Natalia LL’s 1973 artwork of a model sucking on a banana was removed from an exhibition in Warsaw. But bananas aren’t just suggestive – they can be subversive, too

Bananas are not the only fruit but in art they are the most outrageous. Last week, a 1973 video and photowork of a model sucking on a banana by Natalia LL was removed from display at Warsaw’s National Museum, after its director was reportedly summoned to the Polish culture ministry. And Natalia LL is not alone. Artists have been aroused and even troubled by this suggestively shaped fruit for more than a century. The real question here is: why has a woman been censored for getting off on bananas when men have been at it so long?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Meal by Paul Gauguin. Photograph: Christophel Fine Art/UIG via Getty Images

There is nothing obviously sexual about the way Paul Gauguin painted a massive bunch of bananas in his 1891 work The Meal, also known as The Bananas. He had recently arrived in Tahiti on a journey of discovery and seems to have been wonderstruck by a fruit that was still unfamiliar to European eyes. The russet- and lime-coloured bananas tower over a table at which three boys sit waiting to eat. Given Gauguin’s cocksure character and the nude women he would go on to paint in Tahiti, it is not too much to see his own creative tumescence in the fruits as he contemplates the artistic and erotic banquet he promises himself, like the youths preparing to feast.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Uncertainty of the Poet by Giorgio de Chirico. Photograph: © DACS 2019

By the time Giorgio de Chirico painted a bunch of bananas in his 1913 canvas The Uncertainty of the Poet, they were clearly becoming available in Europe. But instead of Gauguin’s virile fruit, De Chirico’s bananas are spread out disconsolately on the ground. Juxtaposed with a maimed nude statue on a bleak piazza, they sprawl impotently. There is something uncomfortable about their clashing black-and-yellow glare that persists in Andy Warhol’s cover for the Velvet Underground & Nico’s 1967 debut album. His yellow-and-black pop banana is a sticker. Follow the instruction to “Peel slowly and see”, and you discover raw pink flesh underneath.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Velvet Underground & Nico album cover by Andy Warhol. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Warhol’s banana became a symbol of subversion in communist Europe, where Czech dissidents including Václav Havel revered the Velvet Underground. The same political monkey business is surely going on in Natalia LL’s video. Called Consumer Art, it has its tongue – as well as a piece of fruit – in its cheek as it equates western capitalism with sexual gratification. Now this cold war art has been censored by the new right.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An artwork by the Guerrilla Girls at Tate Modern. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

There is a feminist as well as a dissident flavour to this image of oral enjoyment, and it is far from the only banana that feminist art has bitten. The Guerrilla Girls use bananas in protest actions against male dominance in the art world. Sarah Lucas glares threateningly as she deals with one in her 1990 self-portrait Eating a Banana.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Undone by Angus Fairhurst, 2004, installation view, Tate Britain. Photograph: © The estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Lucas’s friend, the late artist Angus Fairhurst, performed as and sculpted sad slapstick gorillas. He also created a giant black sculpture of a banana. Bananas are sensual, but they quickly decay. No wonder this fruit of sex, death and freedom still has the power to perturb.

• This article was amended on 3 June 2019 to remove references to the Polish government being directly responsible for the removal of the Natalia LL artwork from Warsaw’s National Museum.