Mary Beard’s Forbidden Art dissects 2,000 years of censorship

For all the recent hand-wringing about the rise of “cancel culture”, it seems to have escaped many that so-called cancellation has always been an indelible part of culture. Since ancient times, works have been censored, boycotted and destroyed. The only variable over the centuries is precisely what is deemed too profane or dangerous to be seen.

Mary Beard’s Forbidden Art, an absorbing new two-part BBC documentary, makes the case that there is little more revealing about an era or a society’s values and anxieties than the art it desperately seeks to hide. In surveying a diverse collection of works that have provoked strong reactions and outcry, the historian explores how the boundaries of acceptability have been gerrymandered over the past 2,000 years. She identifies which taboos have been long outdated and which have remained constant sources of controversy.

Throughout her detailed and enthusiastic interpretations of paintings, sculptures, statues and performances, Beard never attempts to judge what makes “good” art, nor does she suggest that to admire shocking art is to be more (or less) enlightened. In fact, the programme is arguably more about human psychology than it is about art — less about lines drawn than where we as individuals and societies have drawn the line of what should be displayed.

The first episode focuses on corporeal matters, and is not for those with faint hearts or closed minds. It examines shifting attitudes to graphic depictions of human bodies and the function of suffering in art. While contemporary viewers might scoff at earlier generations for being scandalised by the nudes of Henri Gervex and Amedeo Modigliani, we in turn are far more squeamish about representations of death and decay. Where death masks and photographs of the deceased were prevalent in the Victorian era, today a work such as Daphne Todd’s beautiful yet unsanitised painting of her mother’s mottled corpse can find no permanent place to be displayed.

Sex, bodies and scatology give way to politics, iconoclasm and eschatology in the equally fascinating second instalment. Here Beard tackles flashpoint topics such as the removal of public monuments — with particular focus on the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol — and the freedom to satirise religious figures. Her sensitive, considered approach encourages us to look beyond the binaries to which these issues are often reduced.

In addition to challenging us and scrutinising her own instincts, Beard also interviews the likes of Tracey Emin and Marcus Harvey (neither a stranger to polemic) to debate the ethical responsibility of artists who choose to produce work that can potentially disturb or upset viewers. Interspersed throughout the programme are shots of members of the public and their reactions when confronted with some of the provocative works discussed. Their opinions are often illuminating, but the close-ups of their facial expressions are almost works of art in themselves.

★★★★☆

On BBC2 from February 3 at 9pm

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