Case · Censorship
The Conviction of Stass Paraskos
Britain's last artist prosecuted under the vagrancy laws
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Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
After a 1966 exhibition in Leeds, painter Stass Paraskos was prosecuted and convicted for obscenity — one of the last artists in Britain successfully charged under the old vagrancy statutes.
Police removed several of Paraskos's paintings from an exhibition and charged him under Victorian-era vagrancy laws designed to police public indecency. He was convicted and fined, in a case that drew support from figures in the British art world.
The prosecution is now remembered less as a moral victory than as a sign of the statutes' obsolescence, part of the slow retreat of obscenity law from the gallery in the later twentieth century.