Described in The New York Times as the greatest art historian America ever produced, Meyer Shapiro was both a close friend to many of the famous artists of his generation and a scholar who engaged in public debate with some of the major intellectuals of his time. This volume synthesizes his prolific career for the first time, demonstrating how Schapiro worked from the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice to confront some of the twentieth century’s most abiding questions.
Schapiro was renowned for pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to interpreting visual art. His lengthy formal analyses in the 1920s, Marxist interpretations in the 1930s, psychoanalytic critiques in the 1950s and 1960s, and semiotic explorations in the 1970s each helped to open new avenues for inquiry. Based on archival research, C. Oliver O’Donnell’s study is structured chronologically around eight defining debates in which Schapiro participated, including his dispute with Isaiah Berlin over the life and writing of Bernard Berenson, Schapiro’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s ekphrastic commentary on van Gogh, and his confrontation with Claude Lévi-Strauss over the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of visual art. O’Donnell’s thoughtful analysis of these intellectual exchanges not only traces Schapiro’s philosophical evolution but also relates them to the development of art history as a discipline, to central tensions of artistic modernism, and to modern intellectual history as a whole.
Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this study of Schapiro’s career pieces together the separate strands of his work into one cohesive picture. In doing so, it reveals Schapiro’s substantial impact on the field of art history and on twentieth-century modernism.
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: 1929 Formalism and Perception: From Löwy and Fry to Wertheimer and Gombrich
1936 Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft: Foreshadowing the Two Cultures Debate
1941 Science and the Dialectic: Raphael and Dewey, Courbet and Picasso
1947 The “Aesthetic Attitude,” Coomaraswamy’s Metaphysics, and the Westernness of Art’s History
1956 Pragmatic Psychoanalysis and the Confirmation of Woman I
1961 Debating Berenson with Berlin: Two Concepts of Art-Historical Liberty
1968 Heidegger and Goldstein: Van Gogh’s Shoes and the Liabilities of Ekphrasis
1973 Words and Pictures: A Color Field Critique of Structuralist Semiotics
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography of Works by Meyer Schapiro
General Bibliography
Index
“During a long and fabled career, Meyer Schapiro transformed the field of art history, influenced the development of modern art, and earned an honored place in the heady world of the New York intellectuals. In this incisive and judicious account of eight major controversies in which he participated, C. Oliver O’Donnell provides ample evidence that one of the giants of twentieth-century culture still has much to teach us in the twenty-first.”
—Martin E. Jay, author of Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory
