Museum Director sacked over ‘Blasphemous’ frog sculpture – and Muslim vandals attack a London art gallery

CORINNE Diserens, the head of an Italian museum who refused to buckle under Catholic pressure to remove Martin Kippenberg’s crucified frog sculpture,  “Zuerst die Fuesse” (“Feet First”) has been sacked.

The four-foot-high piece first leaped to prominence earlier this year when Franz Pahl, president of the regional government in the mountainous north-east of Italy, went on hunger strike and wound up in hospital in a protest over the frog’s appearance.

He raged:

Surely this is not a work of art but a blasphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people. This decision to keep the statue there is totally unacceptable. It is a grave offence to our Catholic population.

The Pope joined in by saying that:

It injured the religious feeling of many people who see in the cross the symbol of the love of God and of our salvation which deserves recognition and religious devotion.

And the Vatican wrote a letter of support in the Ratzinger’s name to Franz Pahl.

But Diserens, according to this report, refused to budge. She said the museum had a right to artistic freedom, and kept the frog on display as originally planned from May to September. Diserens had accused local politicians in the staunchly Catholic region of trying to exploit the issue ahead of the provincial elections.

But a majority of the museum’s board of directors disagreed and instead dismissed her this week. The official reason given by the museum was that Ms Diserens had caused a “difficult financial situation” by overspending her budget, but supporters said she was being punished for the row over the frog.

Her sacking prompted a debate on contemporary art in the German-speaking region of Alto-Adige. Said the head of a gallery in nearby Trento, Fabio Cavallucci:

The relationship between art and politics is never an easy one, but to be sacked because of one work of art is really incredible.

Museum curators maintained that Kippenberger’s frog, with its tongue out and wearing a loincloth, was a self-portrait of the artist “in a state of profound crisis” and was not an attack on the Church.

Catholics may have been outraged by the piece, but – unlike a bunch of Muslim hooligans in London – they did not go so far as to vandalise the museum.

One of Sarah Maple's 'offensive' paintings

The attack in London this week was on the SaLon gallery. It had just mounted a solo exhibition by Sarah Maple, which – according to the Independent – showed “inflammatory images of veiled Muslims, including a bare-breasted woman partially clad in a burqa”.

Windows and doors of the gallery in west London were smashed after a series of abusive, anonymous phone calls and angry protests about the images from Muslims. The gallery has complained to police.

Maple’s exhibition also features a veiled woman holding a pig, which is interpreted as a flagrant disregard of the Islamic ban on eating pork.

The show – entitled “This Artist Blows” – also includes two self-portraits: one of Maple wearing a headscarf has an image of Kate Moss’s naked breast attached to it; another shows Maple in a T-shirt bearing the slogan “I love jihad”. In another, a veiled Muslim woman wears a badge that says “I love orgasms”.