition to Just Stop Oil, CEF has also funded the Extincton Rebellion and Insulate Britain.
Who is Eileen Getty?
According to the Spanish newspaper, one of the promoters is Aileen Getty, who also launched the Aileen Getty Foundation, on whose website you can read that one of her concerns is the climate. The businesswoman is the daughter of John Paul Getty Jr., a philanthropist and millionaire, and the granddaughter of John Paul Getty, one of the richest men ever and founder of Getty Oil. John Paul’s father, George Franklin Getty, was a pioneer in the American petrochemical industry. So we are faced with a contradictory family: while the grandfather has set up an oil drilling company, the granddaughter wants to close it.
In addition to the oil trade, the family is among the largest art collectors in the art world. His grandfather, John Paul, established the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and at the time of his death in 1976, he inherited the $661 million foundation.
According to the CEF website, Eileen Getty, 65, “has devoted most of her time and resources to supporting projects focused on providing urgent solutions to the climate emergency.”
In addition, he has supported many causes, including housing – he has founded Gettlove, a non-profit organization “created to locate, host, and maintain homes for the countless homeless people who are part of the Los Angeles community.” The heiress also belongs to several non-profit associations, such as the Foundation for AIDS Research, and is an ambassador for the Elizabeth Taylor Foundation for AIDS Control.
The daughter of Jean Paul Getty II and his first wife Abigail Harris, her childhood was marked by the presence of drugs in the house and the kidnapping of her older brother in Rome by the Calabrian Mafia in 1973. His grandfather agreed only to give a portion of the ransom money (and at cost), claiming that the payment of the amount requested by the kidnappers of He would encourage other acts of the same kind, and he imposed benefits upon his son for the rest of his life. John Paul was eventually released without permission. The nightmare did not end, and at the age of twenty-five the boy had a stroke that left him weak forever.
In interviews, Eileen Getty revealed that she was sexually assaulted by her mother’s partner.
At the University of Southern California, she became interested in humanitarian issues – she was active in protests against the Vietnam War – but also in sex and drugs, especially cocaine. According to El Mundo, the businesswoman is currently free of all vices.
Demonstrations like the one recorded at the London gallery were seen around the world, where activists turned to works with artwork to protest. In July, for example, these same activists framed a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper at the Royal Academy of Art in London, and John Constable The Hay Wain, another icon in the National Gallery. Three days before the ‘tomato bath’ in a Van Gogh painting, activists from Extinction Rebellion – another climate protest movement – stormed the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, sticking their hands to the massacre in Korea, by Pablo Rassam.
In August, two other activists from German subsidiary Generation Letzte glued themselves to a Sistine Madonna frame by Italian artist Raphael Sanzio at the Old Masters Painting Gallery in Dresden, Germany. In Italy, two activists from Ultima Generazione – the Italian branch of Extinction Rebellion – knocked out a statue of Laocoon in the Vatican Museums. In July, they did the same with a spring glass by Sandro Botticelli, at the Galleria dos Ophisios, in Florence.