Art and the French Commune

Rating:
Summary: Sensitive evaluation of Seurat saves the book
Review: 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.