Meyer Schapiro

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Schapiro, Meyer (1904–1996). American art historian. He was born in Lithuania into a scholarly Jewish family, emigrated to the USA with his family when he was 3, and became an American citizen in 1914. For the whole of his lengthy career he was associated with Columbia University, New York, where he studied (BA, 1924; MA, 1926; PhD, 1929) and then taught, rising from lecturer in 1928 through various grades of professor; after his retirement in 1973 he was emeritus professor. He also taught as visiting lecturer or professor at various other universities in the USA and elsewhere; in 1968, for example, he was Slade professor of fine art at Oxford University.

Schapiro was a distinguished medievalist, making important contributions to the study of Early Christian and Romanesque art, but he also wrote and lectured on modern painting and sculpture and was friendly with numerous artists, who found him an intellectually stimulating companion because of his wide-ranging socio-cultural knowledge and his openness to varied traditions and methodologies. He was interested in Freudian analysis and Gestalt psychology, for example, and ‘was one of the few art historians writing in the English language in the 1930s who applied the resources of the Marxist intellectual tradition to the problems of the analysis of modern art and its development’ ( Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–1990, 1992). He enjoyed ‘almost legendary renown as a lecturer, and, by virtue of his generosity and receptiveness to new ideas, is, for many, the exemplar of the modern scholar-teacher’ ( Charles Mauner in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn., ed. Roland Turner, 1987). In 1974 his 70th birthday was marked by a gesture that showed the enormous respect in which he was held in the art world: twelve artists produced a series of prints, and the proceeds from their sale was used to endow a professorship in his name at Columbia University. The artists involved were S. W. Hayter, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Liberman (1912–99), Roy Lichtenstein, André Masson, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Saul Steinberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Schapiro himself painted fairly seriously in his spare time, and this no doubt played a part in establishing his rapport with artists.

Schapiro's celebrity was all the more remarkable in that he was reluctant to write books or to republish articles in which he saw ‘imperfections, inconsistencies, and unclear formulations'. Indeed, he was known at one time as ‘the most famous art historian who never wrote a book’ (his monographs on van Gogh (1950) and Cézanne (1952) are essentially introductions to collections of plates rather than full-scale studies). However, between 1977 and 1994 his Selected Papers appeared in four volumes. Volume 2, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (1978), includes essays on abstract art, the Armory Show, Cézanne, Gorky, Mondrian, and Picasso, among other topics. This book won the Mitchell prize for outstanding writing on art history in the English language, and Sir John Pope-Hennessy, chairman of the prize jury, commented: ‘If a census were taken of the living critics who have exercised a formative influence on our attitude to the art of the immediate past, it would generally be conceded that the most original and most influential was Professor Meyer Schapiro.’

Meyer Schapiro , 1904–96, American art historian, b. Siauliai, Lithuania. Schapiro came to the United States in 1907 and later attended Columbia Univ., where he began teaching in 1928, received a Ph.D. in 1929, and became a full professor in 1952. He also taught at New York Univ. (1932–36) and the New School for Social Research (1936–52), where his lectures were particularly influential on many artists and writers. In his earliest work Schapiro made pioneering investigations into the nature and aesthetics of Romanesque sculpture, and he gained prominence in the 1930s as a critic and champion of modern art. He also contributed scholarship of the highest order in the areas of early Christian, medieval, 19th-century, and modern art, exploring such areas as the history of style and the relationship of art to folk art traditions, to sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines.

Schapiro's earlier essays include "The Nature of Abstract Art" (1937), "On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art" (1948), and "Leonardo and Freud" (1956). Among his most important books are studies on Van Gogh (1950) and Cézanne (1952) and four major essay collections: Romanesque Art (1977), Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (2 vol., 1978–79), Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art (1979), and Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society (1994).

Schapiro, Meyer. See Abstract Expressionism.