US museum condemns use of its art by German far-right party

An American art museum is demanding that a German far-right party stop using one of its paintings, portraying a 19th-century slave auction, in a campaign poster for the European elections.

"We are strongly opposed to the use of this work to advance any political agenda," Olivier Meslay, the director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, told The Associated Press.

"We did not supply the painting to the AfD," he said, using the acronym for the party Alternative for Germany.

The 1866 oil-on-canvas painting "Slave Market," by Jean-Leon Gerome, shows a black, apparently Muslim slave trader displaying a naked young woman with much lighter skin to a group of men for examination.

The AfD's Berlin branch said they put up 30 posters of the painting across the German capital with the slogan: "So that Europe won't become Eurabia."
Meslay said the museum had written to the party "insisting that they cease and desist in using this painting."
However, he acknowledged, the painting is in the public domain and "there are no copyrights or permissions that allow us to exert control over how it is used other than to appeal to civility on the part of the AfD Berlin."
A spokesman for the Berlin branch of the AfD called the museum's request "a futile attempt to gag the AfD."