Mural Art and Censorship
Mural Art is a significant form of public expression that has roots tracing back to prehistoric times, with notable developments occurring in ancient civilizations and reaching a pinnacle during the Italian Renaissance. Renowned artists like Michelangelo and Diego Rivera have used murals to convey complex narratives, often reflecting social, political, and cultural themes. However, the intersection of mural art and censorship frequently leads to controversy, especially when the themes challenge prevailing ideologies or offend societal norms. For instance, Michelangelo's "The Last Judgment" faced backlash for its depictions of nudity, resulting in censorship efforts by the Catholic Church during the Council of Trent. Similarly, Rivera's politically charged works, which included portraits of Communist figures, were met with public outrage, leading to the destruction of his mural at Rockefeller Center. The tension between artistic freedom and community standards highlights the ongoing dialogue around expression and censorship in mural art, demonstrating how these public works can evoke strong emotional responses and necessitate negotiation between artists and society.
Mural Art and Censorship
Definition: Paintings on walls, especially walls open to public view
Significance: Public condemnation of murals has sometimes resulted in the destruction of mural art
The earliest mural paintings were executed on cave walls at least as far back as 30,000 BCE. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the Near and Far East also left murals. The Italian Renaissance saw the greatest expression of mural art in history. Many of the murals of Michelangelo, Raphael, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and others still inspire. Mural painting generally requires that artist and client collaborate. At times communication fails and controversy arises, sometimes resulting in censorship. This was the case with Michelangelo.
One of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo became embroiled in a vehement controversy over his enormous mural The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The work depicts countless nude human figures meeting their ultimate fate as judged by God. It was described as a “bathing establishment” by Biagio de Cesena, a papal assistant. Another critic, Pietro Aretino, commented that “such things might be painted in a voluptuous bathroom, but not in the choir of the highest chapel.” Michelangelo is supposed to have inserted the portraits of both these critics in the mural. Aretino was represented as Bartholomew holding the skin of a flayed martyr. The head and body of the martyr dangle limply from Aretino’s hand. The martyr resembles a self-portrait of Michelangelo. He caricatured the assistant, Biagio de Cesena, as Minos, the supreme judge of hell, with ears resembling a donkey’s. Biagio complained to the pope, but the pope responded that to rescue de Cesena from hell was outside the pope’s power, but had de Cesena been in purgatory, it would have been a different matter. On December 3, 1563, the Council of Trent announced that representation of nudity was forbidden. Under popes Paul IV and Gregory XIII the fresco was in danger of being completely destroyed.
Finally the offending parts on all figures were painted over. Other overpaintings were made in 1632 and again in 1762. The censorship actions by the church were to have a negative effect on how much nudity other artists portrayed in their murals from that time on. In the 1980s and 1990s a massive restoration of the Sistine Chapel was undertaken, and The Last Judgment was restored. The loin cloths that had covered the previously offending parts were removed. In his heroic figures Michelangelo was portraying ideal human forms, and nudity in many of the figures was reinterpreted to support the concept of that ideal.
Revolutionary Painters
In 1923 a group in Mexico called the syndicate of revolutionary painters, sculptors, and engravers included Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. These artists painted murals that allegedly promoted Communist propaganda. When public opinion reacted against socialism and Communism, the conservative middle class became enraged at these artists’ supposedly inflammatory works and often moved to have them destroyed or otherwise censored.
Rivera in particular stirred up controversy when he refused to remove a portrait of Communist leader Vladimir Lenin from his Radio City mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1933. Rivera had painted a statement against what he saw as the oppression caused by the capitalist system and all those who symbolized it. In the central areas of the Radio City mural were various technological devices for the production of electrical power, the harnessing of energy, and the exploration of scientific knowledge. On the left side were the oppressors: businesspeople, aristocrats, and bayonet-wielding soldiers. On the right were pictured the working masses, children, and a heroically morose figure of Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution. The controversy was covered on the front page of many newspapers across America. Rivera lost the battle. The owners of the building, with the indirect involvement of prominent businessperson Nelson Rockefeller, destroyed the mural; many viewed the destruction of the mural as an act of the wealthy Rockefeller family to censor Communist ideology. Many artists and Marxists were incensed at the destruction of the mural.
