Tate Modern This article is more than 14 years old

Brooke Shields photograph: Tate Modern caves in

This article is more than 14 years oldRichard Prince's controversial artwork removed permanently following pressure from Metropolitan police

Tate Modern has bowed to pressure from London's Metropolitan police and permanently removed a controversial photograph of film star Brooke Shields from public view.

The image, which depicts the 10-year-old actor nude and heavily made up, was originally taken in the 1970s for a Playboy publication, then reproduced by artist Richard Prince in a 1983 work entitled Spiritual America. It had been a key part of Tate's Modern's Pop Life show, which also contains works by Warhol, Jeff Koons and Cosey Fanni Tutti, but the room containing it was sealed off following a visit by officers from the Met's obscene publications unit two weeks ago.

Following discussions with the artist, the work has now been replaced by another work in Prince's series, Spiritual America IV (2005), which was photographed in collaboration with Shields when she was much older. It depicts the actor in a near-identical pose but wearing jewellery and a bronze bikini, leaning against a Vengeance chopper motorbike.

Both the police and the gallery came under fire for their actions, which were taken despite the fact that no complaints were received, and even though the image had appeared in public many times before – including a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York two years ago.

But following conversations with Scotland Yard – who defended its approach as "common sense" – curators decided to close part of the show, then withdraw the picture entirely. The status of the exhibition catalogue, which contains an image of Prince's original work, remains unclear.

Today's Art Newspaper reports that officers had threatened "almost certain" prosecution under the Protection of Children Act of 1978. But Mark Stephens, an art lawyer with Finers Stephens Innocent, said that doing so was not in the public interest.

"This smacks of over-zealous policemen with little cultural understanding, tromping about the Tate in their hobnail boots, to the cultural deficit of society and this exhibition," Stephens told the Art Newspaper.

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