Suffragette Iconoclasm: Political and Moral Considerations

Slashing of the Rokeby Venus 

     The first and most notable act of iconoclasm in the name of female enfranchisement, considered “one of the most notorious acts of iconoclasm in recent history,”[i] was Mary Richardson’s attack of Velazquez’s The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) in London’s National Gallery on March 10, 1914. Due to the increased suffragette militancy in preceding years, cultural institutions began to take extra precautionary measures through closures, increased policing, and hidden detectives. It was recorded, that “especial watch was being kept on the ‘Rokeby Venus,’” suggesting its distinct significance in the eyes of authorities.[ii]

Mary Richardson leaving for police court, 1914 

(Museum of London).

     Described as “a small woman dressed in a grey suit,” Richardson made her way innocently through the gallery space, stopping to view and sketch “the western world’s most well-known and valuable works of art.”[iii] Once she arrived at “Room 17” and the crowd began to wane, she struck the painting seven times with a “chopper,” breaking its glass covering and leaving slashes in the canvas. In response to outraged museum-goers, as she was being led away, Richardson stated “Yes, I am a suffragette. You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life, as they are killing Mrs. Pankhurst.”[iv] Richardson was a well-known militant, previously convicted for “assault, willful damage, obstruction and arson,”[v] who was on a temporary release from prison dictated by the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act” (also known as the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act put in place to manage hunger striking suffragettes in prisons).
     Mary Richardson documented her motives in a statement that read: “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. Ms. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let everyone remember that such an outcry is hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy”[vi]

Suffragette prisoner being force-fed, 

poster by “A Patriot,”1910 (Wikipedia, “Suffragette”). 

     The day before Richardson’s action, Emmeline Pankhurst had been re-arrested and sent back to prison where she would continue her hunger strike and be subject to violent force-feeding. Richardson’s statement, which was forwarded to the press and clearly articulated by herself in court, attests to her intent to bring attention to the violent injustice against the leader of the WSPU and other imprisoned suffragettes.[vii] During her court hearing Richardson was asked whether she recognized that the painting was “irreplaceable.” She had been an art student, but she reportedly “cared more for justice than art,”[viii] and responded: “no money under the sun could replace Mrs. Pankhurst. She was being killed slowly.”[ix] Her action exposed the hypocrisy of the government and how it reflected on the general society. It revealed the public’s inclination and insistence on focusing on an event that involves violence inflicted on an object rather than focusing on the violence that was inflicted on female bodies every day.

Why was targeting this particular object such an outrage? What does the painting represent?

     David Freedberg expands on general ideas motivating iconoclastic gestures in his work Iconoclasts and Their Motives. In reference to Richardson, he states that she may have had two motivations which align with other iconoclasts: “firstly, the use–or rather abuse—of images to draw attention to a political cause; and secondly, the more common objection to a painting or sculpture which somehow offends propriety or morality.”[x]

Political Motivations:

     Richardson’s political motivations were symbolic as well as tangible and can be explored by looking at the painting’s history and provenance. First, the painting derived great value solely because it was painted by Velazquez, a leading Spanish “master” painter. The Duke of Wellington brought the painting to England in 1806 for Mr. Morritt of Rokeby Hall where the painting remained for the next century. In 1905, the Court of Chancery granted permission to sell the painting and in 1906, after raising the necessary funds, The National Arts Collections Fund purchased the painting for £45,000 and presented it to the National Gallery.[xi] Described as “an acquisition for the nation,” the Rokeby Venus was seen as “‘perhaps the finest painting of the nude in the world’”[xii] – “an image of eugenic perfection – a woman in her prime, young, healthy and fertile!”[xiii]
     The painting represented a great deal of money, an “irreplaceable” work by a “master,” and a symbol of the timeless feminine ideal. Since the painting had also been “acquired for the nation,” its damage was especially reviled because Richardson had “attacked a work of art that, in principle, belonged to every man and women in the country.”[xiv] By attacking the Venus she hoped to prove the impotence of the government to the public by exposing their inability to protect the “cultural treasures” identified with the nation.[xv] Following the attack, the British government’s status was also scorned in the international sphere. The Times reported on March 12, 1914 that The New York Times wrote “The British Government is getting precisely the sort of treatment it deserves at the hands of the harridans who are called militants for its foolish tolerance of their criminal behavior.”[xvi] Finally, the iconoclastic action also exposed another “‘queer anomaly in English law.’”[xvii] While some suffragettes suffered up to 18 months in prison for window-smashing, the longest prison sentence that could be given to an iconoclast was six months.[xviii]
     The series of iconoclastic attacks also produced notable economic consequences. Richardson states that the government expressed their values on terms of finance rather than on a human level so “[she] felt [she] must make [her] protest from the financial point of view.”[xix] She thought that by attacking an object of great financial worth, she would be more likely to provoke the attention of political authorities. According to the National Gallery, the value of the painting was brought down by £10-15,000 following Richardson’s attack.[xx]
     Further, the greatest economic impact of the attack was seen in the country’s tourism sector. The National Gallery immediately shut their doors to the public and within 24 hours of March 10, the Wallace Collection, the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Guildhall Art Gallery, and the Hampton Court and Windsor Castle collections closed.[xxi] This provoked frustration from the local public and also discouraged overseas tourists. The negative impact to national tourism was confirmed in a letter from The Association of Managers of Hotels to the National Gallery in August of 1914 that attested to the relatively low hotel bookings as a result of the closures.[xxii] These economic implications brought attention to the suffragette cause and reflected poorly on the government.

Moral Motivations: “An Eye for an Eye”

“An eye for an eye… if the Government was going to mistreat and abuse Mrs. Pankhurst, then Richardson felt justified in her violent attack on a ‘figure’ of femininity which those same authorities held in esteem.”[xxiii]

     Richardson’s potential moral motivations surfaced in an interview with the Star on February 22, 1952 where she added that she “didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at [the Venus] all day long.”[xxiv] Even though Richardson made no mention of this in her initial 1914 press statement or her personal memoirs (where she only mentioned that she “disliked the painting[xxv]), given this added statement, a popular modern interpretation of her iconoclastic action is that it was a feminist gesture against patriarchal representations of the female body and more broadly a protest against the artistic tradition of the “nude,” commonly assumed in its female form. Lynda Nead, author of The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, favors this interpretation. Nead explores the tradition of the female nude as an artistically, socially, and politically loaded entity. When examining the production of the idea of “the nude,” Nead recalls the words of Neil Maclaren. He was a 20th century art historian with a “particular affinity for Spanish painting,” joining London’s National Gallery in 1935,[xxvi] who described the Rokeby Venus as “‘one of the world’s greatest and most famous pictures...one whose subject is universally pleasing, and whose manner of painting is wholly congenial to modern taste.’”[xxvii] Nead elaborates that it was passages such as this within the largely patriarchal culture of historical writing that produced the ideologically loaded “nude tradition.” These writings had common themes: that the “nude” was “the fountain-head of artistic expression,”—utterly unique and universally possible of inciting contemplation and inspiration, that is was timeless and was loaded with a “flawless historical pedigree” within the art historical tradition of the west, and that it has the ability to “transcend the historical specificities of their making,” while also carrying the implicit assumption of a male artist and female subject.[xxviii]

Adolphe-William Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879 

Swan & Edgar department store smashed windows

      Nead, with these cultural-historical ideas in mind, interprets Richardson’s attack on the Rokeby Venus as a symbol of a “particular perception of feminist attitudes toward the female nude” and the “stereotypical image of feminism more generally.”[xxix] Richardson’s first blow to the Venus was breaking through its glass cover—physically and symbolically recalling suffragette window-smashing tactics. The suffragettes targeted the windows of department stores in London such as Liberty’s and Swan and Edgar which often displayed female models exemplifying a feminine ideal much like what the Venus-type represents. In conjunction, these events may represent the rejection of problematic notions of femininity and gender that were produced within a patriarchal culture and perpetuated in both public and private spaces.

