Painting Furor Widens Chicago Racial Divisions : Depicting Late Mayor in Lingerie Angers Blacks; Students Protest Seizure

A painting of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington dressed only in women’s frilly underwear was returned to its student artist Thursday, 24 hours after angry city councilmen ripped it from an art school wall and police impounded it, saying it could incite rioting.

Seizure of the painting from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago touched off yet another racially tinged uproar, further polarizing relations between the city’s white and black communities.

The incident triggered a city-wide debate over artistic expression, political commentary, community concerns and the First Amendment and set off student demonstrations at the school. Legal experts called the seizure an unconstitutional act of vigilantes. Black radio stations were flooded with angry calls, and switchboards at City Hall and the Art Institute were jammed throughout the day.

Mayor Seen as Ridiculed

Black leaders said the picture, entitled “Mirth and Girth,” by David K. Nelson, a student with a reputation for outrageously irreverent work, defamed and ridiculed the late mayor. Washington is revered locally by blacks just as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is revered nationally.

Mayor Eugene Sawyer, who succeeded Washington, said the painting was “reprehensible.”

“I consider the picture pornography,” said Cook County Commissioner Rose Marie Love, who is black. “It is one in a series of incidents that is dividing the races.”

Art Institute President Marshall Field V, one-time publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and the defunct Chicago Daily News, said that, while students have First Amendment rights, “we do not condone the use of the First Amendment to disparage the memory of a great leader like Harold Washington.”

But Northwestern University law professor Daniel D. Polsby called the seizure of the picture “a very grave violation of the Art Institute’s rights, of the school’s rights and the student’s rights. For that matter, it is a violation of everybody’s rights in the city . . . . It is a story about a lynch mob led by councilmen and police who entered private property and confiscated private property.”

City Aide Dismissed

Paradoxically, six of the nine council members who went to the school to object to the painting as disparaging of Mayor Washington were either silent last week or defended the free speech rights of fired mayoral aide Steve Cokely, who had disparaged Mayor Washington for his relationship with Chicago Jews. Cokely was dismissed from his city job for a series of anti-Christian, anti-Semitic remarks tape-recorded for followers of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Several white community leaders, who refused to talk on the record, said that they were outraged by what appeared to be a double standard among black politicians in condoning criticism of Washington by a black but not a white.

Mayor Sawyer spent part of Thursday meeting with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religious leaders in an effort to heal the deep divisions between whites and blacks and particularly between Jews and blacks left by the weeklong Cokely controversy.

In addition, Sawyer mediated the dispute between council members and the Art Institute of Chicago, gaining an apology from the school, a pledge not to hang the picture again, an agreement to increase both minority employees and students and a promise to review the contents of future exhibits.

Irreverent Loner

Nelson, who will be graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this month, was nowhere to be found. However, classmates described him as an unpopular, irreverent loner with a knack for attracting news media attention. Last month, an April Fool newspaper spoof distributed at the school included a Nelson painting of the Madonna nursing a baby who resembled Anthony Jones, the school’s president.

“David is concerned,” said Harvey Grossman, the artist’s American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. “He did not intend to defame the mayor. His artistic theme is one of iconoclasm.”

Grossman said that Nelson would file suit against the Chicago Police Department for damages and to obtain “a court determination” that confiscating the painting was an illegal activity.