Dali House

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)?

The Look spread, about this and other paintings sent on a world tour by Washington, generated a flood of complaints to the State Department, and when the press showed Truman what the fuss was all about and he saw Kuniyoshi’s equestrian acrobat taking a break, he made a joke or two. It looked like it came from the “ham and eggs school of art”, he said. It looked as if the artist had “stood off from the canvas and thrown paint at it”.

This was great stuff, of course, coming from the guy who’d just nuked Japan, twice. But neither Kuniyoshi nor his ethnicity were the target here, as explained in a fine article last month by Peter Plagens in The Nation, and there’s a good summary by Jim Lane of the incident at Humanities Web.

Among the many trials and tribulations suffered before, during and just after World War II by what eventually became celebrated as the New York School, this was the most public.

In 1946, while his Marshall Plan was rebuilding Europe, Secretary of State George Marshall actually got behind American art as well, putting 117 works on the road to show the world how good it was and get the federally assisted Yankee painters and sculptors over their inferiority complex vis a vis the European masters.

“Advancing American Art” had Georgia O’Keeffe (that’s her “Bella Donna” at left), John Marin, Ben Shahn, Romare Bearden and William Gropper, among other young talents, mostly influenced by cubism, German expressionism and abstraction. The show toured the Caribbean before heading to Europe, and had made it as far as Prague when the White House suddenly pulled the plug.

Marshall himself ordered the exhibit disbanded and the works sold at auction as army surplus. Most went to private collectors, others to the gift shops at army canteens.

Here is “This is Harlem” by Jacob Lawrence, from 1943. It’s now at the Smithsonian Institution, and Lawrence is rightfully venerated as a great African-American artist. I’m not sure if this is the specific painting that was in the touring exhibition – he did many Harlem scenes – but at the 1947 auction, Auburn University bought this, or one like it, for $6.50.

Ben Shahn’s “Senate Hearing, Lafollette and Thomas”, from 1937

Two things had happened to trigger this shameful little about-face in the forward charge of American art.

For one thing, the Iron Curtain had fallen and political uncertainty was, once again, rapidly on the rise. America’s conservative watchdogs had decided that 20 of the 45 artists involved in the touring show were communist sympathisers, some having done illustrations for communist or socialist publications.

William Gropper’s “Out of Darkness”, from 1938

At the same time, the more brashly nationalistic newspapers (read: Hearst), having lost their war news, sought to provoke taxpayers by highlighting the “lunatic fringe” among the artists who were being subsidised by their government. They showed readers what they said wasn’t “American” art.

In the 1930s there’d been an influential Chicago-based organisation called Sanity in Art that called for adherence to “rationally beautiful” art – it had to demonstrate clear talent, a lot of effort, traditional media, realism and noble content. The group is gone, but the sentiment lingers.

John Marin’s “Lower Manhattan”, from about 1921

“And hanging over everything,” Plagens writes, “is the presumption of the constitutional right of every American never, ever to be offended by anything. Ours is a cultural, as much as a political, democracy, where plebeian opinions about art ought to count …

“Sex is an even touchier art subject for Americans. Which is weird, since we veritably wallow in it elsewhere. Every other province of our culture – especially fashion, movies, TV and advertising – is festooned with breasts and bums and breasts and crotch bulges and breasts and more breasts. While there’s an occasional flare-up of outrage like Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’, the tide of de facto prurience is unrelenting.

“When it comes to art, however, we have a tendency to pull on our bluestockings and haul out the fig leaves.”

Romare Bearden’s “Golgotha”, from 1945

But modernism has always been the biggest bugaboo for Joe Public in the States, and its tightening grip on the artists’ output since the war was only going to cause trouble, particularly if the artists were getting government funding.

The struggle continues today as artists get ever more provocative. There was the predictable freakout over the 1999 Brooklyn Museum of Art show featuring Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary “festooned with tiny snippets of female genitalia from porn magazines and supported on the floor (instead of being hung on a wall) by two lacquered balls of elephant dung (a valued and honorific substance, it should be mentioned, in Nigerian culture)”.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani cut off the museum’s city funding, but a court ordered it restored. He appealed, and was told again to keep that money coming.