Albert Boime, Leading Art Historian, Dies at 75
Albert Boime, a noted scholar of art history who took the history every bit as seriously as the art, if not more so, died on Oct. 18 in Los Angeles. He was 75 and a longtime Los Angeles resident.
The cause was myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, his wife, Myra, said. At his death, he was a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he had taught for three decades.
In nearly 20 books and scores of articles, Professor Boime explored the social and political contexts in which art is produced. His work did not neglect issues of style and form, the traditional province of art criticism. But it focused on art as a cultural product — for good or ill — of the society in which it is made. He also sought to rehabilitate one of the most famous madmen of Western art.
Training Marxist and psychoanalytic lenses on his subjects, Professor Boime examined artworks as physical manifestations of the economics, class divisions, power structure and racial attitudes of their times. He was best known for his studies of 19th-century European art, but his work ranged over many genres, among them popular imagery in Europe and America and emblematic national monuments like the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.
Professor Boime was known in particular for his four-volume “Social History of Modern Art.” Published by the University of Chicago Press, the series spans nearly 3,000 pages and comprises “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).
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The cause was myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, his wife, Myra, said. At his death, he was a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he had taught for three decades.
In nearly 20 books and scores of articles, Professor Boime explored the social and political contexts in which art is produced. His work did not neglect issues of style and form, the traditional province of art criticism. But it focused on art as a cultural product — for good or ill — of the society in which it is made. He also sought to rehabilitate one of the most famous madmen of Western art.
Training Marxist and psychoanalytic lenses on his subjects, Professor Boime examined artworks as physical manifestations of the economics, class divisions, power structure and racial attitudes of their times. He was best known for his studies of 19th-century European art, but his work ranged over many genres, among them popular imagery in Europe and America and emblematic national monuments like the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.
Professor Boime was known in particular for his four-volume “Social History of Modern Art.” Published by the University of Chicago Press, the series spans nearly 3,000 pages and comprises “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).