Violence

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Violence fills religious and mythological art, often at the moment of the blow. Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620) shows two women pinning down a general as blood sprays across the sheets, and Peter Paul Rubens's The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1611–12) twists soldiers and mothers into a desperate knot.

Modern artists confronted violence as news and as experience. The photographer Weegee listened to police radio to reach New York crime scenes first, collecting the results in Naked City (1945). Performance made the body the site. In Rhythm 0 (1974) Marina Abramović laid out 72 objects, among them a loaded gun, and let the audience use them on her for six hours. Gina Pane cut herself with razor blades in actions of the 1970s, and the Brazilian artist Letícia Parente filmed herself stitching the words Made in Brasil into the sole of her foot in Marca Registrada (1975).