Washington —- Construction of the national Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial has been postponed after a federal arts commission likened its proposed sculpture to the art of totalitarian regimes.

The U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, which has the power of approval for such projects in the capital, has notified the memorial's planners that the "colossal scale" and static style of the planned 28-foot granite statue "recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries."

The panel also commented that a clay model for the sculpture depicts the civil rights leader, shown standing with his arms crossed, as too "confrontational," said Thomas E. Luebke, an architect and secretary of the arts commission, who summarized the objections in an April letter. The agency advises the government on public design and aesthetics in the capital.

The statue is to be the centerpiece of the memorial, planned for a site near the Tidal Basin, between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.

Harry E. Johnson, president of the privately financed Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, said Friday that the construction would be delayed until an agreement is reached. Work was originally to begin this spring on the privately funded $100 million memorial, which had been slated for completion next year.

Isaac Newton Farris Jr., president and chief executive officer of the King Center in Atlanta and nephew of the civil rights leader, argued that the planned statue correctly depicts his legacy.

"My uncle was a strong and confrontational figure," Farris said. "His confrontation helped us to complete what the original founders intended when this country was formed by confronting our problems with race in this nation.

"For them to say the statue looks too confrontational and too strong is the opposite of what his legacy was about.

"Everything that is strong and confrontational does not mean hate and violence. My uncle was very strong and confrontational with the weapon of love and nonviolence."

Johnson said the foundation has begun a "dialogue" with the designers, who include the Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, winner of the competition for the memorial.

"We feel this is a tweaking process that will occur until the memorial is completed," Johnson said.

He said the foundation would present revisions June 5 to the federal panel.

A model of the statue has been built in China. The project's chief architect, Ed Jackson Jr., huddled with advisers this week in Ann Arbor, Mich., to discuss ways to address the commission's objections before sculpting of the granite statue begins.

Jackson said his design team had aimed for a powerful yet reflective representation of King.

"The image of Dr. King had to be inspirational," Jackson said Thursday. "It had to be an image that projected this man as an intellectual. It had to be an image that projected Dr. King as someone in thought."

The memorial, a 2 1/2-story sculpture carved in a giant chunk of granite, is planned for a crescent-shaped 4-acre site among Washington's famed cherry trees on the northwest shore of the basin.

Called the Stone of Hope, it would depict King, standing with his arms folded, looming from the stone. It would be eight feet taller than the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.

The King Memorial has been authorized by Congress, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held in 2006. Its general design was approved by the seven-member federal commission that year, based on drawings of the Stone of Hope that showed a more subtle image of King, from the waist up, as if he were emerging organically out of the rock, the commission said.

But since the drawings have been developed into detailed models, the vision has generated criticism.

Commission members said the sculpture "now features a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character," Luebke wrote.

They "recommended strongly that the sculpture be reworked, both in form and modeling" and cited "precedents of a figure emerging from stone in the works of sculptors such as Michelangelo and Rodin."

The commission objected to what it perceived as the loss of the subtle way King seemed to be coming out of the stone in the drawings, Luebke said.

Controversy is nothing new to national memorials. In recent years the building of the World War II Memorial stirred sharp debate, as did the Vietnam War Memorial years earlier.

Critics have already questioned the selection last year of a Chinese sculptor for the King Memorial.

Johnson chalked up the latest design concerns as chiefly a matter of individual taste.

"Personally, I don't see it," he said of the suggestion that the statue might make King look like a dictator.

But Johnson added that when it comes to painting or sculpture, "You get 10 people in a room and 10 people are going to see 10 different things."

This report includes information from the Associated Press.