Photo Show Is Back in Focus : Arts: Smithsonian museum restores Sol LeWitt work after it had been declared pornographic by the museum’s director. The show is due in Long Beach in ’92.

The director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, bowing to threats by curators to close a photography show after a key piece was removed on grounds it was pornographic, restored the disputed work Monday.

The formal closure demand had been made earlier Monday by the Addison Gallery of American Art, at Philips Academy in Andover, Mass. The Addison organized the exhibition, “Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography,” which opened at the National Museum of American Art June 28--with the work in question removed.

Trying to defuse the crisis later Monday, National Museum said it would return the work to the exhibition and the Addison Gallery said the museum proposal was acceptable. But the agreement apparently resolving the dispute came only after several hours of a tense standoff between the two arts institutions.

The exhibition is scheduled to be on view in Washington until Sept. 28 and to travel to the Long Beach Museum of Art in July, 1992. The dispute erupted last week after Elizabeth Broun, the National Museum of American Art’s director, ordered a three-dimensional photographic piece by New York artist Sol LeWitt removed from the show after Broun objected to it.

The LeWitt work, titled “Muybridge 1,” includes images of a nude female model that are viewed through small openings that direct attention to her pubic area. In letters to curators at the Addison Gallery, Broun said that, when she viewed the work, she found the images reminiscent of arcade peep shows. In a letter last week to Jock Reynolds, the Addison Gallery director, Broun complained that “focusing increasingly on the pubic region invokes unequivocal references to a degrading pornographic experience.”

Late Monday, Reynolds said, “we’re delighted to know the work is going back in the main galleries. This clearly has been a censorship issue. We’re gratified the ability to see the work is (being restored.) Everyone can make mistakes.

Broun asserted that “I feel the question was never one of censorship. I hope (that) by putting it into the exhibition, we can lay to rest that question.”

The controversy had emerged as a serious artistic and political confrontation because the demand on Monday that the show be closed entirely if the work was not restored occurred under what museum observers said were apparently unprecedented circumstances. The National Museum of American Art acted to strip controversial work from a show before it opened and Washington observers voiced concern that the action appeared intended to try to water down exhibition content in the face of ongoing national political controversy over obscenity, taste and art.

The Muybridge exhibition was supported in part by a $45,000 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and by a $25,000 grant from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York City. Work by Mapplethorpe, who died last year of AIDS, provoked nationwide controversy involving the NEA.

The NEA said the grant to support the Muybridge show had been finally approved just last May, after endowment officials at several levels concluded the exhibition was “professional and artistically excellent.”

Eruption of such a spirited controversy over the Muybridge exhibition was unexpected. Muybridge was a seminal 19th-Century figure in American photography whose sequential images depicting human beings and animals in motion are well known.

Late last week, Reynolds and James Sheldon, the co-curator of the exhibition, threatened to invoke provisions of a contract between the Addison Gallery and the National Museum that apparently give the Addison major curatorial control over how the show is presented. On Monday, Reynolds wrote to Broun demanding that the LeWitt work be restored to the show by noon today--with no special labeling that would remove the piece from the normal continuity of the exhibition--or close the entire exhibition by 5 p.m. local time.

“We remain seriously troubled by the manner in which you personally chose to interject yourself into the curatorial process,” Reynolds said in his letter.

The letter included separate demands from seven of the exhibition’s 25 artists to pull their work from the show if the museum did not change its mind about excluding the LeWitt work. Late Monday, the museum offered to restore “Muybridge 1,” but said special signs would accompany it and that a book would be positioned nearby so visitors could make written comments. Earlier, the Addison Gallery had said the separate labeling and comment book provisions were unacceptable.