Suspended License offers a wide-ranging approach to censorship of the visual arts over the centuries and in a variety of cultural contexts, seeking to elucidate the range of political, social, and artistic circumstances in which censorship has occured.

Using examples from sixteenth-century Germany and Italy, late-eighteenth-century Spain, nineteenth-century France, and twentieth-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.