Picture of Nude John Lennon Pulled From Art Exhibition

A well-known photograph depicting a nude John Lennon embracing a fully clothed Yoko Ono has been removed from an art exhibit at the city-run Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

The portrait, by Annie Leibovitz, was pulled from the exhibit “Heroes, Heroines, Idols and Icons,” which opened Saturday, after objections from several members of the center’s board of trustees.

The issue is the photograph’s appropriateness to the show’s theme of heroism and not the nudity, said Wes Morgan, Fullerton’s community services superintendent. Another Leibovitz photograph that remains in the exhibit shows the late artist Keith Haring, nude but covered with body paint.

“Certain people didn’t think it was in keeping with the theme of the show,” Morgan said. “It’s nothing to do with censorship, nudity, John Lennon or Yoko Ono.”

Members of the board will meet Thursday morning with the center’s program committee to decide whether the photograph will be put back in the show. Morgan said the meeting was planned before controversy over the decision hit the media.

Taken the same day the former Beatle was shot to death, the photograph shows Lennon in a fetal position, embracing a reclining Ono. His buttocks are visible in profile. The photograph raised some controversy when it ran on the cover of the Jan. 22, 1981, edition of Rolling Stone magazine, and several Southern California supermarket chains refused to carry it.

G. Ray Hawkins, a Los Angeles gallery owner who loaned the Leibovitz photos for the exhibit, said he was in “a total state of shock” over removal of the Lennon/Ono portrait.

“I think that the photograph itself is a ground-breaker in a certain social sense. It shows what John was saying in his music,” Hawkins said in a phone interview from New York.

Exhibit curator Norman Lloyd said that he hopes the photograph will be restored to the show Thursday. “Of course, I curated this show and I want the work to be seen by people,” Lloyd said. “As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t the show that I curated. The show I curated includes the photograph.”

He declined to criticize the board’s decision, however. “I need to be very respectful of their wishes,” Lloyd said. “We’re a community gallery. We’re city funded . . . The public’s opinion is something we need to listen to.”

The Muckenthaler incident comes in the midst of controversy over a traveling exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, have been indicted on misdemeanor obscenity charges for an exhibit there of photographs by Mapplethorpe that include homoerotic images and naked children.

“That’s just a piece of coincidental timing . . . Cincinnati was never discussed,” Morgan said. “It’s been the board carrying out their role as trustees. . .They’re just functioning as representatives of the community.”