Schapiro, Meyer

SCHAPIRO, MEYER (1904–1995). An enormously gifted scholar trained as a medievalist but with wide-ranging interests that transcended the boundaries of the discipline of art history, Meyer Schapiro was born in Lithuania and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. There he studied painting at the Hebrew Educational Settlement House, with, among others, John Sloan. Schapiro entered Columbia College in 1920 on a scholarship. At Columbia he studied with the anthropologist Franz Boas, the philosopher John Dewey, and the painter Charles Martin. Schapiro went on to write a groundbreaking doctoral dissertation on the sculptural decoration of the Romanesque monastery at Moissac. As a teacher at Columbia, Schapiro offered courses in Byzantine, early Christian, and medieval art and art-historical theory. He also taught courses at the New School for Social Research in modern art—a field not accorded academic respectability in art history departments during the 1920s and 1930s. An amateur artist of some skill, Schapiro kept in close touch with artists and often played a crucial role in furthering artistic careers.

A lifelong socialist—he joined the Young People’s Socialist League at the age of twelve—, Schapiro became more interested in Marxism during the Great Depression, when he moved toward the American Communist Party. Beginning in 1932, he contributed Marxist analyses under a pseudonym to the New Masses. In 1934-1935, lectured at the John Reed Club’s School of Art and published articles in Art Front, the monthly magazine of the Communist-led Artists’ Union. In February 1936, he delivered an influential paper entitled “The Social Bases of Art” to the first meeting of the American Artists’ Congress.

Although close to the CPUSA from c.1931 to 1936, Schapiro never became a party member. After the first Moscow Show Trial, which took place in August 1936, he broke with the CPUSA. In 1937 he supported the Dewey Commission, which was formed to investigate Moscow’s charges against Leon Trotsky. From 1937 until the early 1950s, Schapiro remained within the orbit of the revolutionary left. As an anti-Stalinist Marxist, he was part of the informal grouping later dubbed the “New York Intellectuals,” writing for Partisan Review as well as the short-lived Marxist Quarterly. In the early 1950s, he shifted his political allegiance from revolutionary Marxism to social democracy. In 1954, along with Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, he was among the founding sponsors of the social-democratic journal Dissent.

During the 1930s Schapiro wrote lengthy articles on Romanesque and Mozarabic art at Silos, on the nature of abstract art, and on Courbet and popular imagery. These three articles probe the social determinants of artistic production. Like the best Marxist cultural studies of the 1930s, they exemplify a creative adaptation of Marxist ideas and methods to specific historical problems. Opposing the dogmatism characteristic of the CPUSA, Schapiro insisted that “Marxism is not a closed system or complete science.” Consequently, when it came to art-historical theories and methods, he proved to be an eclectic. Thus, in the studies he produced during the 1930s, he combined historical materialism with Dewey’s Pragmatism, which remained an influence throughout his career.

After the 1930s, Schapiro concentrated less on the social bases of art, and his work reflected his interest in Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, the philosophy of science, semiotics, and analytical aesthetics. Yet unlike many of his former colleagues on the anti-Stalinist Left, Schapiro never repudiated Marxism or socialism and consistently encouraged Marxist approaches to art history. In a well-known essay on style published in 1953, he reviewed major explanatory theories and, after demonstrating their strengths and weaknesses, concluded that an undogmatic Marxism held out the possibility of a general theory.

As an American Marxist working in what was until recently the elite and conservative field of art history, Schapiro was in many ways unique. Although he influenced several generations of artists and art historians, almost none of his students pursued Marxist approaches. It was not until the 1970s that an American school of Marxist art history began to develop. That school initially looked to European scholarship for inspiration; once critical of Schapiro, it has since the 1990s come to acknowledge the richness, breadth, and profundity of his scholarship.

Hemingway, Andrew. “Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s.” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994).

Hills, Patricia. “Meyer Schapiro, ‘Art Front,’ and the Popular Front.” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994).

O’Donnell, C. Oliver. Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind. University Park Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019.

Meyer Schapiro Collection, 1919-2006. Finding Guide. Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections. https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_7467251/