In April 2013, prominent lawyer and First Amendment champion Edward de Grazia died at age 86. De Grazia spent a legendary legal career defending the artistic value of literary icons, such as Henry Miller and William Burroughs, in their epic battles against censorship. It is worth reflecting on the impact of De Grazia's life to underscore the importance of artistic integrity, particularly as art in all different mediums have morphed in today's increasingly homogenized digital age.
Many literary purists often lament that the digitized and iPad world has stifled creativity within the arts.
The Monuments Men, George Clooney's new film, depicts a World War II platoon tasked to rescue art masterpieces from Nazi thieves and return them to their owners.
Adolf Hitler considered many paintings Entartete Kunst or 'degenerate art.' These pieces can best be "described as virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions... in some case the [artists] were forbidden to produce art entirely," according to a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Championing the merits of art, in all kinds of mediums, are paramount to any democracy. De Grazia's remained committed to defeating government bans on well-known and censored books, and was largely successful in overturning the Supreme Court's prior legislations, which had previously deemed them as 'obscene.' De Grazia's defined his life's work as defending "morally defiant artists against reactionary politicians and judges."
Over sixty obscenity cases confronted Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in 30 years before De Grazia helped the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings. Tropic of Cancer is widely considered one of the most important masterpieces of the 20th century. Before the Supreme Court decision In 1964, it was essentially deemed 'degenerate art.'
De Grazia also defended novelist William Burroughs for Naked Lunch, the controversial 1959 Beat classic. The novel is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, which follows a junkie narrator who takes on various aliases in different locations. Like Tropic of Cancer, the novel was considered vulgar and obscene for years. In Burroughs defense, de Grazia summoned literary giants Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg to testify to prove the book's artistic worth. De Grazia managed to successfully defend Burroughs, like he had done previously for Henry Miller.
Naked Lunch was featured in Time magazine's "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005."
The tenets of free expression must be preserved within all democracies; otherwise 'degenerate art' will be seen as a legitimate counter-reaction by Fascist elements within society.
