Whither the Masters?

By Daniel Linsalata | Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
Roger Kimball
Encounter, 2004

John Alexander Smith, a late philosophy professor from Oxford, once began a lecture by telling his students that "the main, if not the sole, purpose of education" is to be able to "detect when a man is talking rot." His pragmatic outlook on education, while inarguably valid, probably was more applicable readily when Professor Smith uttered in 1914 than today. For today in education there exists a unique dilemma for students: what are they to do when the educators themselves are "talking rot?" How can students learn to detect lies when they are spewing from the mouths of their teachers? Roger Kimball, in his new book The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, posits that one simply turns to outside sources, and then indeed learn to recognize precisely the rot he is being fed.

Kimball asserts that such rot has become endemic in the study of art history, and to that end, he wrote Rape of the Masters in hopes that "readers will henceforth find it easier to identify, laugh at, and reject the rot that has infected the academic study of art history." And there are plenty of laughs to go around. The book's format, a collection of case studies spanning various genres of paintings, lends it both immense informative and entertainment value. In each chapter, Kimball gives a brief background of the work and the artist, and then presents several examples of modern scholarship regarding the piece, each more absurd than the preceding, occasionally insert a snide remark to further ridicule the author. Rather than giving his own, more �correct' interpretation of the work, or explaining the (numerous and obvious) faults in the research papers, he lets the readings speak for themselves, frequently rendering the reader to fits of laughter. The strategy works well, as a straightforward, serious critique would undoubtedly sour the rampant irrationality in the arguments presented. As Kimball states in the introduction, "When someone tells you that the moon is made of green cheese, you don't argue about it, you just put the chap down as a crackpot and move on." And, as the reader discovers, crackpots abound in art history departments.

In February of 1902, Winslow Homer wrote to curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a response to a query about his painting The Gulf Stream, "I very much regret that I have painted a picture which requires any description." He had hoped to quell the stream of questions regarding the fate of the picture's subject, the background story, and the like. Homer's point: the story is not the point. Some months later, this point was reiterated by a critic from The Evening Post, who, in reference to Homer's letter, declared, "The story should never outweigh the artistic interest." Kimball subscribes strongly to this belief and immediately presents himself as a strict aesthetisist; that is, he believes art from any period should be studied purely for its artistic value, techniques, etc., rather than being subjected to some psycho-sexual analysis by politically-bent professors. As a consequence, he mercilessly attacks those who bemoan the traditional emphasis on painting's "stylistic attributes"—"the preoccupation with pigments, patterns and brushstrokes" and regard efforts to explain a painting in aesthetic terms as "spurious." Rather than focusing on the art itself, modern art history scholarship, by and large, concerns itself with finding underlying intonations regarding the artist's intentions, motivations, and subliminal messages. The story has come to outweigh the artistic interest. And the stories are almost universally the same (and universally in the name of political correctness): "The painting (or artist) is racist. It is sexist. It is colonialist. It is capitalist." The chorus of "underlying homoerotic tendencies" materializes on more than one occasion, either in reference to the painter or a subject in the work. The logic by which scholars arrive at such conclusions is simply baffling: applying loose Freudian analysis to a work painted decades, if not centuries, before Freud himself was born; or studying a work in the context of feminist theory, despite feminist studies not existing as a field when the painting was completed; or, a personal favorite, using linguistics to search for psycho-sexual undertones, but using a language with no relation to the painting.

These points are clearly best observed (and ridiculed) with concrete examples. Witness: one of the case studies concerns John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, a portrait of the daughters of a New York aristocrat, painted in 1882. In his discussion, Kimball cites Professor James Lubin, a professor of art history at Wake Forest. Igniting the first pet peeve of Kimball, and of common sense art critics everywhere, Lubin refers to the painting solely as a "text," and an "incomplete" one to boot, seemingly ignorant of the fact that he is performing an artistic, rather than literary, analysis. In his haphazard attempt to create a story to accompany a straightforward portrait, Lubin focuses on the girls' last name. "Boit," he points out, is just one letter short of the French word bo�te, meaning "box" (French, of course, having no more relation to this painting than, say, the Dartmouth football team). Boit's children, Lubin concludes, are then "enclosed within this geometric and ideological box." Additionally, they are hampered by the pesky problem of "the lack of the father's E, his penis." Not to worry—the big E in the father's first name, Edward, does indeed represent the male organ, though the missing little e at the end of "Boit[e]" therefore represents the clitoris; its absence dictates that the girls are of indiscriminate gender, despite their "representation as feminine." Pardon?

But it gets better. Turning his attention toward to the circumflex that should, for some undetermined reason, appear above the "i" in bo�te, Professor Lubin, after an impressive display of non sequitors and mutilations of both English and French, concludes that, "Therefore, � = fertilized female, which to the extent that a woman impregnated is a woman whose personal freedom and potential has been clipped, may also say � = circumcised female." Which, of course, is the central theme of this portrait, of four young girls, none of whom are older than twelve. Kimball, for his part, has little to add to this ludicrous analysis, content to let it act as a parody of itself.

By far the most humorously ironic moments in Rape come when Kimball presents statements from the artist himself that are in direct contradiction to theories proscribed by modern scholars. For instance, in his paper on Courbet's The Quarry (an 1856 realist painting depicting a hunter and his hounds taking a moment of repose after a successful hunt, with their quarry, a roe deer, strung up in a tree next to him), Professor Michael Fried of Columbia University, postulates that "the imaginary point of view is more important, and in the end, more �real,' than what one sees with one's eyes." Perhaps a reasonable belief, with one slight problem: a letter that Courbet wrote to his students in 1861, in which he states, "I also believe that painting...can only consist of the representation of REAL AND EXISTING [emphasis is Courbet's] objects....Imagination in art consists of knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing object, but never in imagining or in creating the object itself." Alas, poor Professor Fried. Though just for fun, what was Fried proposing one saw in the imaginary point of view? Briefly, that the hunter's passive expression, coupled with the fact that if he turned his head just so, he could view the deer's genitals, implies a castration of the hunter. While this may seem preposterous, such is the state of art history today.

Going through the remainder of Rape, the reader quickly picks up on the astounding methodology of these professors. The guidelines are fairly simple: anything longer than it is wide immediately becomes a phallic object (enter corresponding connotations); no subject can have a definite gender; any depicted female, minority, or non-European has been somehow oppressed and suffers anguish; and abstract paintings do depict something very vivid after all, usually relating to anguish and oppression. By the end of the book, the reader is ceased to be amazed by the claims of these critics and scholars, and is left with little doubt as to the existence such crackpots in the study of art history. The case-study format of the book, however, leads to a common problem: how can be sure that this plague is truly endemic and not just afflicting a selected handful scholars? Putting aside for a moment the omnipresent leftward bent of academia, the only evidence of the problem's scope that Kimball provides is a laundry list of professors who have produced works akin to those of Lubin, Fried, et al.

The Rape of the Masters brilliantly achieves its stated goal of enabling readers to detect rot in academic art history. For the many readers who may already be able to do so, Kimball's biting wit and non-didactic asides make Rape immensely entertaining, particularly at the expense of those who are appalled by common sense.

Whither the Masters?

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