Non nude models young12/20/2023 For a day or so, everyone was talking about Just Stop Oil. Though they might not have anticipated the Velázquez nude being conspicuously less treasured, to judge by the public reaction, than Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (the protesters’ soup target in 2022), the adventure could hardly have gone better. It failed women in 1914 and it is failing us now”. “It is time for deeds not words.” Her (male) companion: “Politics is failing us. “Women did not get the vote by voting,” one protester explained, in a video in front of their work. In the updated, climate-inspired double act, featuring blows to another part of the painting, it now appears to symbolise Richardson’s direct action, as opposed to anything related to the current cause: stopping oil and gas licensing. Before slashing the Velázquez with a meat cleaver in 1914, in one of a series of art attacks that generated massive, outraged publicity for the WSPU, the perpetrator, Mary Richardson, had prepared a statement: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.” Last week’s hammer attack in the National Gallery on Diego Velázquez’s painting, The Toilet of Venus, or Rokeby Venus (the gallery persists in associating it with the home address of an English collector who relished its depiction of Venus’s “backside”), was Just Stop Oil’s most explicit channelling to date of suffragette iconoclasm. You don’t like attacks that could destroy venerated paintings? The suffragettes did that! Would you blaspheme against the suffragettes? The more closely, then, that it identifies with the suffragettes and their protests, the more nimbly Just Stop Oil and its supporters can deflect contempt for its (comparatively muted) tactics, and ignore curators’ warnings to the effect that activists “severely underestimate the fragility of objects”. Postal workers were burned, a full theatre ignited. Braverman’s horror of protests has not stopped her reminding girls: “Always remember the suffragettes who gave you and me the right to vote, and cherish that right.” In 2018, the centenary of partial women’s suffrage, Theresa May paid tribute to Emmeline Pankhurst, founder and leader of the proudly militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose supporters engaged in arson, bombings, window smashing, spitting and throwing missiles at MPs. Corbyn once stole into parliament to erect a plaque to Emily Wilding Davison. In adopting the suffragettes as role models, along with their slogan, “deeds not words”, Just Stop Oil has, rather brilliantly, picked a group that unites in admiration left and right, old and young, and, probably uniquely, Jeremy Corbyn and the current – at the time of writing – home secretary, Suella Braverman. Even the older and more exhausting ones have yet to be firmly identified, unlike so many of their successors, as Karens. Who doesn’t love the suffragettes? A group of women who are heroic, right, and, perhaps most advantageously for their collective reputation, no longer with us.
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