Roger Kimball

Author Robert Kimball, the art critic for the National Review, protests too much. The Rape of the Masters is a little too easy for him; some of the politically correct art historian writing he criticizes is almost self-parody. Several paintings and their deconstructions critiques get manhandled; the centerpiece is Kimball’s annihilation of Professor David Lubin’s analysis of John Singer Sargeant’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

Professor Lubin decides that the important part of the painting is not the picture, but the fact that the subjects have the surname “Boit“, which is only slightly different from the French word boîte, and that the father of the children has the first name “Edward”. Lubin decides that the “E” in Edward represents a man with an erection; the î in boîte is a circumcised penis, and the e in boîte is a clitoris; thus the painting actually represents Edward Darley Boit’s desire to prostitute his daughters. I’ll never be able to eat alphabet soup again.


As I said, this is really too easy for Kimball. But I think he goes a little too far. Another deconstructionist critique he goes after is Anna Chave’s of a Mark Rothko painting, Untitled 1953.

Chave (in much more roundabout language) says one of the things the painting symbolizes is an open grave; Kimball dismisses this with the contention that it’s just an attractive arrangement of colored rectangles. You know what, though? For me, it does kind of suggest an open grave – which in turn suggests the gravedigger scene from Hamlet, Shakespere in general, Gweneth Paltrow, a girl I had a crush on in high school, miniskirts, the war in Vietnam, Grignard reactions, lithium batteries, the Tesla car, the Tunguska meteorite impact, iridium, my sled Rosebud, and I could go on for a while. Art is supposed to inspire some sort of emotion in the viewer, and if Untitled 1953 inspires something that the artist did not intend, what’s the harm in that? (Although if The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit inspires a desire to prostitute your children, I hope you’re institutionalized somewhere).

Thus, The Rape of the Masters is OK as yet another preaching-to-the-choir attack on Deconstructionism, but perhaps doesn’t say as much as Kimball thinks it does about our reactions to art.… (mer)