“Slasher Mary”: A Brief Introduction To Political Vandalism In Museums

On March 4, 1914, Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery in London and headed towards the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velasquez with a meat cleaver.

The painting was deemed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and Spanish court painter Velasquez’s only nude. It is certainly striking, particularly in its meta self-reflection, in which the woman stares back at herself. Interestingly, the angle of the face is obscured in shadow, while the body is illuminated in a pale and central light.

When this painting was made in the 17th century far predates the concept now familiar in 20th century art history: the male gaze. There was no feminist theory for the Spanish court painter Diego Velazquez, or even for British Mary Richardson 263 years later.

Yet as an art student, Richardson looked at the Rokeby Venus and boiled with rage. Why should men—or anyone, really—have the power to oggle a woman as she desperately tries to discern herself? What kind of world did Richardson live in where women’s own faces and reflections were secondary to their naked backsides? Art historian Rachel Campbell-Johnston told the BBC in 2014 100 years later that it was almost as if the artist was touching her.

Something had to be done.

Mary Raleigh Richardson (1889-1961) was a suffragette active in the women’s movement of the era. When she slashed the Velazquez painting, she had already been in the movement for four years, and would be arrested for civil disobedience a total of nine times. But in addition to her studies, she was a journalist, and she understood the power of newsworthy content…not unlike the social media sensations of Just Stop Oil and Letzte Generation. She knew that slashing a painting, especially such an important one, would raise awareness about the cause of votes for women.

The attack was a direct retaliation against the arrest of Richardson’s compatriot Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928). Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union with her two daughters, and was taken during a 1914 march she organized to push women to get the vote.

Ever media-savvy, Richardson told the press, “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.”

London’s museums retaliated with intensified security precautions. The Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery both closed to the public in May 2014, while the British Museum permitted women accompanied by men. The National Portrait Gallery where the attack had occurred remained more lenient, ensuring they check all bulky items in coat rooms and following them more closely. But fellow suffragette Anne Hunt was among the NPG visitors just two months after Richardson’s attack. Despite arousing suspicion by a nearby guard, in July 1914, she followed suit and attacked another painting—a portrait of Thomas Carlyle by John Everett Millais.

Unlike today’s protestors who merely glue themselves to the protective glass, Hunt smashed the painting’s frame with her hatchet and disregarded the cuts it caused on her hands until a female student in the viewing room finally apprehended her.

Smithsonian Magazine’s Brigit Katz reports that the painting was taken out of the gallery, not to be replaced again for more than 100 years.

Just as the climate debate continues now, there were divides between pacifist and more extremist factions of the suffrage movement. Those arrested from Pankhurst’s group staged hunger strikes while incarcerated, but officials played with the laws of ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ to let them go once they were near death, but would rearrest them shortly after.

Finally, after World War I, Katz writes that “The Representation of the People’s Act was passed in 1918, entitling women over the age of 30 who also met specific property requirements, the right to vote. On July 2 1928, this act was extended to include women over the age of 21.”

The Carlyle portrait went back up in 2018, the centennial of this law being enacted.

Whether the splashers of today will implement the same progress as the slashers of yesterday remains to be seen, but their place in history will never be forgotten.