Art Censorship

Definition: Works such as paintings and sculpture that are created primarily to give pleasure to the eye

Significance: The ambiguities of visual communication have caused censorship of the arts to be justified on more abstract grounds than other forms of censorship

After Michelangelo completed The Last Judgment, his final fresco for the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, in 1541, the work shocked papal conservatives. It upset them not only because of the human nudity it depicted but also because of its portrayals of members of the papal court—including an aide to the pope himself—as damned souls. Seventeen years later Pope Paul IV put a partial end to the controversy by commanding Daniele de Volterra to paint drapery over the exposed genitalia in the painting. For his part in this famous, and enduring, instance of art censorship, Volterra was nicknamed “the britches-maker” by his fellow artists. Nevertheless, his additions to the fresco survived intact until the painting was restored in 1990.

Nudity and papal grudges against the artist were not the only reasons for censoring The Last Judgment. The act of draping representations of nudity delivered a powerful political message that a new, more conservative day had dawned in the papal court and that Renaissance humanism, with its twin preoccupations with the human form and individual genius, would no longer be tolerated. Since that time The Last Judgment has served not only as model of artistic design and execution but also as an outstanding example of the peculiar nature of art censorship. Michelangelo’s work was censored not for its content, but for ideological implications that were no longer in step with the authority who had commissioned it.

Icon

Visual art is perhaps the oldest aesthetic form to be censored. By the time of its Third Dynasty around 3000 BCE, the Egyptian Empire had established a rigid set of conventions for artistic representation. Egyptian artists were compelled to paint in a few standard tones and to present figures in profile. The proscription of art in the ancient world took its most uncompromising form among the Hebrews, whose religion forbade graven images. The iconoclasm of Hebrew culture has continued to influence art censorship in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds.

Often it is an artwork’s iconic value, as much as its alleged indecency, that has inspired censorship. A classic example is Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s Maja Desnuda (1800), a study of a reclining female nude based upon a sleeping figure in a painting by Titian. Upon public discovery of the painting in 1814, Goya had to defend his work before the Spanish Inquisition, not simply because his female figure was nude, but also because she was awake—radiating a lack of shame in her femininity and sexuality. Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863), prohibited from the Paris Salon, stirred a similar controversy when exhibited at the Salon des Refuses because it portrayed a courtesan of the day in the pose of a Renaissance goddess.

The coupling of iconic value with homoerotic content fed the 1991 controversy surrounding an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs that was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). To present a figure as an icon is not simply to confer on it public acceptance of whatever the figure might symbolize, but also to ground that acceptance in the authority of its model. Hence the angry reactions of cultural conservatives such as North Carolina’s senator Jesse Helms, who punished the NEA by slightly reducing its annual funding.

Iconoclasm

Much like the Soviet dictators of the twentieth century, the ancient Egyptian pharaohs frequently erased hieroglyphic references or obliterated art works that depicted rivals or predecessors. Thutmose III (ca. 1400 BCE) ordered the destruction of all artworks depicting his coregent Queen Hatshepsut. Such wholesale destruction accounts for one of the oldest, and surely the most effective, forms of censorship. The motives behind such acts are best understood when one considers the ideological importance of the artwork destroyed. To destroy a work of art is often to destroy a political and cultural symbol. When the Vandals (whose destructive habits inspired the term “vandalism”) sacked Rome in 455 CE, they destroyed numerous artworks in order to dispirit the Romans. The Paris Communards of 1871, under the leadership of painter Gustave Courbet, demolished the Vendome Column to symbolize the end of the Bourbon dynasty. In 1989, China’s communist government sought to quell a prodemocracy demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by bulldozing its symbol: a hastily constructed Statue of Liberty. In more recent history, after controlling Mosul, Iraq (which includes the ancient city of Nineveh), the Islamic State began destroying works of religious art that the group deemed offensive.

The term “iconoclast” derives from an eighth-ninth century party faction the Eastern Orthodox Church that—in its zeal to distance itself from the Roman Catholic Church—attempted to forbid all holy images and the rituals associated with them (for example, kissing icons). During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther specifically targeted what he called the idolatry of the Roman church. Luther’s followers destroyed innumerable church artworks (stained glass windows, tapestries, sculptures, carvings, illuminated manuscripts, and relics) as their first order of business in reforming the church. The Catholic Church itself practiced iconoclasm against the illustrated Mayan and Aztec codices in their campaign to convert the New World in the sixteenth century.

Organized destruction of artworks has also been undertaken on moral or aesthetic grounds. At times the destruction has resulted from the indignation of a single offended individual. In 1900 temperance activist Carrie Nation not only smashed the liquor bottles but also a revealing painting of Cleopatra behind the bar in the Hotel Carey in Wichita, Kansas. Adolf Hitler, himself formerly a painter, combined anti-Semitism with an antimodernist aesthetic when he objected to what the Nazis called the degenerate art of 1930s Germany. Three years prior to his final solution for the Jews, Hitler allowed Hermann Göring to “sterilize” German museums and exhibits of all modern art by “un-German” artists.

