Leena Mccall’s painting, Portrait of Ms Ruby May, was removed by the Mall Galleries in London from its Society of Women Artists’s annual exhibition. The gallery did not consult the Society, which selected the works to display. The gallery reportedly says that the move “protected” “children and vulnerable adults.” McCall says she was told it was “pornographic” and “disgusting.”
Most sites are reporting simply that the subject’s pubic hair was the problem:
But it strikes me that there are countless other works that show pubic hair, including erotic nudes, that would obviously not incur the vicarious fear and disgust of the Mall Gallery’s operators. After all, they replaced it with another nude. This is the aspect of the painting that makes the subject’s partial nudity a problem:
Female sexuality is the real enemy. Rowan Pellan in The Guardian:
The Society of Women Artists was permitted to replace McCall’s work with another less provocative nude: one where the model wasn’t tattooed and standing hand-on-hip, all unbuttoned. It seems the Mall Galleries’ clientele can cope with nudes, so long as the model is a more passive and unthreatening recipient of the wandering viewer’s gaze. Which all seems a desperately outmoded form of prudishness, like the wartime strippers at London’s Windmill club who were allowed to pose naked, by the Lord Chamberlain’s reluctant acquiescence, so long as they didn’t move. They posed with one foot forward, obscuring any glimpse of “the fork” (ie vulva). The implication’s clear: the minute a woman is alive and free to move, an active agent of her own sexuality, she is a menace to society.