Albert Boime
Albert Boime (1933–2008) was an American art historian and author of more than 20 books and numerous academic articles. He was a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, for three decades.
Boime, Albert
Boime, Albert
United States of America
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Description: Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00021
In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism, Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a "guilty secret"—the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the working class and its allies to seize control of the capital. Eventually violence engulfed the city as traditional liberals and moderates joined forces with reactionaries to restore Paris to "order"—the bourgeois order. Here Boime examines the rise of Impressionism in relation to the efforts of the reinstated conservative government to "rebuild" Paris, to return it to its Haussmannian appearance and erase all reminders of socialist threat.

Boime contends that an organized Impressionist movement owed its initiating impulse to its complicity with the state's program. The exuberant street scenes, spaces of leisure and entertainment, sunlit parks and gardens, the entire concourse of movement as filtered through an atmosphere of scintillating light and color all constitute an effort to reclaim Paris visually and symbolically for the bourgeoisie. Amply documented and compellingly argued, Boime's thesis serves as a challenge to all cultural historians interested in the rise of modernism.
Print publication date January 1995 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691015552
EISBN 9780300251708
Illustrations 164
Print Status in print
Description: The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00116
Using words and works of both pupils and masters of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts, this fascinating book provides a wealth of information about the environment and studio practices of French official art from 1830 to 1890. Albert Boime describes the training of new pupils in the Academic ateliers, from the time they began and were set to copy engravings and casts to their copying of the old masters in the Louvre to their work before the live model and landscape painting out-of-doors. Boime's account includes not only a history of the transition from guild-controlled arts sanctioned by the church to an academic system sponsored by the state but also a reassessment of the positive role played by the Academy's teaching program in the evolution of the independent movements of the nineteenth century.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date June 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9789998002845
EISBN 9780300244458
Illustrations 161
Print Status out of print