The Censors

Like most censorship, that of art has been largely reactive. The exceptions to this rule are the totalitarian states (as various as ancient Egypt, seventeenth century France, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union) that have established official boards or academies to inspect and approve all artwork on public display. In nations without prior restraint on art, self-appointed crusaders have often been influential in acts of censorship. Anthony Comstock’s late nineteenth century New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, for example, targeted indecent art as well as literature. Comstock established his reputation in 1884 when his testimony helped convict a young shop clerk of violating antiobscenity laws. At issue were reproductions of contemporary French paintings that had recently been displayed in a Philadelphia art museum. By 1913 the vice crusader unwittingly became an enterprising art promoter’s best friend when, on a tip from the promoter, he investigated Paul Chabas’s September Morn (1912). Comstock’s campaign helped to make the painting—which featured a girl bathing nude—a cause célèbre that eventually sold more than seven million reproductions.

Book Illustrations and Album Cover Art

Book illustrations and record album cover art have led to numerous instances of censorship—even when the contents of the books or records themselves have been deemed harmless. In 1959, for example, the public library in Montgomery, Alabama, removed the children’s book The Rabbits’ Wedding (1958) from open circulation when white patrons objected that the male rabbit was black and his bride was white. In 1964 a Human Relations Council in Lincoln, Nebraska, objected to the stereotyped illustration of black people in the picture-book Little Black Sambo (1943) and lobbied successfully to have it removed from the local public school system. More recently, DC Comics changed a 2015 cover from a Batgirl comic after some readers found it misogynistic and a glorification of violence. Others felt changing the cover amounted to censorship. However, the artist who created the cover, Rafael Albuquerque, agreed that the cover should be withdrawn.

A number of rock music albums have been recalled on the basis of cover art alone. One of the more famous instances is the original cover of the 1966 Beatles album Yesterday and Today, on which the band members posed in butchers’ smocks with pieces of raw meat and bloody human dolls. Unlike most art objects, books and records are created for mass reproduction; their censorship usually involves attempts by elites to prevent socially destabilizing information and ideas from reaching mass audiences. However, art objects such as paintings and sculptures have traditionally been unique and solitary creations primarily available to the elite that can afford them.

Although reproductions of classic works of art have been available in the form of black-and-white engravings since the eighteenth century, inexpensive full-color facsimiles became readily available only in the twentieth century. Even in the nineteenth century, which witnessed the first establishment of public museums, access to original artworks was, by comparison to the twentieth century, severely limited. The arrival of an art-viewing public and the concomitant need to protect them from indecent or aesthetically revolting art did not occur until the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Is It Art?

The debate over whether an object is a work of art or not has led to notable examples of censorship. A typical reason for censoring something is that it is not “art,” but rather trash, pornography, or the like. In 1926 U.S. Customs classified Constantin Brancusi’s modernist sculpture Bird in Space as a taxable piece of hardware rather than a duty-free art object. The artist brought a lawsuit against the United States and won reclassification in a customs appeal court.

The modernists were not the first to face this most fundamental form of censorship: the denial of an object its status as art. Rebuffed by the state-sanctioned Beaux Arts Academy, the French Impressionists had to coordinate their own salon, the salon of rejects, in order to present their work for the public. Their resulting 1863 show won more opponents than adherents—critics warning that the new style might strike unwitting viewers blind or drive them mad. Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863) was singled out for denunciation, not only because it depicted a shamelessly nude woman in the presence of two fully dressed men, but because of its “amateurish” lack of three-dimensional perspective.

Impressionism remained embattled in the decades that followed. In 1878 the American painter James McNeill Whistler sued English critic John Ruskin for libel. In a London review Ruskin had declared Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874) a “wilful imposture” of legitimate art. Whistler won a pyrrhic victory; however, his one farthing in damages did little to cover the cost of his suit. Little did such critics as Ruskin know that abstract, abstract expressionist, minimalist, and conceptual art were to come; many have criticized such schools for producing works that are not art.

The question of whether something is art has been raised in connection with performance art, an avant-garde movement that combines conceptualism and multimedia presentation with live drama. The bounds of acceptability were pushed by artists like Vito Acconci, whose 1972 installation Seedbed had him hiding under a ramp and masturbating while verbally fantasizing, through a loudspeaker, about members of the audience above him in New York's Sonnabend Gallery.

