I n 1995, Edwynn Houk, one of the braver people I know, hung a beautiful show of my “Family Pictures” series in his gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City.
My work had made a brief appearance on the evolving Culture War battlefield maps but had thus far escaped even the most minor skirmish. I was definitely not jonesing for a fight after having watched what happened to Robert Mapplethorpe, Jock Sturges, Andres Serrano and a few other lesser combatants, and when I walked into the gallery and saw that Edwynn had just snoot-cocked the self-appointed cultural guardians, I quailed. There, smack in the middle of his main wall, he had hung an image [I had] taken that same year called “The Three Graces,” a guaranteed gut-flutterer but illegal as hell. At least in Ohio, which was still reeling from the Mapplethorpe trial and busily tightening up the state obscenity laws. Even if it was flying in a plane over Ohio. Or flying anywhere; illegal to ship, as I recall, although the exact legal threat is no longer clear to me. So how odd is it that after all the risky pictures I had taken, this joyous art rip-off of my daughters and me, hands entwined, peeing in front of an ocean backdrop, was the one that was going to get me thrown in the pokey, once and for all.
Any art lover will recognize the three Graces, the often-painted mythological figures we were portraying, representing the civilizing influence on humanity of joy, elegance and beauty. Our image was one of many in which we restaged works of art toward the end of the “Family Pictures” series. It was taken on the island of Bequia, the largest island in the Grenadines, in our last summer of idyllic, uncomplicated family life; in fact, it was the last extended vacation we ever really took all together. This great travel gift came to us as an artist’s retreat from a generous benefactor, and there has been nothing like it since—without doubt, the happiest months of my life.
In planning the photograph, we followed the long-established pictorial tradition, two Graces facing forward, one facing back, then we stole (yes, flat-out stole) another idea from [photographer] Emmet Gowin, that of a standing woman peeing. Having chugged down oceanic amounts of water we were guaranteed to have enough pee for the one-chance-only, perfectly synchronized image capture on the 8 × 10 film. With youthfully obedient bladders, we let go at the count of three and somebody (who will remain nameless since I suppose they could be legally liable) took the picture.
The artist Sam Messer was also on the island that summer and it couldn’t have been he whose finger tripped the illegal shutter because he was busily sketching the scene
Watercolor sketch: Sam Messer, courtesy of Sam Messer
and he later joined me in indictable misdemeanor-hood by taking his own version there the next year, which he titled “Two Idiots, One Grace.” Although I guess since his Grace isn’t peeing, he’s probably safe.
Because, as I recall, that was the crux of the issue: It was illegal and specifically statutorily in Ohio (and maybe California?) to take a picture of a child urinating. Never mind that piety-skewering putti are delightedly peeing in gardens all over the world. (Although [recently], I found this clever work-around, for which somebody should have been arrested for portraying the poor putti vomiting water from their mouths like drunken frat boys at a beer-bong party when they all had perfectly serviceable little penises.)
Despite the ubiquity of peeing putti, the law was so clear on the peeing part that even my most dedicated legal defenders hedged a bit when I asked them if it was OK to leave the work on the wall of the gallery. So, there I was, a few hours before the opening, removing the picture, the cynosure of the show, from Edwynn’s walls. I was a complete chicken, but what would you do if you got this note on your pillow from one of your children?
“The Three Graces” has never been shown on the walls of a museum or gallery in the U.S., to the best of my memory (a near-comical phrase), although of course nobody bats an eye at it in Europe, where they chortle at puritanical American attitudes. I periodically have to remind myself that this country was founded upon Puritan distrust of two aristocratic preoccupations, with art running a close second to the Papacy. I’m puzzled that our culture can easily assimilate the most vulgar slasher movies, while expressing indignation about static images containing elegant and occasionally frank treatments of sex and mortality, race, gender and religion. But the preponderance of our collective ancestry is, after all, British, and as [Oscar] Wilde, who suffered terribly at their hands, supposedly said of the prudishness of the English, “What a price to pay for a few good novels.”
One might think that my state of Virginia could have escaped this paradigm because it has always clung to a myth of aristocracy, as noted approvingly by [writer] William Faulkner, but it was in Virginia that I ran into just such indignation. Five years after the self-censored exhibition at Houk, I displayed “The Three Graces” in a slide show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and descriptions of it riled the Republican governor, James Gilmore. In a now commonplace Republican strategy (see then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s threat of freezing $7 million in funding to the Brooklyn Museum if it did not remove from the walls Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary), Gilmore garnered headlines, even in The New York Times, by not so subtly threatening the state’s fiscal support of the museum and in doing so brought down a firestorm of editorial and public criticism. In fact, these attacks on the museum and me were specifically singled out in a national news analysis some years later to explain his subsequent plummet into obscurity.
