BOOK REVIEW : Art-World Feminist Fights Cultural War : ALIAS OLYMPIA A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model & Her Own Desire <i> by Eunice Lipton</i> Scribner’s $20; 150 pages

The famous difficulty with truth is that it can be inconvenient. Idealists who are willing to bear the inconvenience stumble on a deeper inconvenience. They kick up against the subverting circumstance that truth oppresses truth.

Idealists’ battles may be mainly intellectual, but they are not bloodless. Eunice Lipton, an art historian, fights in the contemporary cultural wars as a feminist against the traditionalists. There is plenty of regimented dreariness in both camps, but Lipton is the opposite of dreary.

She is an outrider against the canon-eers. She writes with sunny flair and convincing pain. However colorful, banners wear thin, but even then they testify to the hand that holds them. “Alias Olympia” stands for a part of truth--despite the talk about the tyranny of political correctness, it is a part at a frequent disadvantage--but its humanity is entire.

Think of “Alias Olympia” as a Canterbury Tale; a life-story told on a pilgrimage.

The pilgrimage was Lipton’s search for Victorine Meurent, the model for Manet’s “Olympia” and “Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe.” It took her to archives in France and the United States, to a village outside Paris where Meurent spent her old age, up dead-ends and into anticlimaxes and through consolatory procrastinations at sidewalk cafes.

Her account of the search, partly comic and in some ways futile, is oddly enthralling. It was undertaken at a time of crisis and questioning that culminated in Lipton’s giving up her tenured professorship at State University of New York, Binghamton. The writing has a perilous hum.

Pilgrimages are made out of a mixture of general belief and particular need. Lipton sets out the belief: a rebellion against the art history formalism she was trained in by her male professors.

“When I was in college in the late 1950s,” she writes, “works of art were considered things of beauty, and that was it; one would never pay attention to a painting’s literal content. One wouldn’t even risk noting that De Kooning’s ‘Women II’ had a woman in it.” Manet was revered as the first modernist and studied for his lines and planes and abstract shapes.

But it was not lines and planes that had caused such scandal when “Dejeuner” and “Olympia” were first shown in Paris. It was not just the nudity of the central figure but her face. Lipton couldn’t get over the face. “The naked woman was staring quite alarmingly out of the picture,” she writes. “This was a woman who could say ‘yes’ as she could say ‘no.’ Locked behind her gaze were thoughts, an ego maneuvering.”

Lipton felt an ardent kinship with the painted figure, and her exploration of this kinship is the framework of the book. It is an exploration in a dizzying variety of senses, from her laborious attempt to unearth the real life of her subject to reflections on her own childhood and career to the igniting effect of the feminist movement to musings on the fact that Victorine and Eunice have a common etymology, both signifying “triumph.”

Meurent was a painter as well as a model, but the few published accounts of her life virtually ignore the fact. A leading account by a French art historian, Adolphe Tabarant, called her paintings “wretched little daubs,” mocked her pretensions and sketched an operatic portrait of a cocotte -like beauty falling into a drunken and messy old age.

Such male condescension detonated Lipton. She linked it to the kind of academic arrogance and male abstractions that she tells of encountering in her own life. She does not find out a great deal from her research in France, but she does establish that Meurent had more success and more status, even if modest, than the historians’ narrative allowed.

Lipton’s memories of her family add a striking dimension to the story of her search for Meurent.

Her father, whose business ventures remained a mystery to her, was fiercely literary. He was contemptuous of his less educated wife and unhesitatingly unfaithful, according to Lipton’s account. He instilled in his daughter a passion for writing and an itching ambition.

He urged her to work hard and not to marry; yet during her brief first marriage, he urged her to put her husband’s literary aspirations before her own. He was, in short, the precursor emblem of the art establishment that Lipton would encounter and of the French painters and critics whose versions relegated Meurent to the subordinate status of a useful body.

Lipton can be arbitrary and self-indulgent. We hear about her second husband and about dyeing her hair red to resemble Meurent’s. Her intensely personal interjections court silliness and sometimes achieve it.

What is extraordinary is how well they work. At one moment she is fiercely polemical; at the next, self-mocking. Above the trumpeting there is an obbligato , a recognition all along that grave matters can be absurd and that life up-ends gravity, absurdity and the need of art history factions to oppress rival truth with their own. Lipton, on the feminist side, has too much gaiety to be an oppressor.