Political cartoon of a woman peering out of the "Woman's 'Sphere,'" 

her toys "Fashion" and "gossip" are left behind, 

by Merle De Vore Johnson, 1909 (Fine Art America, 2011).  

     Throughout the 19th century, women’s roles were highly polarized, but still confined to the private sphere either as the “idealized wife or mother” or the “degenerate prostitute.” The suffrage movement in England could be found within a larger program to redefine gender roles in the UK.[xxx] Suffragette iconoclasm, according to Nead, represents a “conflict of two forms of femininity: the patriarchal ideal (the Venus) and the deviant (the militant suffragist).”[xxxi] Within the social context, it was relatively easy to paint Mary Richardson and the other militant suffragettes as models of female deviancy. Press coverage, often employing anti-suffrage imagery, perpetuated gendered roles and characterized Richardson on the fringes—socially and mentally. Using phrases like “wild-woman,” “wild-frenzy,” “hacking furiously” when recounting Richardson’s act, portrayed a “kind of demonic possession in which the calm exterior is simply a dissembling mask for desocialized and violent female drives.”[xxxii] These descriptors propagated the socially established idea of “deviant femininity” and reflected poorly on Richardson and the larger suffrage movement. By appealing to the dominant gendered paradigm of the time, the government and the press capitalized on the series of iconoclastic actions that followed Richardson’s to undercut the suffragette movement. Lisa Tucker expands on anti-suffrage imagery by saying that it gave “‘feminism a sexual pathology which makes it a ‘law and order’ problem,’ not only for the interests of the Empire and the state, but at the deepest levels of sexual identity.’”[xxxiii]

          Further, the press sensationalized iconoclastic gestures by painting an image of violence in readers’ imaginations which influenced the public’s perception of the suffrage movement. Given that the press portrayed the actions as if they were violent murders against innocent personified ‘victims,’ it is not surprising that the public was troubled by the prevalence of more iconoclastic events. Newspaper coverage recounted the actions using “the visual and written language reserved for the sensation murder” by presenting a meticulously thorough narration literally and visually detailing the perpetrator, the weapon used, and the damage to the “victim.” By giving Richardson the nicknames, “Slasher Mary,” “the Ripper,” “the Slasher,” she was likened to well-known serial murderers. The Daily Mail also made this reference visually by publishing a photo of Richardson and a “close-up of a hand holding the kind of chopper that was used.”[xxxiv] In addition, the Daily Sketch’s displayed before and after shots of the painting under headline “Rokeby ‘Venus,’ Bought by the Nation for £45,000, was Slashed with a Chopper by a Suffragette in the National Gallery.” This accentuated the perceived violence inflicted by suffragette hands in a time when stabbing the canvas “back” of this Venus symbolized a stab in the back of the body of the nation.

The Rokeby Venus painting after the attack and the weapon Richardson used ("Suffragette Tactics," HistoryLearning.com. 2015). 

             It is also worth mentioning that press coverage detailing the damage to the Rokeby Venus used language that described the painting as though it was a person. The event was presented as if violence was imposed on a female body rather than an inanimate object. The Times reported that Richardson’s attack left “a cruel wound in the neck,” a slash “across the shoulders and back,” and “a ragged bruise,” conflating the subject of the painting (Venus) with the painting itself. Using these terms specifically implants an image of a “bruise” in the mind of the reader, suggesting a fleshy female body rather than the surface of a canvas.[xxxv] The personification of the painting as a victim perpetuated the image of a scandalous murder committed by violent and militant female “deviants” (Richardson and other suffragettes) in the eyes of the press and, consequently, the public. It is curious that the press’ employment of written and visual rhetoric evoking violence against female bodies was successful in inciting outrage in the eyes of the public while Richardson, who evoked comparable rhetoric to make visible the tangible violence inflicted on women’s bodies, was villainized.

