Defaced! Money, Conflict, Protest

This fully illustrated catalogue is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between money, power, resistance and dissent.It accompanies major exhibitions at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. War, revolution and protest are defining themes in all periods of world history, shaping national identities and influencing material and visual culture in myriad ways.The ubiquity of money makes it a powerful vehicle for diseminating the messages of the state to the public, but the symbolic and nationalistic iconography of currency could also be subverted or mutilated in powerful acts of defiance, rebellion and propaganda.Beginning in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, the exhibition explores the political and social tensions present in society, and communicated through the production or defacement of money, over the past 200 years.It contrasts the use of money by the radicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth cent