Self Portrait at the Age of 63, after Rembrandt, 2022 by Ali Cherri
(Picture: Ali Cherri)Diego Velázquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus – or the Rokeby Venus, as everyone calls it – was slashed with a knife in the National Gallery by the suffragette Mary Richardson almost exactly 108 years ago. The response to it in the press and among staff at the National Gallery used terms more akin to descriptions of a murder than an attack on a work of art: the Venus suffered a “cruel wound in the neck”, “a ragged bruise”; she was a “victim”.
When the Beirut-born artist Ali Cherri took on the role of artist-in-residence at the National Gallery and began his research into its collection, this clearly leapt out at him. In the end, he chose to focus his attention on this and four more victims in the gallery’s collection – a Rembrandt self-portrait, Barocci’s The Madonna of the Cat, Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, and the Leonardo cartoon – paintings that have all been attacked by members of the public over the years.
