Dorothy Iannone: Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Love and Divinity

Since the early 1960s, Dorothy Iannone (born 1933) has occupied herself with the attempt to represent ecstatic unity–the union of gender, feeling and pleasure, as she describes it–resulting in a body of frequently autobiographical work encompassing painting, drawing, collage, objects and publications. This volume examines the censorship of Iannone’s work, using her 1970 artist’s book The Story of Bern as a starting point. Iannone’s works were removed from an exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969, after the museum director demanded that the genitals in her paintings be covered. Iannone responded with The Story of Bern, reclaiming her work from the controversies surrounding it by making her perspective public. In a nod to the censorship of Iannone’s work, the explicit image on the cover of this book is hidden by a belly band.