The President as Hottentot
This is “Circus Girl Resting” by Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953), who was an American. It’s not very exciting now and it probably wasn’t really all that much more exciting when US President Harry Truman saw a picture of it in a 1947 edition of Look and offered the immortal judgement, “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.”
Taste aside, it was a poor choice of terminology on Harry’s part, “Hottentot” being an 18th-century Dutch word for any old African tribe when actually the Khoikhoi, who the Europeans were primarily talking about, had a perfectly good name of their own, meaning “men of men”, or “a pure race”.
But Harry had the magazine’s headline screaming at him at the time: “Your Money Bought These Pictures”. That was the main problem. “Circus Girl” was garish, crude and a little risque – it didn’t even seem very well drawn – so what was the federal government doing giving the artist money (and him with a Japanese name to boot)? See the rest.
