Pop Life: Art In A Material World opens at London’s Tate Modern museum today. The display included a picture entitled Spiritual America by New York artist Richard Price of a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields.

Today the exhibit opens to the public, but the photo of Brooke Shields will not be part of the collection since the picture has been withdrawn after Scotland Yard said the naked image of a heavily made up Shields could break obscenity laws. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Officers from the Obscene Publications Unit met with staff at the Tate Modern regarding an image. The officers have specialist experience in this field and are keen to work with gallery management to ensure that they do not inadvertently break the law or cause any offence to their visitors.” A Scotland Yard source said the actions of its officers were “common sense” and were taken to pre-empt any breach of the law.

A Tate spokeswoman confirmed that the display had been “temporarily closed down” and the catalogue for the exhibition withdrawn from sale. The work had been accompanied by a warning, and the Tate had sought legal advice before displaying it.

Spiritual America is a photograph of a photograph. The original – authorized by Shields’s mother for $450 – had been taken by a commercial photographer, Gary Gross, for the Playboy publication Sugar ’n' Spice in 1976. Shields later attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress the picture.

Gary Gross, the New York photographer who took the original photo of Brooke Shields, said he was “disappointed but not surprised” that British officials might consider the picture pornographic. Gross told the Daily Telegraph: “The photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be,” he said, adding that he once sent a copy to Switzerland only for it to be seized in France. Gross, 71, said he did not consider the photo pornographic although he conceded that “she was supposed to look like a sexy woman”. It was supposed to have been displayed alongside another photo he took of Shields without make-up, he said.

“It certainly doesn’t breach child pornography laws here because a judge said so,” he added, referring to a US judge’s ruling in 1983 that the photographs he took were “not sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic. In order for it to be considered pornographic here, she would have to be doing something sensual or sexual,” he said. “But she’s not. She’s just sitting in the bathtub.”

The work has been shown recently in New York, without attracting major controversy, where it gave the title to the 2007 retrospective of Prince’s work at the Guggenheim Museum. Prince has described the image as resembling “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.”

The Pop Life exhibition also includes works from Jeff Koons’s series Made in Heaven, large-scale photographic images that depict the artist and the porn model La Cicciolina having sexual intercourse.