Suspended License offers a wide-ranging approach to censorship of the visual arts over recent centuries and in a variety of cultural contexts, seeking to elucidate the range of political, social, and artistic circumstances in which censorship has occurred. Using examples from 16th-century Germany and Italy, late 18th-century Spain, 19th-century France, and 20-century Germany, China, and America, leading art historians examine what these various experiences reveal historically and what light they shed on current dilemmas and controversies.Essays explore the censure of artworks by famous masters -- Michelangelo, Veronese, Goya, Daumier, Manet -- as well as the censored art of less familiar figures, such as contemporary artists in China. The rejection of modernism as an allegedly corrupt and dangerous style is considered both in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and in McCarthy era Texas in the 1950s. The recent debates in America over government sponsorship for the arts are also discussed, as well as the claims raised about the allegedly pornographic content of work by contemporary artists Wojnarowicz and Mapplethorpe.

Suspended License demonstrates that recent controversies over sponsorship, pornography, sacrilege, and aesthetic integrity in modern art are not without historical precedent, and also shows that many of the works now universally regarded as masterpieces have been the objects of censorious action in the past. Numerous illustrations contribute greatly to the reader's understanding of this important subject.