National Gallery Director Calls Just Stop Oil Art Protests 'a Sad Thing'

Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery in London since 2015, has called the Just Stop Oil protests that targeted artworks in his museum "a sad thing" and urged activists to take their cause elsewhere.

Finaldi addressed the environmental group in a new Telegraph profile published on November 1, 2026. Between 2022 and 2024, the National Gallery was the site of three of the most public-facing actions by Just Stop Oil, the group that controversially splashed liquids across two van Gogh paintings and hammered at the display case of a Velázquez. None of the attacks caused lasting damage to the paintings themselves.

"Those attacks were very shocking," Finaldi told the Telegraph. "The pictures are not guilty. The activists were seeking front-page coverage for their cause. They know that to attack a painting gets you front-page coverage across the world, while breaking the windows of an insurance company probably doesn't."

He added: "People may have legitimate reasons to promote a particular cause. What I would say is: 'Don't come to the National Gallery to do it.'"

Where did the protest wave begin?

The National Gallery was not the only museum to suffer an environmentalist protest involving an artwork between 2022 and 2024. But it is, in many ways, the museum where the mini-movement began.

In 2022, two Just Stop Oil activists threw what appeared to be tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers (1889), one of the gallery's masterpieces, and then glued themselves to the work. The protest was said at the time to have caused roughly £10,000 in damage, primarily to the frame. The two activists subsequently received prison sentences. In 2025, the group formally ceased its protests after the UK adopted a new climate policy.

In the months after the initial 2022 demonstration, other activist groups picked up the cause. Similar protests followed at venues ranging from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to the Louvre in Paris.

What does the director's stance change for the museum?

For now, the remarks read as a verdict delivered after the fact. Just Stop Oil has ended its campaign, and the paintings survived intact. What Finaldi's comments signal is that Britain's flagship historical museum intends to frame the protests as misdirected spectacle rather than legitimate intervention, a position that could shape how the institution responds if copycat actions return.

A second controversy: the Tate agreement

Finaldi's Telegraph profile also saw him wade into another fraught issue: the increasingly vexed relationship between the National Gallery and the Tate museum network.

A formal agreement, in place for years, holds that the National Gallery's presentations do not run past the year 1900 and that the Tate museums exclusively handle modern and contemporary art. Both collections are managed by the British state.

But the National Gallery is now at work on a significant expansion that would include space for art made after 1900. Finaldi has expressed frustration about the agreement and has sought to upend it.

Noting that the "20th century is already present in the National Gallery's collection," he told the Telegraph: "We and the Tate are both part of the great national collection, and this would lead to a slight increase in the overlap of our collections. But we tell the stories in different ways, and the 20th century is quite a big century."

The expansion, backed by a reported £375 million investment plan, positions the National Gallery to compete directly with the Tate for the first time in decades. How that overlap resolves will fall to the institutions, and to the government that funds them both.