Mary Richardson's happening at the National Gallery in London in 1914.

The Rokeby Venus
On Tuesday, 10 March 1914 Velasquez' painting the Rokeby Venus was the victim of one of the most dramatic art actions in modern times.The work of art depicts Velasquez' interpretation of Venus and is considered by art experts to represent one of the world's most beautiful women. An art student called Mary Richardson, who was a member of the English suffragette movement, smashed the protective glass with a meat axe and inflicted seven large slashes on Venus' naked back. As she was being led away by the police, she said: "Yes, I am a suffragette. You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life, as they are killing Mrs. Pankhurst."

The suffragettes
The English feminists, better known as the suffragettes, were organised in a number of grassroots organisations, the aim of which was to fight for women's rights. The most important item on their programme was the introduction of votes for women. The most visible of these organisations was WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union), which was founded in 1902 and was led by the most charismatic of the suffragettes Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and her two daughters Sylvia and Christiabel. As the situation up to the First World War became increasingly tense, they changed their strategy radically, and the movement was transformed into a militant guerrilla movement. Its targets were both private and public property, things that had high social and cultural value. The government responded by putting the women in prison.

Iconoclasm as a feminist strategy
Richardson's happening was a huge provocation and made a profound impact on the art-political situation in England. Prior to the action she had sent a statement to WSPU, in which she explained her motives for the action:
"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas."

Breach of illusion
Richardson's strategy anticipates some of the formal features explored by happening artists and Fontana. She broke with the romantic idea of the work of art by being able to create a breach of the illusion that is maintained by the volume of the body and the painted surface - until the eye encounters the deep cuts.

The sight of Venus' lacerated back is particularly painful. Richardson succeeded both in transforming the beautiful Venus from aesthetic object to murder victim and in transforming woman's position in art from passive to active, from the role of model to that of actor. But first and foremost she ripped the canvas in order to expand the concept of beauty in a work of art from the "aesthetic" to the "ethical", and thereby also to encompass justice, equality and women's suffrage.
"Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas".

In the artistic process a cut has consequences different from those of a brushstroke. A brushstroke cannot be entirely removed, but once the paint is dry it may be possible to cover up an error with a new colour or a new structure of paint. Once the artist has begun to make cuts in the canvas, there is no way back..

Metamorphosis
Mary Richardson's appropriation of the Rokeby Venus was to be one of most clearly remembered of the suffragettes' many actions. The Rokeby Venus was among the most treasured works in Western patriarchal culture, and it came to stand as a symbol of the suffragettes' fighting spirit. Her action was a challenge to the dominant monolithic concept of art. She criticised the hypocrisy of the authorities and their humiliating treatment of women and at the same time accused the art establishment of maintaining a monomaniac pattern of sexual roles and of the female ideal. Wishing to expand the concept of art, she demanded that people should reflect and adopt their own position on the issue.

The American art historian and author Lynda Nead sees Richardson's action as a feminist statement on the way in which the female nude was traditionally represented in art, with the Rokeby Venus representing a certain type of ideal woman. Or, in other words, a stereotype of femininity in general. This is not an ideal picture of a woman created by a woman, but a patriarchal vision that dominates the visual representation of women. Venus is an image of the perfectly pure race - she is young, beautiful, healthy and fertile - and immeasurably valuable. That is why this work in particular was identified both by the authorities and by the suffragettes as a suitable target in the struggle for gender equality. Richardson justified her attack on the symbol of the feminine by provoking an attitude similar to that the authorities maintained towards women in society.

Richardson succeeded in transforming Venus - the symbol of physical beauty and motherhood and the object of male desire - into a mirror-reversed image of Mrs. Pankhurst - the symbol of moral beauty. And in this way the attack on the Rokeby Venus became a metaphor for the emancipation of women.

Suppression by silence
Richardson's action touches on the most essential problems of the work in 20th century art history - the bursting of perspectival space, the treatment of ready-mades and the happening genre - and not least the interference of the painting with space. These problems were later further explored by male artists and written into the history of art up through the 20th century. Richardson was not written into the history of art as an important artist. She was not referred to. Although women were given a voice in the running of the "real world", their voice remained unheard in the world of art.

Freely from The Times 10. March 1914.
The Times 10. March 1914.
Marcus, Jane: Suffrage and the Pankhurst, London 1987, p. 2-3.
ARK 35 (1998:5). Red. Lars Kiel Bertelsen & Klaus Christensen.
Nead, Lynda: The female nude, Routhledge 1992, p. 39.