Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind 9780271085562

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MEYER SCHAPIRO’S CRITICAL DEBATES

MEYER SCHAPIRO’S CRITICAL DEBATES Art Through a Modern American Mind

C. Oliver O’Donnell

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Donnell, C. Oliver (Charles Oliver), 1983– author. Title: Meyer Schapiro’s critical debates : art through a modern American mind / C. Oliver O’Donnell. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the life, career, and intellectual debates of art historian Meyer Schapiro, who worked at the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice and from there confronted some of the twentieth century’s most abiding questions”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025517 | ISBN 9780271084640 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Schapiro, Meyer, 1904–1996. | Art criticism—United States—History—20th century. | Art—History. Classification: LCC N7483.S292 O36 2019 | DDC 701/.18—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025517 Copyright © 2019 C. Oliver O’Donnell All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, a nsi z 39.48–1992.

Dedicated to Frances Malcolm

Contents List of Illustrations  viii Preface and Acknowledgments  x List of Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction  1

1929 Formalism and Perception: From Löwy and Fry

to Wertheimer and Gombrich  14 1936 Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft: Foreshadowing the

Two Cultures Debate  35 1941 Science and the Dialectic: Raphael and Dewey,

Courbet and Picasso  57 1947 The “Aesthetic Attitude,” Coomaraswamy’s

Metaphysics, and the Westernness of Art’s History  82 1956 Pragmatic Psychoanalysis and the Confirmation

of Woman I  101 1961 Debating Berenson with Berlin: Two Concepts of

Art-Historical Liberty  123 1968 Heidegger and Goldstein: Van Gogh’s Shoes and

the Liabilities of Ekphrasis  142 1973 Words and Pictures: A Color Field Critique of

Structuralist Semiotics  163

Epilogue  188 Notes  192 Bibliography of Works by Meyer Schapiro  214 General Bibliography  227 Index  245

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, relief of Abbot Durand, end of the twelfth century  18 Chartres Cathedral, west façade, drawn by the architect Robert Garland, 1836  31 Chartres Cathedral, west façade, twelfth to early thirteenth century  31 Chartres Cathedral, south tower  33 Chaim Soutine, Chartres Cathedral, 1933  33 Abbey of Saint-Pierre, Mozac, lintel, twelfth century  39 Abbey of Vézelay, portal, twelfth century  40 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559  49 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–4  50 Attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1560s  53 Meyer Schapiro, Icarus, undated  55 Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937  76 Pablo Picasso, Guernica (first state), May 11, 1937  77 Attributed to the family of Nainsukh, The Hour of Cowdust, 1810–15  87 Palace of Darius, Persepolis, relief of Darius fighting a monster (detail), ca. 500 B.C.E.  90 Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait (8), 1919  99 Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932  106 Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Rising Sun, 1889  109 Paul Cézanne, Three Apples, 1878–79  110 Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950–52  119 Abbey of Sainte-Marie, Souillac, detail of trumeau, twelfth century  122 Meyer Schapiro, caricature of Bernard Berenson, ca. 1940s  126 Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross, 1612–14  136

Illustrations / ix

24. Meyer Schapiro, analytic diagram of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross, undated  137 25. Meyer Schapiro, diagram of the relief of Theophilus, 1939  138 26. Abbey of Sainte-Marie, Souillac, relief of Theophilus, twelfth century  138 27. Vincent van Gogh, Old Shoes, 1886  153 28. Pentecost, Reichenau Lectionary, ca. 1055  156 29. Pentecost, Worcester Psalter, ca. 1225  157 30. Meyer Schapiro, diagram from An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, 1953  171 31. Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1951  172 32. Barnett Newman, Dionysius, 1949  173 33. Meyer Schapiro, diagram from An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, 1953  174 34. Moses, Aaron, and Hur, Oxford Moralized Bible, thirteenth century  181 35. Moses, Aaron, and Hur, North French Hebrew Miscellany, thirteenth century  182 36. Moses at battle, St. Louis Psalter, thirteenth century  183

