ALBERT BOIME (1933–2008)
The Los Angeles Times reports that Albert Boime, an art historian, educator, and author who evaluated art in its social and political context for new insights into French Neoclassicism, Impressionism, and other prominent art movements of the last 250 years, has died. Boime, a faculty member at UCLA for more than thirty years, wrote close to twenty books and hundreds of scholarly articles. “My work presents an alternative view and attempts to keep pace with the advancements made by social history,” Boime said in a 1995 interview with the Rutgers Art Review. In “The Social History of Modern Art,” a series of books that Boime worked on through much of his career, he explored French art from the mid-1700s to the late 1800s, relating critical periods including the French Revolution and the age of Napoleon Bonaparte to artists’ choices of subject matter and other aspects of their work. One of Boime’s most highly publicized articles focused on The Starry Night, the best-known painting of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. Boime argued that the painting was based on van Gogh’s careful observations of the sky, not simply his imagination. To prove it, Boime compared the painting to a re-creation of the same stretch of sky at 4 AM, June 19, 1889, the day van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother, Theo, saying that he had finished the painting. The moon and the brightest star, Venus, were in the same place in van Gogh’s painting and in the re-creation of the predawn sky. Van Gogh added swirls of light, a tree, and other details from his memory, but as a whole the sky scene “tallies with astronomical facts at the time the painting was executed,” Boime told members of the American Astronomical Society in 1985. “Al’s research required intense attention and concentration,” said David Kunzle, Boime’s colleague at UCLA. “He set a new standard with his work.”
