Police Seize Putin-in-Drag Portrait

Police confiscated a satirical portrait of Russia’s president and premier clad in women’s underwear – along with paintings depicting arch-conservative lawmakers and the Moscow Patriarch with prison tattoos – from a provocative museum in St. Petersburg, its owner and the police said Tuesday. The seized oil on canvas portrait by painter Konstantin Altunin depicts President Vladimir Putin in a pink-white nightgown touching the hair of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, clad in nothing but a push-up bra and panties. The portrait was displayed at the Museum of Power’s “Rulers” exhibition that opened in Russia’s second-largest city less than two weeks ago, the museum’s owner Alexander Donskoy said. Police confiscated the canvas along with a portrait of local lawmaker Vitaly Milonov titled “Rainbow Milonov,” a painting named “Erotic Dreams of Lawmaker [Yelena] Mizulina” and a portrait of Moscow Patriarch Kirill wearing prison tattoos with skulls and profiles of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, Donskoy said. “Museum property was forcibly seized without any warrants,” Donskoy told RIA Novosti. “The rest [of the exhibition] has been sealed, we have no access to it.” St. Petersburg police said four paintings were “withdrawn” from the museum because they might “violate existing legislation,” according to a statement posted on the Internet on Tuesday. The police did not say which laws may have been broken, although Russia does have a law against “insulting representatives of authority.”

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20130827/182994089/Police-Seize-Putin-in-Drag-Portrait.html
http://www.echo.msk.ru/blog/echomsk/1144458-echo/ (pictures)

UPDATE: Russian Museum Closed After Seizure of Satirical Paintings
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20130828/183005109/Russian-Museum-Closed-After-Seizure-of-Satirical-Paintings.html