His mother, Dorothy Rubin, was a European Jewish immigrant and his father, Max Boime, was a salesman, and a naval yard worker in Brooklyn during World War II.

Boime went on to earn a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1961 after completing service.

[1] His first book, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1971 by Phaidon Press, examined the unintended role of the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts in the development of 19th-century painters.

[1] In an analysis of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, Boime convinced art historians that the images in the painting's night sky were not a fanciful artwork but were the result of Van Gogh's observations of the sky from the window of the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence at 4 a.m. on June 19, 1889, the day he wrote his brother that he had completed the painting.

", which Boime wrote for COSMOS & CHAOS: A Cultural Paradox group exhibition, he included works by Ib Benoh, James Bohary, Eric Fischl, Lucian Freud, and Jerome Witkin.

[7] A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Boime died at the age of 75 in his home there on October 18, 2008, of the bone marrow disorder myelofibrosis.