Meyer Schapiro's Critical Debates

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 Jay, author of Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory