The crime of the nude : Anthony Comstock, the Art Students League of New York, and the origins of modern art in modern American obscenity

In 1906 postal inspector Anthony Comstock raided the Art Students League of New York, seizing its publication "The American student of art" and initiating a criminal obscenity prosecution against the clerk who handed him the magazine. In contrast to its intended effect of policing public morals, this seizure resulted in a strong and significant public backlash against government censorship. American artists responded by demonstrating their professional autonomy through self-regulation and by creating works with the subject matter and aesthetics of criminal obscenity as a means of asserting their liberty, and their modernity, in the early twentieth century. [Publication abstract]