Al Boime is not only a terrific teacher, but also an extremely knowledgable and intelligent author. This book was an excellent complement to his Modern Art course at UCLA, as well as an excellent social history of art in the early 19th century for art historians, students, and the art enthusiast. ...

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.