What Happens When The Art Monster Is a Woman?
Leslie Camhi, New Yorker
December 2023
Last month, a pair of climate activists attacked a painting known as “The Rokeby Venus,” by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez, which hangs in London’s National Gallery, using hammers to smash the protective glass covering the work. It is Velázquez’s only surviving nude and features the Roman goddess of love, her dazzling back turned toward us, reclining on a divan as she gazes into a mirror held up by a winged Cupid. The activists, members of the British group Just Stop Oil, were not protesting oil painting per se but, rather, their government’s licensing of new oil and gas projects. They said they chose that particular canvas because it had been attacked in the service of social justice before. In 1914, the Canadian-born suffragette Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery and, after making her way over to the painting, slashed it half a dozen times with a meat cleaver. […]