Censorship
Art shaped by suppression, and art that makes banning, covering and silencing its subject.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Censorship are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Censorship has shaped art as surely as patronage. Rulers, churches and states have destroyed images, covered them or punished their makers. During Byzantine Iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries, religious images were banned and smashed. After the Council of Trent, Daniele da Volterra was hired to paint draperies over the nudes in Michelangelo's Last Judgement, and Paolo Veronese, questioned by the Inquisition in 1573, retitled his Last Supper as The Feast in the House of Levi rather than alter it.
The 20th century added mass purges and public trials. The Nazis mocked modernism in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich (1937), Soviet officials bulldozed an open-air show of unofficial painting outside Moscow in 1974, and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs led to an obscenity trial in Cincinnati in 1990 that ended in acquittal. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Tania Bruguera and Ai Weiwei have answered by making suppression their material.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
Childhood
City Scenes
Cityscapes
Cityscapes and City Scenes
Classical Figure
Classical Mythology
