Lawrence 'obscenities' finally get a showing

A collection of paintings went on display yesterday - more than 70 years after the images were banned - but there is no sell-by date on obscenity.

In June 1929 a squad of embarrassed policemen raided the Warren gallery in London, and seized 13 paintings by DH Lawrence. They were spared from being burned on condition that they were never exhibited in Britain again.

The paintings were exported - "to corrupt some other poor buggers" as Lawrence remarked - but a set of replicas was on view yesterday at the Pan bookshop in London.

Neither the owner of the replicas, nor the author and publisher of a new book which reproduces dozens of the images seen as even more shocking than Lady Chatterley's Lover, is quite sure what their legal status is.

Two other bookshops turned down the invitation to display the paintings - on space grounds, both insisted. The publishers are hoping to find a space for a longer exhibition.

"I did wonder if the police were going to rush in and seize me, or the pictures," said Christopher Miles, who commissioned the replicas for Priest of Love, the 1982 film which he directed and which starred Ian McKellen as Lawrence. "But I gather there's been somebody big in town, and there isn't a policeman to spare."

The originals were inherited by Lawrence's widow, Frieda, then by her third husband, and most were then sold for a pittance to a Greek hotelier in New Mexico called Saki Karavas, who once offered to return them to Britain in exchange for the Elgin Marbles going back to Athens.

For the last half-century visitors to the La Fonda bar in Taos have paid a dollar to be shocked. It cost Prof Miles £100 to send in a photographer, and a scene painter in Britain then copied them on to canvas. Since the making of the film - which is about to be re-released on DVD - the replicas have been in a scenery store.

Keith Sagar, author of DH Lawrence's Paintings (Chaucer Press), owns an original painting called Dandelions, and has first-hand experience of its continuing power to shock.

He discovered Dandelions, which he believes is the last surviving major Lawrence painting in Britain, by chance while researching an exhibition on his other passion, Ted Hughes. He was on his way to an international conference on Lawrence in Texas, and offered to try to sell the picture for the owner.

"I had Texas millionaires clustered about me, waving their chequebooks," Mr Sagar said. "Then I took the photograph out of my pocket, and they fell back in horror. Sex they could have coped with, but urination was quite beyond the pale."

There are dandelions, but most of the canvas is filled by a suntanned, muscly, naked young man, peeing on them.

Eventually it dawned on him that he could afford to buy the painting himself. His wife was in hospital giving birth to their first daughter, Ursula - after the heroine of Women in Love - and by the time she came home it was on the dining room wall as a surprise gift. It hung there until his children said they would never bring another friend home from school unless it was moved.

What is most shocking to some viewers of the exhibition is not the plentiful buttocks, penises and breasts, but Lawrence's shaky grasp of anatomy. There are thigh bones which ain't connected to the hip bones, and arms skinny as hazel twigs and bending like liquorice whips.

"He really wasn't very good but he had a go," Prof Miles said fondly.

Sagar will have none of this. "These are great, great paintings. You get no impression of how good they are from the reproductions. Lawrence was aware of his anatomical ignorance, but what he valued was not technique but life, and these pictures throb with life."

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