The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
by Roger Kimball
Encounter. 200 pp. $25.95

As in other areas of our intellectual life, the practice of art history and art criticism has been increasingly corrupted in recent years by, for lack of a more precise term, the ideology of political correctness. Case in point: the Modigliani show at the Jewish Museum this past summer. Here, an early-20th-century artist recognized as a genuine “little master” of the School of Paris was subjected to an entirely bogus effort to reinvent him as a Jewish socialist “conceptualist.” This was arrant nonsense, and it also entailed an injustice. Modigliani's art, having been injected with a non-existent motive—the desire for “progressive” social change—was made out to be something other, and something less, than what it actually is.

Such injustices are common these days, if not prevalent, according to Roger Kimball in The Rape of the Masters. His book examines eight examples of contemporary art-historical revisionism, tracing its roots to the writings of the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Kimball also offers useful insights into how one should think about art. Above all, his book stands as a record of protest against intellectualism run amok.

Kimball's eight case studies are the heart of his book. They are instructive, providing a cautionary tale in the misinterpretation and overinterpretation of art on the basis of inappropriate criteria. They are also illuminating, showing just how far some distinguished academics are prepared to go in their effort to rewrite the history of art so that it meets today's standards of politically correct thought.

One such academic is Michael Fried, director of the humanities institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of a book on the 19th-century realist painter Gustave Courbet. Kimball captures Fried in the act of “reinterpreting” Courbet—specifically, a painting titled Young Women on the Banks of the Seine (1856-57)—in acceptably feminist terms:

My argument can be summed up by saying that in the Young Women, what appears at first to be simply or exclusively a strongly op-positional thematics of sexual difference (the women as objects of masculine sexual possession) gives way to or at the very least coexists with a more embracing metaphorics of gender (a pervasive feminization of the pictorial field through an imagery of flowers).

In other words, while Courbet, according to Fried, was “a representative male of his time,” i.e., a “chauvinist,” his art can be seen as “structurally feminine” and as tending to “eliminate the distinction” between men and women. This finding presumably allows the dead white Frenchman to continue to pass muster.

As Kimball points out, Fried does not shy away from admitting that his claims are “so extreme” that he doubts that Courbet could have grasped them. Nor do some of the other academic specialists discussed by Kimball shrink from making the most extreme, not to say ludicrous, bizarre, or offensive, claims about the art and artists they have chosen to deconstruct.

Albert Boime, for example, is a professor of art history at UCLA and the author of an “immensely influential essay” (in Kimball's description) entitled “Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters: Visual Encodings of Racism in Copley and Homer.” In this essay Boime turns The Gulf Stream (1899), a painting by the American realist Winslow Homer that depicts a black man adrift in a damaged boat in a hurricane, into a vehicle for Marxist-style anti-Americanism:

Homer's conspicuous representation of the [sugar cane] stalks, totally out of proportion to the boat and its lone passenger, assumes a symbolic and etonymic connotation in its intimate relationship to the history of slavery in the West Indies. . . . But when Homer painted his picture, this allusion would have taken on yet another level of meaning: America's imperialist ambitions—culminating in the Spanish-American War of 1898—devolved on the Hawaiian Islands, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, all of them rich sugar-producing territories and all of them worked by blacks soon to suffer the discriminatory policies of a racist society.

In a similarly fevered vein, and in similarly turgid prose, the art historian David Rubin writes about John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), a well-known example of the American society painter's family portraits. Inspired by the politically correct categories of class and sex rather than class and race, Rubin transforms this painting into an act of sexual “repression,” in which

figured in absentia is the master or boss of these young females whom the title designates as his children but who, seeming to await his slightest word or wish, might also be thought of as his servants, his domestics, and even, at the level of submerged sexual fantasy, as his harem, his congregation of wives, his jolie fillettes du bordel/maison/ boîte.

_____________

This sort of perverse inanity is the ultimate fruit of the hallucinatory mindset of today's politically correct academics. In accordance with that mindset, Kimball demonstrates, the history of Western art—art spanning continents and centuries—is being systematically turned on its head and rendered unrecognizable to anyone who approaches such matters from within the boundaries of normal human understanding. The Rape of the Masters, Kimball tells us, is intended to provide an “antidote” to such practices, and hence to the intellectual disease that has engulfed much of the academic art establishment and, indeed, much of our intellectual life in general.

In this Kimball succeeds admirably. Along the way, he also offers thought-provoking observations on the nature of art appreciation and the proper role of the critic. As one might expect, he takes a “minimalist” view of that role. This makes good sense up to a point—though only up to a point.

Let me illustrate what I mean. In a chapter on Van Gogh, Kimball refutes a “metaphysical” interpretation of one of the Dutch painter's most famous works, A Pair of Shoes (1886), that was put forward by the German philosopher (and later Nazi fellow-traveler) Martin Heidegger. Kimball is rightly put off by Heidegger's rhetorical flights of fancy about the toil of the common man, which seem disconnected from the painting itself and amount to little more than speculative hot air. But the fact that Heidegger got carried away with himself and his own subjective ideas, instead of allowing the picture to speak for itself, would hardly seem to warrant Kimball's rather arch dismissal: “And here you thought that Van Gogh had just painted a pair of old shoes.”

