FA: Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution
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"Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution"
(hardcover w/dustjacket) by Albert Boime.
Copyright 1995, 234 pages, 160 halftones, Princeton University Press,
EXCELLENT Condition (NEW), Cover price: $55, Starting bid price: $26.99.
"In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism,
Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a 'guilty
secret'--the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to
expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its
socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when
the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the
working class and its allies to seize control of the capital. Eventually
violence engulfed the city as traditional liberals and moderates joined
forces with reactionaries to restore Paris to "order"--the bourgeois order.
Here Boime examines the rise of Impressionism in relation to the efforts of
the reinstated conservative government to 'rebuild' Paris, to return it to
its Haussmannian appearance and erase all reminders of socialist threat.
Boime contends that an organized Impressionist movement owed its initiating
impulse to its complicity with the state's program. The exuberant street
scenes, spaces of leisure and entertainment, sunlit parks and gardens, the
entire concourse of movement as filtered through an atmosphere of
scintillating light and color all constitute an effort to reclaim Paris
visually and symbolically for the bourgeoisie. Amply documented, richly
illustrated, and compellingly argued, Boime's thesis serves as a challenge
to all cultural historians interested in the rise of modernism."