Albert Boime - Writings

Writings

Boime wrote some 20 books of art history, focusing not only on style and form, but using a Marxist and psychoanalytic analysis of the social and political contexts of art, examining how artworks are representations of the class, economic, power and social structures and racial attitudes that exist at their creation.

His first book, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1971 by Phaidon Press, examined the unintended role of the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts in the development of 19th-century painters. In 1974, art critic and commentator Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called the book "the indispensable text" for a reconsideration of the merits of the Salon painters, as the book demonstrated the web of connections in the cultural and institutions of the time that affected artistic tastes and aspirations of that time.

His book series, The Social History of Modern Art, analyzed French art from the mid-18th century to the end of the 19th century, making connections between the art and subject matter to historical events at the time, such as the French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. The four-volume, 3,000-page series, published over a two-decade period by the University of Chicago Press, includes Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750–1800 (1987); Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800–1815 (1990); Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815–1848 (2004); and Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871 (2007).