Re-authoring
     Richardson’s iconoclastic intervention can also been read as a “re-authoring” of the painting itself. Alfred Gell describes this as the iconoclast “exercis[ing] a type of ‘artistic agency,’” positing that “art-destruction is art-making in reverse.”[xxxvi] In accordance with these ideas, Gell refers to the post-attacked “Rokeby Venus,” as the “‘Slashed’ Rokeby Venus” by Mary Richardson.”[xxxvii] Since Richardson drew a connection between the Venus and Emmeline Pankhurst, she is essentially re-authoring the subject of the painting as well as re-positioning herself in relation to the painting and the represented subject. She aimed to equate the damage she inflicted on the canvas with the violence against women in prisons. Gell advocates that Richardson’s new painting, the “‘Slashed’ Rokeby Venus” is “a more powerful image… because the image bears the traces which testify directly to, rather than simply represent, the violence women endure.”[xxxviii] What is problematic is that when Richardson inflicts violence on the Venus in the painting, she is essentially re-positioning herself in the role of the government who is enacting violence against female suffragettes in the first place. In addition, this interpretation has Richardson affirming and upholding the female “nude” tradition because she acknowledges the Venus as “the most beautiful woman in mythological history” when comparing her to Mrs. Pankhurst as the “most beautiful character in modern history.”
     Another interpretation involves the press in their visual representations as a form of “re-authoring.” While the press’ visual reproduction of the damaged Rokeby Venus perpetuated negative ideas about suffragettes and women generally, the images also provided a new narrative that responds to gender roles and the female nude tradition. Since the photograph documenting the attack prominently displayed the multiple vertical slashes left in the canvas, the viewer cannot simply look upon the smooth back of the nude—a luxury traditionally offered within the “nude” tradition. Nead adds that “the face in the mirror might lead us to believe that the body has volume, but the cuts and marks insist on its fabrication.”[xxxix] The fabrication of an idealized subject contained in the painting speaks to the fabrication that is the idea of the ideal female body, breaking down the idea and exposing the tradition as one that has its foundation in an idea that does not hold up.

Times article covering Richardson's attack, 11 March 1914. 

     The newspaper itself could be seen as “re-authoring” the painting by re-framing it. The “after” photograph provided a visual testament to a “viewer who would no longer play the game” of a voyeur observing a passive female nude for visual consumption. The “aesthetic and cultural codes of the painting and of the female nude” are thereby broken down.[xl] By intervening in the painting, Richardson not only leaves her mark on aesthetic/artistic history, she also leaves her mark on social history by presenting herself as a nonconforming viewer/artistic collaborator in a gallery space and an alternative form of femininity in society.
     It is not surprising that the press and the public reacted in the way they did. More than just a breakdown of an object, the attack of the Rokeby Venus broke down a powerful gendered ideology that was produced by art historical conventions and institutions and constituted national identity and heritage.