Gilmore asserted to the press that he had received a letter about the slide show from an anonymous “concerned citizen,” later revealed to me by an investigative reporter at The Washington Post to have been (allegedly) a member of Gilmore’s own staff and written from his own office. The whole thing fizzled out after a while, although at the time it was quite the little tempest, as evidenced by a file in my attic bulging with letters to the editor (remarkably supportive), personal letters (ditto), yellowing newspaper articles and transcriptions of the few weary and occasionally acerbic statements I gave. To wit:
I am sorry for the aggravation this has caused the Virginia Museum. I’m sorry for Governor Gilmore whose imagination must have run wild conjuring up the images described in the anonymous letter, and I’m sorry for my family, but most of all I’m sorry for the other artists working in a sincere and honest way, for whom this threat must be chilling.
I want a healthy dialogue between the arts, the museums and the people of the state. Art, at its best, can provoke that dialogue, and, yes, Governor Gilmore, “challenge the values of our society”—but in a positive and enlightened way. I sincerely hope that the inadvertent dialogue my slide show provoked will not diminish both the governor’s office and the artists of this state but will elevate both.
You might note that I am not reproducing “The Three Graces” here. I suppose I am still a yellow-bellied coward, like some sly, cowlicked Mark Twain character who taunts another to jump off the cliff into the water but doesn’t do it himself. Here I am telling you to jump in, be brave, put your work out there, take chances, you’ll regret it otherwise. Yes. Do those things. And yes, I do. Regret it, I mean: I probably should have left the print on the wall. But. The note on the pillow.
Photo: Betsy Schneider.
S elf censorship is one thing, always vexing and fraught. But uninvited, outside censorship is another thing altogether; it is to editing as radical tree-pollarding is to the painstaking pruning of a bonsai. And perhaps ultimately so damaging to your integrity that you will fail like those suburban Bradford pears, cropped down to their core, which struggle for years to send up trifling shoots from their stumpy, amputated limbs. You will have to navigate your own way through complex moments like these.
As an artist, you have an obligation to the viewer to offer up a different sensibility (why otherwise would they bother to explore yours?), to call their closely held belief systems into question (not gratuitously and, to whatever extent you can, with respect and a lagniappe of beauty) and to challenge and subvert. The more effective you are at this, the more agitation, possibly even anger, you may cause. My dear friend, the novelist and critic Jim Lewis, wrote about the risk and importance of offending the viewer in a letter to a fellow critic, Jerry Saltz. In it, he urges us to push harder, even if people hate our work, suggesting that if nobody hates it, it might not even be art. A great admirer of [writer] Samuel Johnson, Lewis bolsters his concept with this winning Johnsonian dropshot: “It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock… To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.”
“Self censorship is one thing, always vexing and fraught. But uninvited, outside censorship is another thing altogether; it is to editing as radical tree-pollarding is to the painstaking pruning of a bonsai.”
Lewis is such a brilliant writer that I occasionally experience a stomp-provoking surge of petulance when I read him. Why couldn’t I have written that? This happens frequently when I see photographs that I wish I had taken, but as a writer I am humble enough to know there is no way I could improve on Lewis in what he says here: “Those qualities in your work that bother people the most are often precisely the ones that should be cultivated, pushed so far out on the axis of vice that they come around to be virtues.” Axis of vice! How can you top that? It should be the title of a book. Though maybe not this one.
But he’s right about the way things often end up coming around. Cynical sophisticates scoff at the belief that if you make your true work with the purest intentions, your sincerity will be rewarded even by the jaded art world, but you know what? I kinda buy that. Do the work of your earnest heart, with all your body and soul, for as long as you breathe and with as much craft and creativity as you can wring from your every filament, and you will have made art. Your art.
If it is tough art, if it is “The Three Graces” kind of tough, if you have listened to Jim Lewis but you don’t want to draw attention to it, then give it some temporal insulation, as [artist Andrew] Wyeth did with the Helga portraits, working on the series privately for years before releasing it. Or just let time’s sandpaper take care of it for you, as it did for [composer Igor] Stravinsky, whose “The Firebird,” initially ridiculed, is now considered a 20th-century masterpiece. Either way, you press on, regardless. As [writer] Flannery O’Connor once wrote: “Be properly scared, and go on doing what you have to do.” And hope like hell if it’s tough work and you put it out there, it has this kind of reception:
That’s it in the end: “just art pictures,” just somebody making a little something. No big deal. Everybody, calm down. Indeed, these “uncomplicated… country people” got right to the heart of the matter.
Excerpt from the new book “Art Work: On the Creative Life” (Abrams Press) by Sally Mann © 2025 Sally Mann.