A Punch and a Kiss

For all its whining about national treasures being parceled out to Abu Dhabi, France sure isn't doing a good job of protecting the art that's actually in the country.

Early yesterday, someone punched a four-inch-long hole in Claude Monet's The Argenteuil Bridge (1874) after breaking into the Musée d'Orsay with what are believed to be four drunken accomplices. They may have been revelers of the White Night, an annual arts and music festival.

Taking into account the other indignities art on French soil has suffered of late, this is just embarrassing.

In August, thieves raided the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice and made off with four canvases, including Monet's Cliffs near Dieppe and Alfred Sisley's The Lane of Poplars at Moret. It wasn't the first time these paintings had been lifted: The Monet and Sisley were stolen from the same museum in 1998 in a heist masterminded by its own curator and two accomplices; the Sisley had also been taken from Marseille twenty years earlier. August's theft was not even a month after a woman kissed a Cy Twombly painting on view at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, leaving a lipstick smudge on the white canvas — she was reportedly overcome by the beauty of the work. And last year a man assaulted a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp's original urinal from 1917 with a hammer at the Pompidou Centre after urinating on the same piece at an exhibition in 1993 — he claimed he was staging a piece of performance art.

Repeat offenders and multiple thefts of the same paintings — Christine Albanel has some explaining to do.