Two Stop Oil supporters, identified as Hanan and Harrison, took hammers to the 400-year-old painting Rokeby Venus.
A suffragette once slashed the Diego Valázquez painting in 1914.
Suffragettes were the women in the early 1900s who demanded the UK give women the right to vote. Emmeline Pankhurst organized the suffragette movement.
Anyway.
Hanan and Harrison screeched at those walking the gallery: “Women did not get the vote by voting; it is time for deeds not words. It is time to Just Stop Oil. Politics is failing us. It failed women in 1914 and it is failing us now. New oil and gas will kill millions. If we love art, if we love life, if we love our families we must Just Stop Oil.”
Somehow, fighting for a fundamental human right is the same as stopping oil. No, I’m not justifying the suffragette ruining a painting. I just don’t see how it’s the same.
Then, the two people had to invoke Pankhurst and the women who fought for equality:
“Emmeline Pankhurst said: you have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else.”“The suffragettes are proof these methods work to achieve social change. That is why we have taken this action today. New oil will destroy everything we love. I do not want to be here, but I cannot continue to see this government fail all of us.”
Yeah, no. Not the same thing.
Mary Richardson took a knife to the painting in 1914 to protest Pankhurst’s imprisonment.
Police arrested Pankhurst in May 1914 while trying to give King George V a petition at Buckingham Palace.
You would also think the National Gallery would instill security. In October 2022, two Just Stop Oil threw soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in the gallery.
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