“You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life, as they are killing Mrs Pankhurst.” These were the words of Mary Richardson who, on 10 March 1914, walked into London’s National Gallery and slashed, with a meat chopper, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51). Smashing through the glass, she scarred several times Velázquez’s idealised nude in protest of the re-arrest of British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Richardson was subsequently sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
This type of protest – and Richardson’s words – resonated this month when Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, part of the Just Stop Oil protest group, made headlines across the world by throwing a tin of soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888). Glueing themselves to the wall of London’s National Gallery, they announced: “What is worth more: art or life? Is it worth more than … justice?”
