(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) French President Emmanuel Macron defended a painting that depicts child rape.
“Targeting a work of art is an attack on our values,” Macron said on Monday. “In France, art is always free and respect for artistic creation is guaranteed.”
The painting by Swiss so-called “agitpropist” Miriam Cahn entitled, “F*** abstraction,” was displayed in the Paris Museum Palais de Tokyo. The pornographic painting depicts a faceless adult orally raping a childlike figure.
Cahn defended her painting by saying that it is a condemnation of rape as a weapon of war.
Children’s rights groups didn’t buy it and regarded the work as child pornography. People repeatedly tried to take it down, citing French law that forbids public displays of “pedo-pornographic” material that “incites” predators and “puts minors in danger.”
“We don’t care that Miriam Cahn claims she’s denouncing war crimes. It doesn’t matter,” Homayra Sellier, founder of the children’s defense group Innocence in Danger, stated.
“The first impression given by this painting… is that they are children.”
A petition against the painting received roughly 14,000 signatures and several children’s rights groups, led by Lawyers for Childhood, took the matter to court in March. However, in the end, the French politicians and judges defended pedophilic painting.
“It’s very important the judge has put a clear stop to attempts at circumventing the right to freedom of expression, by way of so-called child protection,” a lawyer for the museum said of the judgment. “It shows one cannot remove an artwork from its context.”
When petitions and complaints didn’t work, Pierre Chassin, a former elected official from the rightist party Front National, bypassed the three guards protecting the painting and destroyed it with purple spray paint he had hidden in a medicine bottle on May 7.
Chassin wasn’t affiliated with an activist group.