Iconoclasm, Contagion, and “Second order harm”
     Richardson’s action left a mark in history due to its social, cultural, and political implications as well as its instigation of a surge of iconoclastic gestures in the name of the suffragette cause. Regrettably, these events remain somewhat a mystery because they were poorly recorded and did not expose a clearly identifiable pattern of intent. Although seven out of the nine attacked paintings depicted female nudes or male portraits, the attacks following Richardson do not share an observable connection of intent against the patriarchy or the “nude” tradition. There was no explicit anti-male rhetoric behind the suffragette cause, but Christabel Pankhurst published The Great Scourge and How to End It in 1913 advocating “Votes for Women and Chastity for Men” which “simultaneously championed the liberation of women and urged the mistrust of men and male authority,”[xli] so this may have had an influence. However, not all of the four men represented in the targeted portraits were against female suffrage. First, Emmeline Pankhurst respected Thomas Carlyle. Second, the Duke of Wellington voiced no clear opinion regarding the women’s movement. Third, Henry James’s portrait was “greatly admired by the King,”[xlii] which may have made it a potential target, but James himself expressed sympathy for the suffrage cause and the attacker of his portrait did not even know who he was.[xliii] The damage inflicted directly on the portrait of King George V is seemingly the only logical target if the iconoclast’s motivation was to non-violently and symbolically attack the subject, subvert male authority, or bring attention to the suffragette cause.
     Richardson spoke to the non-violence by saying “our warfare was to be without bloodshed. Money could be spilled, yes! Property could suffer; but human beings would be immune, except for the sufferings inflicted upon us militants in the course of the campaign.”[xliv] Freedberg in his work, Iconoclasts and their Motives, examines the political, ideological, and moral significance of iconoclastic acts. He states “when we see an image of the king…we will be inclined to respond to it as if the king himself were present,” but we “argue with ourselves against that elision [and] see a picture, a framed object, a cold bloodless statue.”[xlv] To explain his theory of “second order harm” in iconoclastic actions, Freedberg recalls an incident when an iconoclast targeted an image of Princess Diana in order to symbolically transfer dishonor onto the Princess herself without inflicting physically harm. He elaborates that “public response to this act would have at least as much to do with the fact that it was she who was represented as with the damage to an expensive object in a public space.”[xlvi]

J.S. Sargent, detail of the portrait of Henry James after the iconoclastic intervention, May 1914
(Royal Academy of Arts, London). 

     An example of this in regards to the suffragette cause was the iconoclastic action by Maude Edwards when she attacked the a Portrait Study of the King for The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh on May 23, 1914. Prior to the attack, the suffragettes had been taking steadfast and creative action in order to bring the King’s attention to their cause. They commandeered performances, interrupted royal weddings, and disrupted a Derby event (resulting in a suffragette death), but were unsuccessful in swaying the King’s opinion.[xlvii] Even though he was deeply hated by the suffragettes, any harm against royalty was simply unfeasible and would diverge from their statement of non-violence. Maude’s action may be an example of “second order harm” against the royalty to subvert the image of the crown or to provoke his attention to their cause.

Conclusion
     Through these acts of iconoclasm, the cultural and social significance of the paintings as agential objects is revealed. The Rokeby Venus as the most notable example discussed here, was revealed as a symbol of the government, of the nation, and of a particular and dominant idea of femininity that cohered with a masculinist construction of British national heritage, history, and identity.
     However, each act of iconoclasm requires an examination of the public’s reaction to speak to the larger social, cultural, and historical context, as interpretations produced out of a particular context change over time. For example, Richardson’s moral motivations are still up for debate, but Gamboni predicts that her Star statement was an alternative explanation that would have been palatable to a contemporary reader.[xlviii] Nead’s interpretation also reveals the changing context of art historical analysis, influenced by shifting notions of gender and identity.
     Overall, the choice to target paintings within national cultural institutions, which generated intense “outrage felt even by those who were not normally much concerned with art,”[xlix] and their personification of the painted “victims,” speaks to the immense social and cultural investment that we place on objects and institutions. While this campaign of iconoclasm was intended to bring visibility to the hypocrisy of the government’s actions with regard to the treatment of women, it also reveals specific political, moral, and value-based considerations that reflect on and/or constitute various socio-cultural debates of the time. In addition, it opens up conversations between different publics that examine the past and how it shapes the present and the future, exposing the potential of objects to not only reflect, but also create society and culture. Iconoclastic gestures reveal the agential role of objects, as social and political entities, because objects are produced by, and create interactions between people, thereby constituting humans and human relationships.
     The outrage provoked by suffragette iconoclasm revealed what the nation valued or the ideas that authorities wished to hold in place. If the Venus represented a certain idea about womanhood—one that produced tangible and restrictive consequences—was its restoration an attempt to keep those gendered notions in place? Especially when employed in ideologically loaded spaces, is restoration, in this case, a way of preserving not only artwork, but also systems of power?
     This question additionally opens up a conversation about the value we place on national cultural institutions. It makes us ask for whom the institutions are intended and whom they represent. For example, when Maude Edwards entered the Royal Scottish Academy, she was carefully monitored because according to the assistant secretary at the Academy, “she did not appear to belong to the class interested in art.”[l] This comment exposes the class and gender biases of some state-sponsored cultural institutions, which ostensibly define themselves as public spaces intended for all members of the nation, yet have been a historically upper-class male terrain. Perhaps choosing to target the Academy was intended to reveal the dimensions of inclusion and exclusion in institutions that represented social restrictions seen in the society.
     Examination of this series of iconoclastic acts prompt us to ask where women fit into national history and what role objects (such as art and visual images) play in positioning women in the future or in determining where the nation is going. To connect British suffragette iconoclasm to recent events, the debate over the removal of multiple confederate statues provokes questions about race and where racism fits into national history and generates conversations about how it’s the way we envision history that will shape our national future. These actions involving humans and objects ignite debates that are fundamentally part of the democratic process.

