independent

Sunday 19 May 2013

Woman held for defacing painting

A Eugene Delacroix canvas was defaced in an extension to the Louvre

A visitor to the Louvre's newest extension, in northern France, has been detained after scrawling an inscription in marker pen on the famed canvas of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.

The 28-year-old woman was immediately seized by a guard and another visitor, then handed over to police, according to a statement from the Louvre-Lens. It said the painting should be easily cleaned.

The Louvre-Lens opened in December in Lens, a struggling coal town with an unemployment rate nearly three times the national average.

The Delacroix work is among the artist's most famous. It shows a bare-breasted woman (Liberty) holding aloft the French flag as she urges on a crowd of revolutionaries.

According to Le Figaro newspaper, the woman wrote AE911 near the bottom of the canvas.

Press Association

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