Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France.

This book takes as its object the work and theories of Neo-Impressionist painters during the late 1880s and 1890s. As the author clearly acknowledges, he is examining these objects through the general social art-historical methodology developed in the work of Clark, Crow, Pollock, and others.(1) More specifically, Hutton's study emulates the kind of political art history staked out in the groundbreaking text from 1961 by Eugenia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium 1855-1898 (New Haven, 1961), which established the issue of anarchist thought and practice as crucial to an understanding of Neo-Impressionism. Thirty-five years later, in the light of …