CLIMATE ACTIVISTS ATTACK VELÁZQUEZ PAINTING WITH HAMMER AT ENGLAND’S NATIONAL GALLERY
Two young protesters affiliated with environmental activist organization Just Stop Oil this morning entered the National Gallery in London and smashed the glass protecting a work by Diego Velázquez. The attack came in response to the announcement today that the government of Conservative British prime minister Rishi Sunak plans to annually award oil and gas licenses to North Sea drillers, doubling down on its commitment to depletable resources and turning away from clean and renewable energy sources. The action marked the organization’s latest effort at bringing attention to the global need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic climate change. The pair targeted Velázquez’s ca. 1647–51 The Toilet of Venus; commonly known as the “Rokeby Venus,” the work in 1914 was slashed by Canadian activist Mary Richardson in protest of the imprisonment and cruel treatment of British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. Just Stop Oil late last year announced that it would take the early-twentieth-century suffrage campaign as their model, but to date, its members have not taken knife to canvas. The assault on the “Rokeby Venus” is an escalation of the group’s previous attempts to gain notice for their cause, chief among them the drenching, last year, of Van Gogh’s 1888 Sunflowers with tomato soup. That event also took place at the National Gallery and provoked the ire of the International Council of Museums.
“Women did not get the vote by voting; it is time for deeds, not words,” one of the protesters, twenty-two-year-old Hanan Ameur, told those assembled immediately following the action. Raining five blows each with safety hammers, Ameur and fellow protester Harrison Donnelly, twenty, succeeded in breaking the glass in multiple places. The painting sustained only minor damage, Hyperallergic reports, and is being examined by conservators. No word has been forthcoming as to when the work will return to the gallery; it has since been replaced with the seventeeth-century Italian painting A Dead Soldier, which at one time was attributed to Velázquez. Ameur and Donnelly were arrested for criminal damage, according to London’s Metropolitan Police service.