-Maia Kamehiro-Stockwell

 

"'The Suspected Sex,' Girl (suddenly noticing policeman), "I fahnd it like that. I never done it, mister. Straight I never!"
Punch Magazine, 16 July 1913. 

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[i] Nead, “The Damaged Venus,” The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (Routledge, 2002): 35.

[ii] Ibid., 37. 

[iii] Ibid., 34.

[iv] Mary Richardson quoted in Gamboni, 94.

[v] “National Gallery Outrage,” The Morning Post, 13 March 1914.

[vi] Gamboni, 94-95.

[vii] Scott, (2016).

[viii] Gamboni, 95.

[ix] Richardson quoted in “The Damaged Venus,” The Times, 13 March 1914.

[x] Freedberg, David. Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen, 1985): 18.

[xi] Nead, 36.

[xii] Nead quoting The Times, Nead, 36.

[xiii] Ibid., 36.

[xiv] Ibid., 36.

[xv] Scott, (2016).

[xvi] The New York Times quoted in “The Damaged Venus,” The Times, 12 March 1914.

[xvii] Pankhurst, My Own Story,  345 cited in Gamboni, 96.

[xviii] Gamboni, 96.

[xix] Richardson, Mary R., Laugh a Defiance (G. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953):165.

[xx] “National Gallery Outrage,” The Times, 11 March 1914.

[xxi] Nead, 35.

[xxii] Scott, (2016).

[xxiii] Nead, 37.

[xxiv] Richardson quoted in Gamboni, 95.

[xxv] Richardson, Laugh a Defiance, 165.

[xxvi] Dictionary of Art Historians, “Maclaren, Neil,” https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/maclarenn.htm.

[xxvii] Maclaren quoted in Nead, 43.

[xxviii] Nead, 43.

[xxix] Ibid., 35.

[xxx] Scott, (2016).

[xxxi] Nead, 37.

[xxxii] Ibid., 38.

[xxxiii] Lisa Tucker quoted in Nead, 38.

[xxxiv] Nead, 38.

[xxxv] Ibid., 39.

[xxxvi] Gell, Afred. “The Involution of the Index,” An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1998): 64.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 62.

[xxxviii] Ibid., 64.

[xxxix] Nead, 41.

[xl] Ibid., 41.

[xli] Scott, (2016).

[xlii] Scott, (2016).

[xliii] Scott citing Sandra Stanley Holton, “In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst,” British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 1990): 13. Fowler, 117.

[xliv] Richardson, 39.

[xlv] Freedberg, 19.

[xlvi] Ibid., 19-20.

[xlvii] Scott, (2016).

[xlviii] Gamboni, 97.

[xlix] Fowler, 122.

[l] Ibid., 122.