Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 1848-1871. A Social History of Modern Art. Volume Four

Abstract

Published barely four months before the author’s death in November 2008, one of a projected six-volume social history of western art from the Ancien Régime to the First World War stands, at least provisionally, as an epitaph to one of the most influential and productive careers in post-war art history. A seminal figure in opening up the discipline to other areas of historical enquiry, Albert Boime was central to the vigorous debate initiated during the 1970s by scholars such as Robert Herbert, Linda Nochlin, and T. J. Clark out of which art history emerged re-invigorated as a more theoretically aware and politically engaged field of enquiry. The importance of nineteenth-century French studies within this radical re-evaluation is reflected in the overall balance of Boime’s gargantuan survey (currently totalling some 3000 pages). Begun in 1987, and seemingly growing in scope and ambition with each successive volume, this final offering has reached what might be regarded as the symbolic departure point of the intellectual revolution to which it attests: Nochlin’s work on Courbet, Herbert’s research on Millet, and Clark’s publications on Courbet, Manet, and the art of the Second Republic all stand as particularly authoritative antecedents in the study of Realism and Impressionism that dominates Boime’s current instalment. Beyond this, over the course of an unusually prolific career, Boime himself published widely on mid-century culture, not only in France, but also in nations traditionally less often considered in the art-historical literature, notably Italy, Germany and the United States. If whole chapters of Art in an Age of Civil Struggle have a familiar ring, this is because Boime draws upon his prodigious back-catalogue of books and articles covering a myriad of artists and themes from the Second Republic to the Commune.