Reclaiming art as it is

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THE RAPE OF THE MASTERS: HOW POLITICAL CORRECTNESS SABOTAGES ART

By Roger Kimball

Encounter Books, $25.95, 186 pages, illus.

At its core, Roger Kimball's "The Rape of the Masters" is an anger-making book. In it, Mr. Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and a noted art critic, shows that the academic study of art history today is plagued in no small way by the misapprehensions and whims of political correctness.

By focusing on seven famous works of art, Mr. Kimball methodically demonstrates how prominent academicians have scrutinized some of Western civilization's most stunning canvases and seen therein not art but sex, subjugation of women, racism, more sex and even more sex of the most perverted kind. Mr. Kimball's aim in this book is to refocus attention on the works of art themselves and rout out the "rot," the specious, self-referencing hyperbole that passes itself off as art criticism.

In the book, the formula Mr. Kimball employs to make his case is a simple one. Each artist is introduced -- Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Winslow Homer (1856-1910), Paul Gaugin (1848-1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) -- and a representative painting is described.

Once the reader is comfortable with the artist and somewhat conversant with the painting being highlighted, Mr. Kimball goes in for the kill, offering up one or two experts who are cited for their astonishing miscalculations of the artist's intent.

Mr. Kimball annotates what a variety of academicians write with a lively eye for balderdash, hypocrisy, vanity and any number of other affronts. And he does so smartly with searing humor, choosing examples that are eye-poppingly damning. So much so that in the source notes that appear on the first page of the book, Mr. Kimball writes that the question he was asked most often by early readers was "'Are you making this up?'"

Consider Mr. Kimball's treatment of John Singer Sargent and his painting "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882." The author begins with a thumbnail description of the artist's life. Sargent was a Florence-born American expatriate, the second of six children born to a family that "subsisted in a bubble of feckless hypochondria," a shy man who never married but nevertheless moved easily in the world of his patrons.