He Rape of the Masters How Political Correctness Sabotages Art Roger Kimball

The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Fine art, by Roger Kimball. New York: See Books, 2005. 200 pp. $17.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Daniel Wahl

Roger Kimball begins The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art by asking why we teach and study art history. "Information technology is a question," he says, "that elicits a complicated answer."

To larn nigh fine art, yes, but also to learn about the cultural setting in which art unfolds; in add-on, to learn near—what to telephone call it? "Development" is not quite right, neither is "progress." Mayhap "evolution": to larn about the development of art, and so, nearly how over the course of history artists "solved problems"—for example, the problem of modeling three-dimensional space on an essentially 2-dimensional plane.

Those are some of the answers, or some parts of the answer, most of us would requite. There are others. We teach and study art history—as we teach and report literary history or political history or the history of science—partly to familiarize ourselves with humanity's adventure in time. We look an educated person in the West to remember what happened in 1066, to know the plot of Hamlet, to understand (sort of) the constabulary of gravity, to recognize Mona Lisa, Botticelli'southward Birth of Venus, or Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère. These are aspects of a huge common inheritance, episodes that alternately relish in and cast illuminations and shadows, the interlocking illuminations and shadows that delineate flesh's conjuring with the world.

All this might exist described equally the dough, the ambient trunk of culture. The yeast is supplied by direct acquaintance with the subject of study: the poem or novel or play, the mental itinerary a Galileo or Newton traveled, the actual work of art on the wall. In the case of art history, the raison d'être—the ultimate motive—is supplied by a direct visual encounter with great works of fine art. Everything else is prolegomenon or afterthought: scaffolding to support the main result, which is non so much learning well-nigh art as it is experiencing art first hand.

Or and so one would have thought. What has happened to the main event? (pp. ane–2)

Every bit Kimball makes articulate, the main event has changed.

[T]he ascendant trend—the migrate that receives the limelight, the prizes, the honors, the academic adulation—is decidedly elsewhere. Yes, there are dissenting voices. Just the study of art history today is more than and more virtually displacing art, subordinating information technology to "theory," to politics, to the critic's autobiography, to just virtually anything that allows one to dispense with the burden of experiencing fine art natively, on its own terms. (p. 3)

Co-ordinate to Kimball, this set on on art unfolds in 2 ways.

The first involves a process of spurious aggrandizement. You hail the mediocre every bit a work of genius, for instance, or pretend that what is merely repellant actually en-nobles our agreement of art or life. (p. 7)

The second . . . proceeds in the opposite direction. It operates not past inflating the trivial, the mediocre, the perverse, but past attacking, diluting, or otherwise subverting greatness. Its enemy is civilization and the social, moral, and aesthetic assumptions upon which civilization rests. Its aim is to transform art into an ally in the campaign of decivilization. (p. 8)

Examples of both methods of attacking art unfortunately abound. In The Rape of the Masters, Kimball focuses on instances of critics engaging in the latter method of assault with respect to 7 artworks: The Quarry by Gustav Courbet, Untitled by Mark Rothko, The Daughters of Edward Darly Boit by John Vocaliser Sargent, Drunken Silenus by Peter Paul Rubens, The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer, Spirit of the Dead Watching by Paul Gauguin, and A Pair of Shoes by Vincent van Gogh.

For each of these Kimball gives a brusk bio of the artist, a description of what the creative person depicted, a picture of the painting, and a quotation or two by the creative person himself if he said anything most it. These provide readers with some degree of an objective ground for evaluating what both leading art critics and Kimball say about each piece. For instance, here is what i critic, Professor Anna Chave, says about the paintings of Marker Rothko:

Those images of Rothko'southward that parallel the pictorial structure of a pietà, such equally White Band (Number 27) (1954), and Number 20 (1950) might be said at the same time to parallel the structure of a conventional mother and child prototype. Farther, and by the same logic, such tripartite pictures every bit an untitled xanthous and black painting of 1953, which bear a relation to the pictorial structure of an entombment, likewise comport a relation to certain conventional admiration or nativity images. (p. 66)

Kimball'south response is typical of his polemical tone throughout the book. He begins, for example, by observing that anything "might be said."

White Ring (Number 27) is a blue rectangle, eighty-one by lxxx-half dozen inches; in the center of the rectangle there floats a narrow gray-white band; above it sits a wider blueish-gray band, below a band of charcoal-grey. You might say that it parallels "the pictorial structure of a pietà," merely then yous might say that it reminds you of the state of Colorado, Nelson's semaphored bulletin at the Battle of Trafalgar, or Euclid'southward proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. Every bit for that untitled painting from 1953, take a look at the analogy . . . Professor Chave says that it "bear[s] a relation" to the "pictorial structure of an entombment" and "certain conventional adoration or nativity images." Does it? Does information technology?

