front cover of Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871
Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From the European revolutions of 1848 through the Italian independence movement, the American Civil War, and the French Commune, the era Albert Boime explores in this fourth volume of his epic series was, in a word, transformative. The period, which gave rise to such luminaries as Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, was also characterized by civic upheaval, quantum leaps in science and technology, and the increasing secularization of intellectual pursuits and ordinary life. In a sweeping narrative that adds critical depth to a key epoch in modern art’s history, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle shows how this turbulent social environment served as an incubator for the mid-nineteenth century’s most important artists and writers.

Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, Boime strikingly evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among countless others. In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and the artist’s struggle to interpret his surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.
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front cover of Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815-1848
Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815-1848
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Art for art's sake. Art created in pursuit of personal expression. In Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, Albert Boime rejects these popular modern notions and suggests that history—not internal drive or expressive urge—as the dynamic force that shapes art.

This volume focuses on the astonishing range of art forms currently understood to fall within the broad category of Romanticism. Drawing on visual media and popular imagery of the time, this generously illustrated work examines the art of Romanticism as a reaction to the social and political events surrounding it. Boime reinterprets canonical works by such politicized artists as Goya, Delacroix, Géricault, Friedrich, and Turner, framing their work not by personality but by its sociohistorical context. Boime's capacious approach and scope allows him to incorporate a wide range of perspectives into his analysis of Romantic art, including Marxism, social history, gender identity, ecology, structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory, a reach that parallels the work of contemporary cultural historians and theorists such as Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Eric Hobsbawm, Frederic Jameson, and T. J. Clark.

Boime ultimately establishes that art serves the interests and aspirations of the cultural bourgeoisie. In grounding his arguments on their work and its scope and influence, he elucidates how all artists are inextricably linked to history. This book will be used widely in art history courses and exert enormous influence on cultural studies as well.
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The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento
Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 1993
During the 1860s and '70s, more than a decade before the development of French Impressionism, Italy produced a group of avant-garde artists whose fervently nationalist paintings anticipated some of Impressionism's theoretical concerns. These artists were called "Macchiaioli" because they based their technique on a quickly rendered macchia, or sketch.

In the first extended sociopolitical interpretation in English of this important group, Albert Boime places the Macchiaioli in the cultural context of the Risorgimento—the political movement that unified Italy, freed from foreign rule, under a secular, constitutional government. Anglo-American art criticism has generally neglected these painters (probably because of their overt political affiliation and nationalist expression), but Boime shows that these artists, while deeply political, nevertheless created aesthetically superior work.

Boime's study departs from previous research on the Macchiaioli by systematically investigating the group's writings, sources, and patronage in relation to the Risogimento. The book also examines both contemporary and later critical responses, revealing how French art criticism has obscured the achievements of Macchiaioli art. Richly illustrated, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento will appeal to anyone interested in nineteenth-century European art or the history of Italy.
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Observation Points
The Visual Poetics of National Parks
Thomas Patin
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

National parks are the places that present ideas of nature to Americans: Zion, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone bring to mind quintessential and awe-inspiring wilderness. By examining how rhetoric—particularly visual rhetoric—has worked to shape our views of nature and the “natural” place of humans, Observation Points offers insights into questions of representation, including the formation of national identity.

As Thomas Patin reveals, the term “nature” is artificial and unstable, in need of constant maintenance and reconstruction. The process of stabilizing its representation, he notes, is unavoidably political. America’s national parks and monuments show how visual rhetoric operates to naturalize and stabilize representations of the environment. As contributors demonstrate, visual rhetoric is often transparent, structuring experience while remaining hidden in plain sight. Scenic overlooks and turnouts frame views for tourists. Visitor centers, with their display cases and photographs and orientation films, provide their own points of view—literally and figuratively. Guidebooks, brochures, and other publications present still other ways of seeing. At the same time, images of America’s “natural” world have long been employed for nationalist and capitalist ends, linking expansionism with American greatness and the “natural” triumph of European Americans over Native Americans.

The essays collected here cover a wide array of subjects, including park architecture, landscape painting, public ceremonies, and techniques of display. Contributors are from an equally broad range of disciplines—art history, geography, museum studies, political science, American studies, and many other fields. Together they advance a provocative new visual genealogy of representation.

