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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
On 10 March 1913, the artist, arsonist, and suffragette Mary Richardson, alias Polly Dick, a member of the militant Women's Social and Political Union, walked into London's National Gallery and took an axe to Velázquez's ‘Rokeby Venus’. Her act resulted in the closure of the National Gallery and other museums. At her trial Richardson announced: ‘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.’ In 1911 Umberto Boccioni wrote to his friend Gino Severini in heady enthusiasm about the manifestos he had co-written and signed—Futurist Painting and Sculpture (January 1910), and Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (April 1910). The first featured the familiar futurist exhortation to smash the ‘cult of the past, all things old, academic pedantry’, to bear ‘bravely and proudly’ the banner of ‘madness’ with which ‘they’ try to dismiss innovators. Boccioni echoes the words of Marinetti's The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909):
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! … Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! O the joy of seeing the glorious old canvasses bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded … Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the vulnerable cities.
1. Cited in Lyon, Janet, ‘Militant Discourse, Strange Bedfellows: Suffragettes and Vorticists Before the War’, Differences, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1992), p. 121.Google Scholar
2. Cited in Apollonio, Umbro, Futurists Manifestoes (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 26Google Scholar
3. Ibid., p. 23.
4. Lyon, , ‘Militant Discourse’, p. 121.Google Scholar
5. See Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar, especially Chapter One, ‘Burning Acts, Injurious Speech’, pp. 43–69.
6. Pankhurst, Christabel, ‘The Great Scourge and How to End It’, in Marcus, Jane, ed., Suffrage and the Pankhursts. Women's Source Library, edited by Spencer, Dale & Lacey, Candida Ann (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 187–240.Google Scholar
7. Freud, Sigmund, ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 43, 39.Google Scholar
8. Cited in Lyon, , ‘Militant Discourse’, p. 101.Google Scholar
9. Cited in Apollonio, , Futurists Manifestoes, p. 27.Google Scholar
10. In Freud, , ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’, p. 30.Google Scholar
11. Cited in Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 54.Google Scholar
12. Freud, , ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, Standard Edition, Vol. 14, p. 131.Google Scholar
13. Cited in Apollonio, , Futurists Manifestoes, p. 28.Google Scholar
14. Freud, , ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, p. 125.Google Scholar
15. Ibid., p. 135.
16. Cited in Apollonio, , Futurists Manifestoes, p. 28.Google Scholar
17. ‘Fisicofollia’ is a Futurist coinage which can be translated as the ‘mad body’.
18. See Lyon, , ‘Militant Discourse’, p. 121Google Scholar
19. Freud, , ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, p. 134.Google Scholar
20. Cited in Lyon, , ‘Militant Discourse’, p. 124.Google Scholar
21. Ibid., p. 121.
22. Ibid., p. 109.