In Washington, D.C., a nude statue in the U.S. Department of Justice building provoked Attorney General John Ashcroft to request $8,000 be spent to cover her about a month ago.

In Ames, a nude sculpture proposed for Bandshell Park provoked some Ames residents to request that she be covered up last year.

But on the Iowa State University campus, such protest over nude statuary is unheard of.

First of all, there’s not that much to protest.

“We do not have lots of nude sculptures,” said Lynette Pohlman, director of University Museums.

Christian Petersen created a few nude sculptures while he was the first artist-in-residence at Iowa State from 1934-1955, Pohlman said.

But since Petersen, Iowa State has not acquired any major nude sculptures, she said.

The only possible exceptions to that are the two abstract pieces “Left-Sided Angel” and “Forward,” which are both near Parks Library, Pohlman said.

“You don’t see clothes on them, but I don’t know that you’d call them nude because they are so abstract,” she added.

It’s not that Iowa State prohibits nude sculpture.

University Museums has “never given the direction of `no nude sculptures,'” she said. Nudity is “not a criteria that any committee member has ever discussed.”

If a nude sculpture were ever proposed, Pohlman said she would expect the reaction to be “very varied.”

“I think you’d look at the context in which something was presented,” she continued.

“The arts are an easy target,” said Dana Schumacher, academic adviser in political science who recently taught an honors seminar dealing with censorship and art.

“In the broadest sense, the arts are there to provoke a reaction,” Schumacher said.

Despite that, she couldn’t think of any instances of censorship or public outcry over nudity in art in the 25 years she has been at Iowa State.

Especially when dealing with nudity, “an artist needs to have good reasons for anything they do,” Schumacher said.

One reason for using nudity is historic tradition, said John Cunnally, associate professor of art history.

Nudity in public sculpture dates back to the Greeks, Cunnally said.

“The Greeks felt that nudity was a very important value in public art.”

He said in ancient Greece, nudity was associated with three different types of people – gods, athletes and heroes.

The gods were nude because they were too great to need clothes, Cunnally said, while athletes were nude “to show that they had nothing to hide,” and great heroes “were nude because they lived in the early days . . . before clothes.”

In classical art – art based the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans – nudity is often used symbolically, he said.

One example of this is the Justice Department statue that Ashcroft objected to which shows the personified form of Justice, Cunnally said.

She is shown naked “because Justice is a warrior,” he explained, and “in Greek art, warriors were Amazons” who went into battle with one breast bare.

In the classical tradition Justice is also related to Truth, who is also shown nude, thus the expression “the naked truth,” Cunnally added.

Christian Petersen was inspired by that same classical tradition when he did his nude pieces, said Lea Rosson DeLong, Ph.D., scholar of Depression-era American art and author of “Christian Petersen, Sculptor.”

Nude classical sculpture “is a traditional form and it’s a beautiful form” of art, DeLong said. “And he was very concerned with beauty.”

But Petersen didn’t employ the nude very often, she said.

“There wasn’t too much of a market for that kind of thing,” DeLong said. “Not just in Iowa in the thirties but today and everywhere.”

The two notable nude pieces by Petersen on the ISU campus are “Marriage Ring” and “Reclining Nudes,” she said.

The “Marriage Ring” fountain portrays nude children “so it’s very different” from adult nudity, DeLong said. “Perhaps it seems more natural and innocent . . . people get less upset over that.”

The low-relief sculpture “Reclining Nudes,” originally created for Roberts Hall was recently restored and is currently in the storeroom of the Brunnier, Pohlman said.

Petersen never had any problem with his nude works, DeLong said.

“There may have been private comment but nothing that I’ve come across in any of his papers or anything that was written at the time,” she said.

“Ames is a fairly sophisticated community and I think that it was at that time as well,” she said.

Besides, DeLong said, “The way he used the nude was not in a way that antagonized people . very idealized and generalized.”

Pohlman also speculated that Petersen may have changed some of his plans to better suit the college’s tastes, especially in the wake of “Reclining Nudes.”

“Christian Petersen modeled two dancing maidens . rather flimsily clad, revealing if you will . It is my curatorial presumption that those were the original models” for the Memorial Union fountain, she said.

While she has no documentary evidence, she said she thinks the college declined the dancing maidens for the fountain “and what you see now . was actually a second design.”

Since Petersen’s time, there have been no new nude pieces added to the Iowa State collection.

Cunnally said that this may have to do with changes in artistic fashion.

“Since World War II, classical art has not been much the style,” he said.

“Wherever you have a tradition of classicism and wherever public art is supposed to be classical, you have nudity.”

However, Cunnally said he has seen a recent renewal of interest in classical art, and would not be surprised to see nude sculptures make a comeback in the art world.

As for Ames, “I can’t imagine proposing a nude sculpture for Ames,” said Nancy Polster, chair of the Ames Public Art Commission and former ISU faculty member in art and design. “There would be no point.”

Despite a flurry of media coverage last year, Polster said the a supposed controversy over a proposed statue for Bandshell Park was blown out of proportion.

There were only a few people who objected to the partial nudity of an abstracted female form in the piece, she said.

“There was really no controversy other than a Des Moines television station made an issue of [the nudity],” Polster said. “It never became an issue for the Public Art Commission or for the City of Ames.”

Cunnally, who also sits on the Public Art Commission, agreed nudity wasn’t really the issue with the Bandshell Park sculpture.

“Most people have no problem with the figure,” he said.

“Maybe if [General Ashcroft] ever visits our city we’ll have to put a brassiere on her,” Cunnally joked.

Ashcroft jokes aside, Cunnally said, there are “probably a lot of people” in Ames who would find nude sculpture inappropriate.

“Maybe they’re right, because it does get cold here,” he said.

“Myself, I think there’s nothing wrong with” nudity in public art, he said.

“It’s part of a tradition of showing leaders and heroes, and gosh, the kids aren’t going to see anything in a statue that’s worse than what they see in the movies or on MTV.”