Customer Reviews

Art and the French Commune

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Professor Boime's book is quite an eye-opener. The gorgeous and "Modern Art" that we know today as Impressionsim is thrown up against the backdrop of the terrible events of the Paris Commune. Boime's major point, and a fair one, is that the absence of any images of the commune raises serious intellectual and political questions about the group. How can it be possible for open air painters to ignore the burnt out city streets of Paris and its environs? Yet with the exception of a few quick sketches the Impressionists completely avoid the ravages of revolution and repression.

Boime produces a wealth of useful material, particularly in the newspaper images of the times. These have an authenticity missing from the post Commune paintings of the Impressionists. Perhaps most shocking are the examples of now world-famous images, such as the railway bridges, where instead of the pleasant scenes of trains, boats and strollers Boime offers up original photographs of bridges broken in half from explosions.

The conclusions Boime draws are unpleasant - the Impressionists quickly returned to painting pleasantries and whitewashed the cruelties of the historical upheval by not depicting them whatsoever. Whether out of commercial necessity or distaste of the subject, the Impressionist group made a conscious decision to side with the desires of the victors to wash away the memory of the Commune.

This book covers a very ugly period in French history: readers should realize it is not a 'tone' normally associated with Impressionism. However; art teachers and students of modern art, particularly those focused on the political maifestations of art, would gain by a careful assessment of the implications of Professor Boime's work.

This book is a somewhat anachronistic Marxist interpretation of Impressionist and Post-Impressionistic French painting on the basis of the old-fashined Base-Superstructure model. The author strives to prove that the Impressionits' concentration on landscape and private life painting was, above all, a kind of bourgeois whitewashing of the recent events of the Paris Commune. This would make the book too much one-sided, were it not for the author's later remarks on Seurat's paintings, that allow him to fully grasp the fact that the pseudo-organic character of these pointillist paintings reflect, more than bourgeois fear of a renewed Commune, the self-confidence of a sucessful bourgeoisie in creating an stable social order based on individualism and private accomplishements.