Thomas Hart Benton
In 1934 the mural painter Thomas Hart Benton gave a speech at the John Reed Club in New York City. He criticized Marxist art, which was characterized by Rivera’s mural. Benton held that Marxist art was too idealistic, and not based on life experiences. Benton expressed his indifference to the destruction of the Rivera mural. In conclusion he said: “I respect Rivera as an artist and a great one, but I have no time to enter into affairs concerning him, because I am intensely interested in the development of an art which is of, and adequately represents the United States—my own art.” These were incendiary words. One of his lectures during this period resulted in a chair-throwing brawl.
In 1936, Benton completed his social history of Missouri murals in the Missouri State Capitol. Walter Heren reported in the Kansas City Journal-Post the results of a poll he had taken. There was no middle ground in the opinions of the murals. “You either like them or you want the wall to be painted a deep black,” he observed. Benton had elected to portray Missouri not from an idealized, noble, and refined point of view, but rather he depicted miners, laborers, politicians going about their business, along with the Jesse James gang robbing a bank and a train and enslaved Black people being whipped as they worked the lead mines. Benton showed breweries, shoe factories, and clothing sweatshops of St. Louis, as well as the story of Frankie and Johnnie, where Frankie shoots Johnnie dead because “he done her wrong.” The mural aroused the admiration or hostility of lay people and artists alike. In Benton’s mind the ugliness of some of the figures had a certain truthfulness and nobility of character not found in the more idealistic paintings, as found in Rivera’s work, for example.
Postwar and Twenty-First Century Murals and Censorship
Murals continued to be associated with socialism in the former Soviet Union, Mexico, and Chile. Mural painting underwent a revival from the 1960s to the 1990s in many countries. In the 1960s and 1970s in Chile it was used by communist painting brigades to bring messages to the people during the revolution. Various paintings on the Berlin Wall came to be seen as one long, interconnected mural reflecting the thoughts and feelings of many different people on both sides of the wall during the Cold War. In the 1970s and 1990s mural art was frequently used to communicate ethnic consciousness and pride, particularly in the inner cities of America.
Murals and other similar forms of street art continued to often be connected with political or social themes into the twenty-first century, and censorship controversies likewise remained common. For example, in 2010 the artist Blu was commissioned to paint a mural on a wall of the Geffen Contemporary building at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) in California. However, when the work's strong antiwar themes were revealed, including images of coffins covered in money, the MOCA painted over the mural before it was shown to the public due to concerns of offending a nearby veterans' hospital and war memorial. Blu and some other artists objected to the censorship, while others defended the museum's right to determine what art it would display. In 2014 a mural on a transformer box in Loveland, Colorado, commissioned by the city as part of a public art program, was ordered to be removed after members of a nearby church complained that the image of a witch-like woman was scaring children. That same year, a mural painted on a wall in Clacton-on-Sea, England, was chemically removed. The artwork was claimed by the famous but anonymous artist Banksy, who had left typically political murals in locations both within and outside of the United Kingdom. While many interpreted it as communicating a message about anti-immigrant sentiment in the United Kingdom, town officials claimed that it had been reported as offensive and therefore, following inspection, needed to be removed.
In 2015 muralist Mike Alewitz complained of censorship when the Museum of the City of New York denied the installation of his commissioned work The City at the Crossroads of History. Alewitz accused the museum of attempting to dictate the content of the mural and ultimately rejecting it for its imagery promoting the labor movement over the wealthy class that Alewitz claimed supported the museum. In some cases, public murals were covered up for cited sensitivity issues, such as one that was part of a 2021 Banksy series in an English town that depicted a scene that some had reported as negatively reminding them of a death of a young girl that had recently occurred in the town. By that time, murals considered controversial in public spaces such as schools had been subjects of debate for potential removal, with one prominent mural, George Washington High School's Life of Washington painted by Victor Arnautoff, prompting years of discussion and even legal battles into the early 2020s as some argued that such images of racism in American history could be traumatic for students and others contended that the mural was an educational part of history that needed to be preserved.
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