1992 Articles

Censorship Revisited

Freedberg, David A.

The topic of censorship has become a modish one. There has hardly ever been as much talk and writing about it as in recent months. The official organ of the College Art Association (the professional association of art historians), the Art Journal, has just devoted two issues it (vol. 50, nos. 3-4).

The recent exhibitions and reconstruction in Los Angeles and in Washington of Hitler's 1937 shows of Entartete Kunst provided a large number of instructive and often chastening parallels, while the Asia Society in New York held an exhibition about the censorship of prints In Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (it also happened to show examples of the kinds of images that are often proscribed to little or no avail). Puritans and fundamentalists continue to press for stricter controls on art, and the cultured press has not ceased to run articles about the dangers so.