Censorship of Reproductions

Artworks, produced for and admired by one culture or era, have been censored when displayed by another. More often than not in such cases, copies, replicas, or facsimiles of original artworks have fallen victim to censors. The best-known victim of modern censorship has probably been Michelangelo’s David. In response to protests in Orange County, California, a fig leaf was added to a marble replica of the statue at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in 1937. Three decades later the Beverly Hills vice squad seized a replica without a fig leaf from a local art gallery, and a poster of the statue was removed from a Sydney, Australia, bookstore on charges of obscenity. Some artworks controversial in their original cultures have remained so. Goya’s Maja Desnuda raised a new volley of protest when it appeared on a Spanish postage stamp in 1930. As late as 1959 the U.S. postmaster generally refused to forward letters with the offending Spanish stamp. An almost life-sized reproduction of Goya’s painting was moved, after protest, from the men’s room in a hotel restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport to the men’s room in the same chain’s airport hotel in Honolulu, where a similar controversy arose.

Political Cartoons

Censorship of political cartoons dates back to the eighteenth century, when the first newspapers and regularly published journals appeared. British caricaturist James Gillray was jailed in 1796 for publishing a print that satirized the financial motive behind the Prince of Wales’ recent marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. The charges against him were eventually dropped, but his case shows how the threat of prosecution is at times a more effective means of censorship than an outright ban. For example, in the United States, the Sedition Act of 1798, which banned “false, scandalous or malicious criticism” of the government, included political cartoons.

During a politically unstable time in France in 1832, Honoré Daumier was fined five hundred francs and sentenced to six months in jail for drawing a cartoon titled “Gargantua” that depicted King Louis Philippe consuming the nation’s wealth while excreting privileges. Charles Philipon, publisher of the weekly La Caricature, for which Daumier’s drawing was intended, was also fined and jailed, even though the offending cartoon was never printed. The regime then declared an outright ban on all political cartoons that lasted until 1848.

In the United States political cartoons have generally been considered speech that is protected under the First Amendment. This has often led to attempts at censorship that have avoided the word “censorship.” In 1870, for example, New York City’s corrupt political machine leader William “Boss” Tweed reportedly offered Thomas Nast a million dollars to stop drawing the damaging series of cartoons attacking him. Nast refused and his cartoons helped precipitate Tweed’s downfall.

Such methods of persuasion have often taken even more blunt forms. In 1945 General George S. Patton pressured army sergeant Bill Mauldin, whose cartoons in the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had received a Pulitzer Prize, to soften his often satirical tone so as not to undermine troop morale. Mauldin resisted, although his work was not protected by the First Amendment because he did his work as a member of the U.S. armed forces. On occasion public figures lampooned in political cartoons have sought recourse in libel suits. President Richard Nixon won such a 1969 suit against a Connecticut student who had published an obscene caricature of him. Normally, however, libel has been difficult to prove in political cartoons. An 1808 decision in an English law court established ridicule as a “fit weapon of criticism.”

More recently, the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo created a firestorm because of its depictions of the prophet Muhammad on several covers. In fact, in 2015, the magazine's headquarters were the target of a terrorist attack by Muslim extremists. Twelve employees were killed, including the editor in chief. The attack prompted many to call for a reevaluation of the limits of free speech. However, many others defended the magazine and warned of the dangers of censorship.

Public Art

As in the case of The Last Judgment, censorship of art has often originated with patrons who have commissioned artworks. Such censorship has been a relatively straightforward affair in privately commissioned work. However, the public art of the Western democracies, ultimately commissioned by taxpayers, has led to bitter controversies. In 1945, for example, citizens of Kennebunkport, Maine, raised a thousand dollars to commission a new mural by a Maine artist to replace a federally funded work that had been painted in the style of Mexican Diego Rivera. Several murals commissioned by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration were whitewashed over for similar reasons by unappreciative citizens in cities, such as Columbus, Ohio. In 1955 residents of Los Angeles sought unsuccessfully to remove a Giacometti-inspired sculpture, The Family, that had been commissioned for the city’s police department headquarters. On the other hand, anticommunists were successful in their efforts to remove murals from San Francisco’s Coit Tower that included portraits of resentful workers, one of whom carried a book by Karl Marx.

Bibliography

"Art and Culture Censorship Timeline." National Coalition against Censorship, 2018, ncac.org/resource/art-and-culture-censorship-timeline. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Print.

Carmilly-Weinberger, Moshe. Fear of Art: Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Art. New York: Bowker, 1986. Print.

Clapp, Jane. Art Censorship: A Chronology of Proscribed and Prescribed Art. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1972. Print.

Frank, Priscilla. "A Brief History of Art Censorship from 1508 to 2014." Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 16 January 2015. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.

Grovier, Kelly. "The Artworks that Caused a Scandal." BBC, 19 Oct. 2017, www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171018-the-works-too-scandalous-for-display. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018.

Lawrence, D. H. Pornography and Obscenity. Yonkers: Alicat, 1948. Print.

Read, Herbert. The Meaning of Art. Winchester: Faber, 1951. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. "On Censorship." New Yorker. Condé Nast, 11 May, 2012. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.