In fact, Kimball elsewhere concedes that Van Gogh's painting is “remarkable” and exudes a “mysterious loneliness,” suggesting that it is much more than a mere rendering of footwear. The trouble here may be that in dealing with Heidegger, who wrote long before political correctness arrived on the intellectual scene, Kimball has conflated bad art criticism, which has always been with us, with a very particular type of revisionist criticism motivated by today's politically correct agenda.¹

Kimball's discussion of Velasquez's Las Meninas (1656) likewise falters somewhat. In passing, he cites a comment by Michel Foucault to the effect that the painting reflects “an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance.” Kimball assumes this is self-evident nonsense. But if one considers the formal implications of Foucault's statement, what he seems to be picking up on is a quality of emptiness and lifeless resemblance in Las Meninas that has disturbed other commentators as well. Here is the great German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe:

One must not imagine the picture without the figures, for otherwise the result would be an empty nothing. Individual figures . . . and certainly the main group possess . . . cohesion with one another but not with the surrounding space. . . . Are these really human beings? There is something immobile in all his figures, even in the best of them and in fact especially in them.

Whether one agrees with this assessment or not, it is hard to deny its echo in Foucault.

_____________

This is not to say that Kimball is wrong to decry the misapplication of psychoanalytic or political criteria in a search for the “hidden” meaning of art, a point he makes with devastating clarity. Rather, it is to raise again the question of what are the appropriate criteria to apply in any such discussion.

Kimball neatly sums up the primary criterion by saying that we should consider the “superficial,” by which he means what is on the surface of the canvas. This obviously does not include the viewer's politics or anything else that is purely subjective; nor does it include the artist's politics, unless he paints political pictures. One must likewise be cautious in evaluating what the artist claims he is doing, or trying to do, especially if it does not seem to be supported by the work itself.

As the examples Kimball cites make clear, the kind of politically correct exegesis now in vogue fails the test of appropriateness in spades. But it also violates the art to which it addresses itself in a more fundamental respect—by (to cite a distinction made by the critic Roger Fry) confusing the purpose of art, which is to give expression to the imaginative life, with the purposes of actual life, which in the case of politically correct criticism is to cause us to think differently about such issues as sex and race, and to alter our actions accordingly.

What ultimately renders spurious the approach adopted by the art historians discussed by Kimball is that they seek to associate with painting a certain political-moral obligation to promote “right” conduct (to be non-racist, or anti-imperialist, or pro-feminist). It is in this sense that the efforts of these academics can be said to constitute the “rape” to which Kimball refers. For their main consequence is to devalue or trivialize or degrade much of the great art of the past while raising up the inferior (and often dreadful) art of our own time.

_____________

That this is indeed the consequence of applying the ideological tenets of political correctness to art and art history is clear. But there is an interesting complication: if the champions of political correctness were to implement their own strictures, would they not have to call for the wholesale destruction of most of the paintings, and most of the art-history books, that are part of the cultural patrimony of the West? For, by their logic, those paintings and books are nothing less than a permanent embodiment of “hate crimes” against the poor, the non-white, and the female.

And yet, logic notwithstanding, and despite the inroads of political correctness in academic curricula, demands for the outright banning of “incorrect” texts and paintings have never gained much traction. To be sure, some have tried—for example, by calling for the removal of a photographic reproduction of Goya's The Naked Maja from the wall of a college classroom, or by making students read expurgated versions of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with offending words like “nigger” removed. But such antics have only succeeded in making political correctness itself into an object of scorn and ridicule, so much so that the term has come to be used mockingly or disparagingly.

Even in an area where the movement has scored a big success—the rewriting of commercial public-school textbooks—the result has provoked heated controversy, and the real achievement seems more to have been a further dumbing-down of public education than a wholesale reprogramming of young minds. By the same token, the craze for campus “hate speech” codes quickly ran into the brick wall of the First Amendment, no doubt demonstrating to academic radicals the limits of any effort to put their extremist views into practice.

Could it be out of a recognition of this reality that politically correct art historians have by and large tried to rewrite history, rather than to erase it? Certainly their work often displays the rather peculiar quality of a salvaging operation—an attempt, even while discrediting the cultural products of Western humanism, to look for a way to re-validate those same products by imposing upon them an ideologically acceptable “meaning.” Hence a Michael Fried will attribute to Courbet a proto-feminism that the painter's works manifestly do not support, or Albert Boime will attribute all sorts of late-20th-century racial sensitivities to Winslow Homer.

This activity, too, as Kimball makes vividly clear, is offensive to and destructive of our notion of what is fitting to examine in the course of serious inquiry. It violates what were once clear and high standards of acceptable scholarship. It can misinform, mislead, and confound readers both about the nature of art in general and about the extraordinary achievements and lasting value of the Western tradition in particular. And even as it “rescues” certain dead white artists of the past, it demonstrates a complete lack of respect for them as well as for their living legacy.

Nevertheless, art has been subjected to ideological assaults before—think of the early Soviet proscription of non-socialist realism or the famous Nazi exhibition of “decadent” (i.e., modern) art—and both art and our ability to experience it have survived. It is true that the current revisionism is more insidious, since it is not enforced or sponsored by state power but is rather the result of a voluntary exercise of academic freedom. That is reason enough for Kimball's book to become required reading in every art-history course in America. But I would still contend that, for anyone who is prepared to resist the politicization of thought, reading a bad book or a bad article about a painting by no means makes it impossible to engage and experience that painting on its own terms, especially if one knows enough to trust what he sees and feels, and if, as Kimball advises, he concentrates on that.

_____________

¹ For my own view of the role of religious feeling in Van Gogh's mature work, see “Why We Love Van Gogh,” in the December 1998 COMMENTARY.

_____________