caa a22 4500 388109297 CHVBK 20180307125348.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1999 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S030788330001912X doi S030788330001912X pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S030788330001912X Diamond Elin Polly Dick and the Politics of Fisicofollia [Elektronische Daten] [Elin Diamond] 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. Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999 Theatre Research International Cambridge University Press 24/3(1999), 264-267 0307-8833 24:3<264 1999 24 TRI https://doi.org/10.1017/S030788330001912X text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S030788330001912X text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Diamond Elin NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Theatre Research International Cambridge University Press 24/3(1999), 264-267 0307-8833 24:3<264 1999 24 TRI CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge