The Subject Is Art

After an initial misstep, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana has recovered nicely and is displaying all 75 paintings in a traveling exhibit from Vietnam. The museum rightly decided in the end not to cave in to the protests of some members of Orange County’s Vietnamese community.

The Bowers previewed the paintings for some Vietnamese Americans before the exhibit opened a week and a half ago. That set off the complaints. Previous stops for the exhibit included Texas, Minneapolis and Atlanta. Only in Plano, Texas, were there protests, by Vietnam War veterans and Vietnamese Americans. But the ArtCentre of Plano resisted demands for censorship, an admirable decision. Bowers originally had agreed to remove at least one painting, the most controversial in the show, but eventually the museum followed the Plano example and hung all the art.

Orange County is home to the nation’s biggest concentration of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans. Some fled after the war; others were political prisoners subjected to harsh mistreatment before escaping. Earlier this year protests against a shopkeeper who displayed a flag of Communist Vietnam and a portrait of the late North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh lasted for weeks in Westminster. But the community is not monolithic; opinions on the paintings vary. Even the most adamant protesters against the Bowers exhibit have difficulty agreeing which pictures are troublesome. The one that was to be withdrawn shows a young woman in an army uniform forging steel.

Some Vietnamese have demonstrated outside the museum during the exhibit or have explained to museum visitors that their main objection is the source of the paintings: Vietnam. That’s fine as an opinion or as the basis of a protest but not as grounds for censorship. Museums have survived displays of art that some, even many, have found objectionable for political, religious or moral reasons.

Americans are mature enough to distinguish between art and propaganda. To have removed one or more paintings on political rather than artistic grounds would have been an insult to an audience able to make its own decisions.