The posters, which went on display this week in Vienna, were financed by a €1 million (£680,000) grant from the Austrian Government. It had hoped that a series of pictures by artists from all member states would reflect the social and political diversity of the EU. Instead, the work has provoked an unseemly row.

The posters are mounted on rotating boards and are visible for only seconds at a time — but that is long enough for most passers-by to identify the three figures. The George Bush figure is a woman model using the appropriate mask. She is seen bending over, with the Queen and President Chirac kneeling behind her. The Queen can be seen clutching the hips of the George Bush character.

“Absolutely outrageous!” the tabloid Krone Zeitung declared. “This will overshadow the beginning of our EU presidency.”

The posters are part of an artistic project known as Europ-art that is intended to stir interest in the European Union. Austria now ranks as one of the most sceptical EU partners and its Government has been struggling to find ways of engaging the interest of young people in European issues. The group sex scene was created by Carlos Aires, a 31-year-old Spanish artist.

The second poster by Tanja Ostojic, a Balkan artist, is causing even more anger. It shows a woman’s spread thighs wearing blue knickers embroidered with the stars of Europe.

The artists were planning to show both posters when EU leaders come to Salzburg on January 27 for a conference entitled The Sound of Europe. But under pressure from the Government and public opinion, the artists appeared to be caving in. Last night they announced that they were having the posters removed, although it was not clear when that would happen.

“The EU knickers are depraved and sexist and can only damage the European idea,” Gabi Burgstaller, governor of the Salzburg region, said. Art critics were taking a calmer view. “One could see the picture of the woman’s crotch as an image that the EU is the new source of life for the world,” the critic Walter Seidl, who helped to select the posters for the exhibition, said.

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