White marble and black plaster. A look back at a case of iconoclasm

At the beginning of this year, La Tribune de l’Art published an article devoted to two figures by the Liège sculptor Michel Decoux present in public spaces. These two façade sculptures representing Africans were the subject of a media campaign calling for their removal due to "colonial racism."
This social phenomenon, which concerned works erected in 1877, reminded us of a story from a few years ago concerning another 19th-century work that faced a fairly similar challenge.
We are talking here about a creation by Louis Samain entitled Fugitive Maroon Slaves surprised by dogs, which was presented at the Paris and Brussels salons in 1869. At that time it was a plaster (ill. 1) that later served as a model for the marble version purchased by the Belgian State in 1894 and placed on Avenue Louise in Brussels the following year (ill. 2).

In 2020, Pascal Smet, the Secretary of State for the Brussels-Capital Region, responsible in particular for Urban Planning and Heritage, announced the creation of a working group tasked with studying the presence of colonial symbols in the public space of the Brussels region. On 17 February 2022, the designated experts submitted their report highlighting several approaches to "decolonisation" that were at least problematic.
For example, they noted the necessity to "nuance" the term vandalism by striking it out: "systematically in the report in order to problematize its negative connotation. When material markings are inflicted to contest colonial traces, it is not gratuitous, destructive, or purposeless vandalism,…