Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates

Described in the New York Times as the greatest art historian America ever produced, Meyer Schapiro 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 all helped 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.

“O'Donnell’s noteworthy study breaks new ground in dealing comprehensively with the career of one of the most influential American intellectuals of the past century. Meyer Schapiro was active as an art historian and theorist with remarkably wide-ranging interests. He was also involved in the critical debates that accompanied the rise of Abstract Expressionism. His early engagement with Marxism is closely analysed here, as is his deep affiliation with the tradition of American Pragmatism.”—Stephen Bann, author of The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis

“Meyer Schapiro belongs to that small number of art historians who can be regarded as world-class intellectuals; even Theodor W. Adorno was dazzled by his ‘tireless imagination.’ He was one of those rare scholars who engaged so deeply with the philosophical and political issues of their times that their writings illuminate in profound ways the larger culture to which they belonged. In this concise, learned, and well-researched study, C. Oliver O’Donnell offers the first synthetic overview of Schapiro’s achievement in a sequence of essays that compellingly illustrate his range and complexity as a historian and a thinker. Schapiro is a demanding subject, and O’Donnell has risen magnificently to the challenge.”—Andrew Hemingway, editor of The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America

“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

“An important resource on one of art history’s most brilliant practitioners.”—D. Pincus, Choice

“O’Donnell illuminates how art can suffer from [a] theoretical load, portraying the original artwork straining under the weight of the multiple ‘debates’ in which it found itself. O’Donnell recaptures the origins of those debates, plugging nuance back in in order to rescue art from the indeterminacy of multiple theoretical perspectives. That is the purchase of intellectual history, a genre whose relative absence from the field of art history, O’Donnell proves, is in desperate need of remedying.”—Chloe Julius, Object

C. Oliver O’Donnell is a research associate at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

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

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

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