Thirty years ago, a debate on what is, and what is not, art was front-page news.

A controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment — a touring retrospective exhibit of photographs by the artist, including a series of partitioned X-rated images — dramatically played out in museums across the country. The exhibit featured celebrity portraits, self-portraits, interracial figure studies, floral still-lifes, collages and homoerotic images.

Shortly after the exhibition opened, the artist died at age 42 from AIDS complications on March 9, 1989. The tour had popular stops in Philadelphia and then Chicago. The brouhaha began when Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled the show weeks before its opening during the summer of 1989 when the issue of public funding of art became political red meat for right-wing politicians such as Sen. Jesse Helms. (The D.C. show was saved when Jock Reynolds of The Washington Project for the Arts steered the exhibit to his arts center.)

Next stop: Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum in October, where it became a blockbuster hit. When the tour reached Cincinnati’s Institute of Contemporary Art in the spring of 1990, police arrived to shut down the show on its opening night and arrest the museum director, who was later put on trial for obscenity.

As an arts journalist for the Hartford Courant, I witnessed first-hand all three city experiences of the tour. It was the most exciting time to be writing about art in America, when debates raged about the values, responsibilities and roles surrounding this country’s culture.

“Millard Pryor was the hero of the hour,” says Patrick McCaughey, who was director of the Atheneum then, referring to the chairman of the museum’s board at the time the show came to town. “The trustees came to him in all directions saying the exhibit would endanger the capital campaign or ruin the reputation of the museum. I remember saying to him, ‘Millard, if you want this exhibition to go away, I will make it go away. I will not be pleased and I won’t have the same attitude toward the Wadsworth Atheneum.’ He said, ‘No, we’re going to back you.’ He was a man of real courage.”

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