Calgary Transit rejected this image of Ron Mueck's 2006 sculpture, A Girl, taken at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa. (Photo courtesy of NGC)

Calgary Transit has rejected a Glenbow Museum advertising campaign showing a sculpture of a naked newborn baby.

Senior managers made the decision after reviewing a photo of the sculpture, said spokeswoman Theresa Keddy.

"We have to take into consideration opinions from all Calgarians, and community standards, so it was our decision that it might offend some," she said. "Art is very subjective and a lot of people have different opinions."

Keddy didn't explain how the sculpture might be offensive, but said Calgary Transit would have allowed a photo that was cropped above the umbilical cord.

Australian-born artist Ron Mueck's sculpture, A Girl, is part of a new exhibit at the Calgary museum called Real Life, which also features the work of Israeli video artist Guy Ben-ner.

A Girl is a realistic-looking, five-metre long sculpture of a naked newborn infant girl smeared with blood. The photo submitted for the ad campaign captures the entire sculpture. It was taken from an angle that showed the partial umbilical cord, but not the baby's genitals.

Calgary Transit offered to run a cropped photo of the infant, showing the head and belly but not the umbilical cord.

Museum picked cropped sculpture

Tanis Shortt, the Glenbow's marketing manager, said the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton used a similar cropped image in their bus ads. Since that gallery wasn't exhibiting any other sculptures by the artist, they didn't have much choice, she said.

The Glenbow didn't think it would be appropriate to take the sculpture out of context, she said. So they decided to use an image from a different sculpture, called Head of a Baby, which is a huge close-up of a newborn infant's head. The ad was approved and the transit campaign started Monday.

The artist is presenting a realistic portrait of birth in A Girl, said Jonathan Shaughnessy, an assistant curator with the National Gallery of Canada, who was in Calgary for the exhibit's launch.

"While it's a romantic and really enjoyable thing, the process of birth is quite labour intensive, graphic and really, an arduous process. I think that is all in the sculpture. It would be a shame to cut that out because I don't imagine how anyone could be offended by coming to terms with that."