AS the crowds trickled through the Sully wing of the Louvre one recent afternoon, a stocky, middle-aged Frenchman looked around furtively before whipping a gilt-framed painting from under his leather jacket and fixing it to the wall. Placed alongside the august portraits of Salle 59, the miniature held its own amid the splendour of the room's more conventional treasures.

But its presence was not welcome and when the artist returned to see it, it had been removed. “Now I have to write a letter to the president director-general or someone to get it back,” he said.

Pascal Guérineau has become the bête noire of Paris's most prestigious galleries. The stunt was not his first offence. Last month he hung one of his own works in the Musée Maillol in between a Christian Boltanski and a drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The museum, which only spotted the rogue picture at closing time, was not amused.

Though his venture may smack of self-promotion, Guérineau insists his actions are less about him and more about the legion of overlooked and under-appreciated French artists he claims to represent. By hanging pictures in some of the capital's most high-profile exhibitions, he says, he is drawing attention to the desperation felt by many contemporaries who struggle to gain recognition. The French art world, he says, has time only for artists who have made it big, or who are already dead. “In France it is very, very hard to get noticed. You have to be part of a certain small group,” he said.

“Nowadays I think our museums are cemeteries. They are the Père Lachaise of art,” he added, referring to the sprawling graveyard in the east of Paris.

Guérineau, who praises London and New York for their efforts to support new talent, believes that Paris has fallen far behind other world capitals in the promotion of young, poor or little-known artists. He argues that museums such as the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou should allocate more funding to putting on work which might otherwise be overlooked.“A museum like the Louvre has thousands of people coming through every week. They should be able to discover some of the message of contemporary French art — on society, on their lives, on pain, on poverty,” he said. He cited the recent troubles of the 104, a large contemporary arts space on the north-eastern fringes of Paris which ran aground within months of its inauguration, as an example of poorly directed state help for the arts.

Guérineau, who compares his work to that of such distinguished artists as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and who sometimes refers to himself in the third person, is not without his detractors. Patrizia Nitti, artistic director of the Maillol, dismissed his action as a “publicity stunt”.

Olivier Lorquin, the museum's president, who was reportedly left furious by the illicit exhibit, went further in his criticism.

He described Guérineau's drawing — of a skull — as “bad, useless” and insisted that no problems had been revealed in the gallery's security system by the artist's “ignoble” action.

— The Guardian, London