A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 1: Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750-1800

A Social History of Modern Art #1

by Albert Boime

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 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

Genres: Art, Art History

550 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1986

About the author

Albert Boime, was an American art historian and author of more than 20 art history books and numerous academic articles. He taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1968 until 1972, at Binghamton University from 1972 until 1978, and at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1979 until his death.

Reviews

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This incredibly detailed and comprehensive overview of English, American, and French art during the time period covered by the book (175-1800) is characterized by depth of treatment, clarity of focus, and humanity of values. The author, Albert Boime, professor of art history at UCLA, chooses to also give summaries of the tumultuous times of the artists, informing the readers as how the 'dual revolutions' (French and Industrial) influenced the objets d'art that are the focus of his gaze/analysis. He does a particularly effective job of explicating the effects of groups like the Lunar Society in Great Britain had on artists like Flaxman and William Blake, and, in a cumulative section that is worth the price of admission, the world of Jacques-Louis David, whose embracing of the French Revolution defined an age. Additionally, well-chosen drawings, paintings, and sketches go a long way to filling out the aesthetic and intellectual experience of the reader who is swept along by the scope and power of Boime's analysis and narrative. So, while some historians would dispute the Marxist interpretation of some of the historical events of the book (Simon Schama would raise hell about the description of the French Revolution as the triumph of the middle class), the analysis is mostly extremely cogent and trustworthy, supplementing as it does fine explication of the make-up of the images that form the basis of the book. Recommended for students of Western culture in general, as well as Art Historians, this book presents an extremely credible case for its thesis, and it does this while entertaining the reader with its prose and images. A fine book!