|
|
Dana Adams Schmidt
LONDON, NOV. 28 - A London magistrate ruled today that pictures by Jim Dine, the American pop artist, while "individually not indecent, became an indecent exhibition" by reason of their arrangement.
John Aubrey-Fletcher, the Marlborough Street magistrate, fined Robert Hugh Fraser of the Fraser Gallery in Duke Street, £20 with 50 guineas costs (totaling $203) for "Willfully exposing to public view an indecent exhibition" under the 11838 Vagrancy Act.
The 21 pictures, which had been seized by Scotland Yard detectives, were arranged, as seen from the window, with male sex organs on the left, female on the right, while a picture on a wall at the back of the gallery represented an act of copulation.
The magistrate's decision turned on this juxtaposition and on the question of whether the pictures could be seen through a large window from the street.
Two detective-sergeants, who made the seizure after the Director of Prosecutions had received a complaint, testified that they could see the pictures clearly, including a fourletter word with an arrow directing attention to one of the pictures.
Peter Weitzman, counsel for the defense, pleaded not guilty and told the court that Mr. Dine was "among the most internationally famous of the younger American artists," and a pioneer in the pop-art movement. Pictures by Mr. Dine hung in the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, he said, and one of the pictures seized had been chosen for showing at a museum in Amsterdam.
After his conviction, Mr. Fraser said he was "very ashamed this should have happened in this country, which I thought had a reputation for liberality." He said he thought it "disgraceful that works of art should be put on the level of pornography that might be seen in a dirty-book shop."
Mr. Fraser said he would not try to show the pictures again, even in a different arrangement. He said he feared that "they would not be judged on their merits, but on the basis of what the prosecution said."
The New York Times, November 29, 1,966:38
|
|
|
|
|
|
