Two nude paintings by a famous Icelandic painter have been removed from the country’s central bank after a complaint by a staff member that they were too rude.
The Central Bank of Iceland confirmed it had decided to take down the two paintings by Gunnlaugur Blondal (1893-1962) after accepting that the content might be too explicit.
The staff member, who was not identified, had reportedly said they showed off too much flesh to qualify as art and verged on the pornographic, and requested that they be removed.
It then took six months for the bank to evaluate the request and eventually agree, which in turn generated criticism from people who felt the paintings should have stayed.
Icelandic Professor Guomundur Magnusson criticised the decision, saying that local movements like #FreeTheNipple were about giving power to women through nudity. He rejected the suggestion that the paintings were sexual in nature, and highlighted one critic that described them as a poetic view of the feminine body.
The Federation of Icelandic Artists also complained to the bank about removing the paintings which will now join a local arts collection where they will not be available to the public.
The organisation’s president Erling Johannesson described the act as demonstrating “prudishness and puritanism” and argued that the human body was a timeless subject of beauty that could be used to illustrate so many things, before adding “if you don’t have the judgement to look deeper, everything changes into pornography”.
The Central Bank of Iceland is one of the country’s key collectors of Icelandic works of art, which are on display in Reykjavik.
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Story By: Bartosz Staszewski, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