Contributors: Robert M. Bednar, Southwestern U, Georgetown, Texas; Teresa Bergman, U of the Pacific; Albert Boime, UCLA; William Chaloupka, Colorado State U; Gregory Clark, Brigham Young U; Stephen Germic, Rocky Mountain College; Gareth John, St. Cloud State U, Minnesota; Mark Neumann, Northern Arizona U; Peter Peters, Maastricht U; Cindy Spurlock, Appalachian State U; David A. Tschida, U of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; Sabine Wilke, U of Washington.

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Revelation of Modernism
Response to Cultural Crises in Fin-de-Siécle Painting
Albert Boime
University of Missouri Press, 2008

Among postimpressionist painters, Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, and Gauguin produced a remarkable body of work that responded to a cultural and spiritual crisis in the avant-garde world—influences that pushed them toward an increasing reliance on science, literature, and occultism. In Revelation of Modernism, renowned art historian Albert Boime reappraises specific works by these masters from a perspective more appreciative of the individuals’ inner conflicts, offering the art world a new understanding of a period fraught with apocalyptic fears and existential anxieties.

Building on the seminal observations of Sven Lövgren from a half-century ago, Boime rejects popular notions of “art for art’s sake” and rethinks an entire movement to suggest that history, rather than expressive urge, is the driving force that shapes art. He reconsiders familiar masterpieces from a fresh perspective, situating the art in the contexts of history both real and speculative, of contemporary philosophy, and of science to depict modernism as a development that ultimately failed.

Boime expands on what we think we know about these figures and produces startling new revelations about their work. From the political history of Seurat’s Parade de cirque to the astronomical foundations of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, he draws analogies between literary sources and social, personal, and political strategies that have eluded most art historians. He offers a richer and more complex vision of Cézanne, considering the artist as an Old Testament figure in search of the Promised Landscape. And he provides a particularly detailed look at Gauguin—on whom Boime has never previously published—that takes a closer look at the artist’s The Vision after the Sermon and its allusions to Eliphas Lévi’s writings, sheds light on the sources for From whence do we come? and offers new thoughts about Gauguin’s various self-portraits.

Boime’s latest contribution further testifies to his status as one of our most important living art historians. As entertaining as it is eloquent, Revelation of Modernism is a bold and groundbreaking work that should be required reading for all who wish to understand the contradictory origins and development of modernism and its role in history.

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front cover of A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 1
A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 1
Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750-1800
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In A Social History of Modern Art, a sweeping multivolume social history of Western art from the French Revolution to World War I, Albert Boime moves beyond the concern with style and form that has traditionally characterized the study of art history and, in the tradition of Arnold Hauser, examines art in a broad historical context. Into his wide-ranging cultural inquiry Boime incorporates not only frequently studied mainstream artists and sculptors but also neglected and lesser known artists and unattributed popular imagery. He examines popular as well as official culture, the family as well as the state, and the conditions of the poor as well as of the affluent that affected cultural practice.

This inaugural volume explores the artistic repercussions of the major political and economic events of the latter half of the eighteenth century: the Seven Years' War, the French Revolution, and the English industrial revolution. Boime examines the prerevolutionary popularity of the rococo style and the emergence of the cult of antiquity that followed the Seven Years' War. He shows how the continual experiments of Jacques-Louis David and others with neoclassical symbols and themes in the latter part of the century actively contributed to the transformation of French and English politics. Boime's analyses reveal the complex relationship of art with a wide range of contemporary attitudes and conditions—technological innovation, social and political tensions, commercial expansion, and the growth of capitalism.

"Provocative and endlessly revealing."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
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front cover of A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 2
A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 2
Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In this second volume, Albert Boime continues his work on the social history of Western art in the Modern epoch. This volume offers a major critique and revisionist interpretation of Western European culture, history, and society from Napoleon's seizure of power to 1815. Boime argues that Napoleon manipulated the production of images, as well as information generally, in order to maintain his political hegemony. He examines the works of French painters such as Jacques-Louis David and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, to illustrate how the art of the time helped to further the emperor's propagandistic goals. He also explores the work of contemporaneous English genre painters, Spain's Francisco de Goya, the German Romantics Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, and the emergence of a national Italian art.

Heavily illustrated, this volume is an invaluable social history of modern art during the Napoleonic era.

Stimulating and informative, this volume will become a valuable resource for faculty and undergraduates.—R. W. Liscombe, Choice
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