In an echo of the controversial Bill Henson case in Australia, the Tate Modern gallery in London has withdrawn a controversial work depicting a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields after a police visit raised concerns it could be deemed child pornography.
The picture, which shows Shields standing naked and with an oiled torso in a bathtub, was created by the American artist Richard Prince from a photograph originally shot in 1975 by a commercial photographer, Gary Gross.
Shields’s mother had commissioned the image in her effort to launch her daughter as a child star. The photo was later published in a Playboy publication, Sugar ‘n’ Spice .
Shields made an unsuccessful attempt to buy back the negatives in 1981, but a judge ruled she was a ”hapless victim of a contract” that two ”grasping” adults had bound her to.
Tate curators had already chosen to hang the picture, Spiritual America , behind closed doors bearing a warning that the photo was ”challenging”. An essay in the exhibition catalogue by the exhibition’s curator, Jack Bankowsky, argues that the artist’s desire was not to spark the ”lubricious titillations” but that it was created to provoke thought about the child star’s story.
The image forms part of a new exhibition, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, which was due to open yesterday and which aims to explore the relationship between commercial and artistic images.
The Tate consulted lawyers before hanging the picture, which has not been seen in Britain. It has been shown in New York, where it attracted little attention.
As in the Henson case, it is understood police visited the gallery after reading media coverage and previews of the exhibition in newspapers.
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