WASHINGTON _ A California congressman has removed from a congressional wall a painting that won an art contest sponsored by Rep. William Lacy Clay that critics said offended police.
"We are aware of that," said Steven Engelhardt, a spokesman for Clay, D-Mo., of reports that the painting had been removed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. Engelhardt said Clay was not immediately available for comment.
Hunter was also not immediately available for comment, but he said, according to Fox News: "I was angry. I've seen the press (reporting) on this for about a week or so. ... I'm in the Marine Corps. If you want it done, just call us."
He said Clay could put it back up if he wanted to.
"Untitled #1" had drawn criticism from police groups, who said the painting depicted police as pigs; one officer appears prominently with what looks like the head of a hog or boar.
It was painted by former St. Louis high school student David Pulphus, and had been hanging amid hundreds of other paintings by high school art contest winners in a tunnel between the Capitol and House office buildings since June.
It became a political flashpoint last week when a conservative blog wrote about it, prompting police groups to criticize it.
Clay defended it as free speech and said he would not take it down.
A Republican who represents a Missouri district, Rep. Ann Wagner, denounced the painting in a statement. "I think the painting is reprehensible and I would have never chosen it to represent Missouri's Second Congressional District," she said.
So did Missouri Republican Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer.
"If artwork is going to be displayed in the U.S. Capitol, it shouldn't be divisive or offensive to large swaths of Americans. Period," he said in a statement.
The Clay-sponsored painting is not the only Missouri-related piece of art drawing political ire as Donald Trump prepares to become president.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., the chairman of the congressional committee overseeing Trump's inauguration, has chosen a George Caleb Bingham painting, "Verdict of the People," to hang in an area of the Capitol where Trump is scheduled to have his post-inauguration lunch with congressional leaders.
St. Louis artist Ilene Berman and Ivy Cooper, an art historian at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, have gotten more than 2,000 signatures on an online petition asking the St. Louis Art Museum to cancel its loan of the painting later this month. They object to its use as "an implicit endorsement of the Trump presidency and his expressed values of hatred, misogyny, racism and xenophobia."
Blunt's communications director, Brian Hart, said Friday that "the painting was selected by Sen. Blunt after visiting in July and in consultation with the St. Louis Art Museum months before the presidential election and would have been displayed regardless of the election results.
"This painting is a celebration of Missouri and our uniquely American form of representative government," Hart said.
Museum director Brent Benjamin plans to meet with Cooper and Berman next week, but said the museum will honor Blunt's request.
