summarize this news article in 750 characters or less "Not for the faint-hearted’: the gripping, horrifying show about the NAME_1
His name has become a byword for extreme sexual depravity. But was there more to the French nobleman who spent much of his life in jail? Our writer finds out at a new exhibition in Barcelona investigating his shocking work

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NAME_2
@ladyhaja
Tue 25 Jul 2023 16.18 BST
It’s a bright, sunny day in Barcelona and I’m in a dark gallery watching a woman pull a scroll out of her vagina. Outside, skateboarders circle the CCCB, one of the city’s foremost arts centres. Inside? A naked teenage girl is eating her master’s excrement in a clip from NAME_3’s 1975 film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

NAME_4: Freedom or Evil is an exhibition exploring the influence and reputation of the notorious French writer and philosopher the NAME_1 – from whose name the term sadism derives. It is not for the faint-hearted. It opens with a reproduction of his only extant authentic portrait, a 1760 sketch of the 19-year-old NAME_5 by NAME_6, and juxtaposes it with NAME_7’s collage composed of 6,060 Google image search results for “NAME_4” and associated terms. The purpose of NAME_8’s piece is to depict current impressions of the Ancien Régime-Revolution straddling provocateur; amusingly, there are plenty of shots of the Smooth Operator singer mingled among entwined limbs from hardcore movies.

It is the sort of intelligent and curious work that typifies Freedom or Evil. For much of history, including during his lifetime, NAME_5 has been cast as mere pornographer, a cartoon sensationalist or a twisted sicko. It’s this characterisation that co-curators NAME_9 and NAME_10 are intent on challenging.


A Parisian nobleman born in 1740, NAME_5 spent almost three decades of his life in prison, mostly to deter and suppress his explicit and macabre writings. One prison sentence was the result of him sending his novel, NAME_11 – which runs the full Sadeian gamut from murder to incest to cannibalism – to Napoleon, which was rather asking for it.

There is no act of depravity that NAME_5 found too stomach-churning. His most famous work – but in its unfinished state, his least accomplished – 120 Days of Sodom features a woman being raped to death atop a bed of nails. And that’s not even the most shocking vignette. Written on a 12-metre scroll, it was smuggled out of the Bastille into the febrile, pre-terror atm