Ever wandered around a gallery getting absolutely nothing from the paintings? You’re not alone. Everyone reacts differently to art and – importantly – no reaction is wrong. Hating it is just as justified as loving it but if you’re finding yourself bored and baffled you might not be looking at art in the right way for you.
Some of us get pleasure from the simple aesthetic. We might like the colours of Kandinsky, the humour in Guerrilla Girls or the technique of Caravaggio. It can be like falling love at first sight or happen with time. Either way, art is simply a pleasure for the senses and looking at it is enough to enjoy it.
Others appreciate art through context; a piece comes alive when you know why, how and by whom it was made and it’s here where many galleries fall short. You’ll often only see a few paintings with an accompanying paragraph about their history, if any at all, meaning some of us are wandering around galleries uninformed and uninterested when we don’t have to be.
Felix is taking you beyond the canvas to look at the stories behind some of London’s most interesting, infamous and occasionally overlooked artworks. We want to know how they captured their audience and why they deserve their place on such prestigious walls. First up is Diego Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus housed in the National Gallery.
The Spanish Inquisition
Diego Velasquez was a Spanish painter in the 1600s with a big following. Not only was he the leading artist to the Spanish King, he also influenced Manet, Picasso, Dali and Bacon centuries later. Don’t be misled though – Velasquez’s paintings were far more traditional than his future following suggests. He was a prolific painter of royalty, supposedly including our own Charles I, so his works feature a lot of long-dead unfamiliar faces. Thankfully one shines beyond the rest.
Originally titled La Venus De Espejo (Venus at her Mirror), The Rokeby Venus is Velasquez’s only surviving female nude and there are a few reasons it’s worthy of your wandering eye. The reclining goddess with her son, Cupid, was painted at a time when nudes just weren’t acceptable: the Spanish Inquisition.
If your knowledge of this time is limited to Monty Python, you should know it wasn’t comedic in the slightest. Trials, torture and death lurked around the corner for anyone who dared stray far from Catholicism. Velasquez’s grandparents may well have been Jewish but he made the wise choice to hide his ancestry from the King and so kept his position as court painter. The leaders of the Inquisition kept a strict eye on literary and artistic endeavours, censoring anything they didn’t agree with, which is why nude figures were rarely seen and few dared to bare all on canvas.
Suffragettes and Sexuality
It was during this dangerous time that Velasquez painted the Rokeby Venus, which is named after the house where it once resided. This was a bold change from stately portraits and it was only his position and protection from the King that allowed the painting to survive. The Rokeby Venus, with her alluring curves and come hither eyes, came to epitomise female beauty. Despite this the painting remained scandalous for centuries: so much so that someone took a meat cleaver to it.
A century ago Mary Richardson, a suffragette protesting the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, walked into the National Gallery and slashed Velasquez’s Venus five times. You can see from photographs how focused Richardson’s attack was – the cuts are centred entirely on the beauty’s body.
It wasn’t just the price tag of the picture that compelled her but the fetishisation of the female body. Richardson said she couldn’t bear “the way men visitors gaped at it all day long”. Some things never change.
Londoners were naturally outraged (we’re guessing the men in particular). Little did they know it was merely the first in a series of art attacks by suffragettes in 1914. Richardson was incredibly deemed a murderer and earned the nickname “Slasher Mary” – a loaded term which had been used just two decades earlier about Jack the Ripper
The reaction was a bit steep: we’d like to think the goddess would have been only too willing to sacrifice herself for the female cause. Thankfully women got the vote and the painting got a painstaking restoration, soon returning to its adoring public.
The Rokeby Venus has survived Spanish censorship and the savagery of a suffragette and still maintains a sexual je ne sais quoi. Part of this lies in her timelessness – her figure is noticeably modern, unlike the classic nudes you often see. Visit the Velasquez Venus in Room 30 at the National Gallery in room 30 and you’ll see how much she stands out among the stiff portraits of Spanish nobility.
You’ll be hard pushed to find any sign of its brilliant restoration but you will see why the painting has been turning heads for centuries. The Rokeby Venus’s derriere has become one of the most infamous, imitated and adored on earth. Eat your heart out, Kim Kardashian.
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