What I encounter when I look at the picture is a tall, relatively narrow rectangle. The footing of the painting is a sort of brownish white. The height ii-thirds of the sail are virtually filled by a yellow rectangle. Underneath that are flecks of white and then an uneven fairly narrow orangish stripe. Underneath the orangish is a thick cake of blackness extending to the painting'due south edges, followed at the lesser by a bar of mottled orange with a yellowish center. There's nothing that "bears a relation to," "parallels," is a "trace" or "icon" or "palimpsest" of a pietà, an entombment, a nativity scene, or even your Aunt Joan. Nor is in that location any "message" that needs to be "decoded." Rothko'southward picture is just that: a picture. It is not a "text" to be read or a puzzle that needs to exist deciphered or unraveled. It is a painting to exist looked at. It is not, in my view, 1 of Rothko'southward strongest works. Simply even if information technology were his very best, the piddling dramas that critics like Anna Chave accept invented to "explain" or enhance Rothko's paintings would exist cool fabrications. (pp. 66–67)

Although I claiming the implication that Rothko's paintings are works of art, much less masterpieces (more on this below), Kimball's point about the absurdity of critics inventing little dramas to explain or eternalize artworks is both valid and well concretized in The Rape of the Masters. According to Kimball, such fabrications are the rule, non the exception among critics, and he unpacks several cases, showing but how absurd they can be.

Given the shenanigans of the critics being critiqued, The Rape of the Masters is, at times, painful to read. Given Kimball's cut commentary, however, even the painful parts are oddly pleasing. Consider Kimball's analysis and mockery of a criticism by Professor David One thousand. Lubin of John Singer Sargent'south The Daughters of Edward Darly Boit:

Lubin'due south first signal is that the French word for box, boîte, is merely one alphabetic character and an accent marking away from the surname of the painting'due south discipline: "Boit." "The Boit Children makes a visual-verbal pun by translating into Les Enfants de (la) Boît(due east): the children of Boit and the children of the box." In fact, information technology is not the painting that makes the pun—and a silly enough pun it is—but Professor Lubin. And that'southward merely the get-go of his charade. "Another manner of accounting for the overall emptiness or lack that the painting bespeaks," Professor Lubin intones, "is that the Female person Child enclosed within this geometric and ideological box is likewise trapped within a biologic box: the lack of the begetter's E, his penis."

Bring you upward brusque, did it? Peradventure you're thinking that the existent issue here is non the totally fortuitous and irrelevant similarity betwixt the surname "Boit" and the French word for "box" but the much more pertinent congruence betwixt "Boit" and the third person singular of the French give-and-take boire, to drink: il boit, he drinks, he is a drunkard, sot, lush, tippler.

Y'all experience that Professor Lubin knows he's straining here, for he hastily issues i of his periodic disclaimers: "Why in the world," he asks, "take I equated the Boit's male parent's first initial, the letter E, with the male organ?" An excellent question, that. We don't become a satisfactory respond but rather a flurry of persiflage about how "it is less ironic than predictable that in French, boîte is a feminine gender noun." It is also less ironical than predictable that a present-day bookish would digest the grammatical concept of gender to the biological category of sex. What we call "gender" in grammer oftentimes has but a tenuous relation with sexual identity. Thus, for example, the German word for young girl is das Mädchen, a neuter noun. Professor Lubin says, "Sargent's portrait not but uses the devices of realist representation to depict Boit's girls as feminine, only as well doubles the depiction by enclosing them within a superstructure for which the French term is feminine." Er, not quite, professor. Sargent represented Edward Boit'southward daughters "every bit feminine" considering—how can I put this?—the people he was painting were little girls. I know that is a difficult thing to get ane's mind around, but with patience Professor Lubin will notice that little girls are often, indeed regularly, "represented as feminine." With a picayune exercise, he may fifty-fifty detect why this is so. (pp. 104–5)

The Rape the Masters is laden with such caustic acts of justice.

Unfortunately, Kimball's choice of artists and some of his commentaries about their works are themselves inexplainable. For example, that Kimball includes Mark Rothko as a "master" painter and says his paintings "offer unadulterated aesthetic pleasure" (p. 68) simply makes no sense. Kimball besides names Paul Gauguin as a "master," calculation that "genius" is at work in his paintings (p. 151). In both cases, equally well as others, I wanted to enquire the critic—this time Kimball—whether we were looking at the same thing and, if so, whether such comments weren't themselves examples of what he earlier chosen "spurious inflation" or glorifying mediocrity or worse at the expense of those who were truly swell.

Such puzzlement aside, The Rape of the Masters substantially succeeds at what it set out to do—that is, "to object to the objectionable" in the art globe—and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys viewing and analyzing paintings.

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Source: https://theobjectivestandard.com/2014/08/rape-masters-roger-kimball/

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