Preface and Acknowledgments

The concrete outlines of this book emerged out of my participation in a seminar at Columbia University in the spring of 2015 that was dedicated to Meyer Schapiro, organized by Robert Harrist, and co-led by various members of Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. The proximity to Schapiro’s archive and the contact with individuals who had known him personally created an irreplaceable perspective on Schapiro’s work that shaped the text of the following chapters in innumerable ways. I am indebted to Keith Moxey for his support during my time at Columbia, to Robert Harrist for organizing the seminar itself, and to the seminar’s participants, including Avinoam Shalem, Daniel Esterman, Kent Minturn, Linda Seidel, Jonathan Crary, Barry Bergdoll, Anne Higonnet, Holger Klein, Stephen Murray, Barbara Rose, and others. Additionally, at Columbia the staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) was instrumental to my access to and navigation of Schapiro’s unpublished papers, especially Tara Craig, Jocelyn Wilk, and Tom McCutchon. I relied on the support and expertise of the RBML’s staff throughout the years that it took me to write these chapters; without their work this book would not exist. I arrived at Columbia in the fall of 2014 as a visiting scholar from UC Berkeley, where I had earlier developed an interest in Schapiro because of his relationship with American pragmatism. I am especially thankful for the mentorship of Whitney Davis, who first supported my interest in Schapiro and in art historiography more generally. My intellectual debt to Whitney is likely larger than I know; his deep engagement with some of the most far-reaching analytic problems of art history has long supplied me with a model for my own scholarship. Martin Jay’s writing also played an important role for me at Berkeley, and, more recently, he generously read an early draft of this book, providing comments that kept my spirits high. Additional Berkeley faculty who played a part in the earliest stages of this book’s development include Alva Noë, Lauren Kroiz, Beate Fricke, and Richard Cándida Smith.

Preface and Acknowledgments  /  xi

While the origins of this book emerged at Berkeley and its basic outlines formed at Columbia, the book itself was primarily written between 2016 and 2018 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI)—Max-Planck-Institut. During this period I was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Alessandro Nova and a member of the “Languages of Art History” research group. My work on Schapiro made for an apt contribution to this larger research project for a number of reasons, perhaps most notably because Schapiro’s thinking emerged out of the intersection of German-, French-, and English-language scholarship and because his deep intellectual network was essential to the integration of French and German writing into the American art world. Moreover, because English emerged over the course of Schapiro’s career as the most common language of academic discourse—art history being no exception—and because Schapiro is undoubtedly one of the most prominent English-speaking art historians of the twentieth century, the specific case of his life provides a fecund example of how English-language intellectual traditions have refracted with European continental thought in order to shape the global discourse of visual art. I am especially grateful for the support of Alessandro Nova and thankful for the feedback of the other members of the “Languages of Art History” group, mostly notably Robert Brennan and Marco Mascolo. In addition to granting me the freedom to conduct research and develop the arguments of the book, the KHI further facilitated this project in various ways. Notably, during my time in Florence I was able to participate in several conferences and more informal workshops that helped me complete the manuscript. In this regard, Carolin Behrmann, Felix Jäger, Hana Gründler, Georgios Binos, Fabian Jonietz, Dario Donetti, and Brigitte Sölch, all of the KHI, helped me. I am also indebted to scholars from other institutions, including Steffen Haug, Malcolm Bull, Michael Schreyach, Yve-Alain Bois, Jérémie Koering, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Kerstin Thomas, Edward Wouk, Kate Cowcher, Nikolas Drosos, Natalie Adamson, and Stephanie O’Rourke. Finally, in Florence I helped organize a conference where I presented some of the material in this book, and the feedback from that event was central to the sharpening of my arguments. From this final context, I am grateful for the comments of Michael Fried, Christopher Wood, Alessandra Russo, Andreas Beyer, and John Leavitt, among others named elsewhere. Beyond these three institutional contexts, numerous other peers and friends abetted the improvement of the book. The two anonymous peer reviewers for Penn State University Press, for instance, delivered incisive feedback on the manuscript. Moreover, the editorial team at the press, including Ellie

xii  /  Preface and Acknowledgments

Goodman, Hannah Hebert, and Annika Fisher, shuttled the manuscript through the publication process and provided me with excellent insights and professional support over the many months that it took to produce this volume. Other colleagues who helped me with research related to the book include Neil Furman at Argosy Books, Mark Mahoney at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Lena Newman of Columbia’s Avery Library, the staff of Harvard University Archives, the staff of Princeton’s Firestone Library, the staff of Yale’s Haas Family Arts Library, and the staff of the Getty Research Institute. Additional friends and peers who read the book in draft form and helped me develop it include Sam Rose, who agreed to be the first outside reader of the manuscript; Stephen Bann, who was especially helpful in aiding the improvement of the fifth and eighth chapters; and Andrew Hemingway, whose extensive knowledge of Marxist art-historical scholarship proved invaluable. Finally, my biggest debt for completing this book is owed to my wife, Frances Malcolm. Frances read multiple drafts of the manuscript and helped refine its arguments both at the wider conceptual level and at the fine-tuned level of specific words. Her patience and focus is reflected in my prose, and the arguments that make up this book are undeniably clearer and more precise because of her efforts. This book is dedicated to her. Florence, September 2018

Abbreviations

ACP Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Papers, Princeton

University Libraries EGP Ernst Gombrich Papers, Warburg Institute Archive,

University of London JFP James T. Farrell Papers, University of Pennsylvania

Libraries MSB Meyer Schapiro Books, Stronach Center, Schermerhorn

Hall, Columbia University MSC Meyer Schapiro Collection, Columbia University

Libraries WIA Warburg Institute Archive, Warburg Institute,

University of London

Introduction

Stated simply, Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) was an art historian, New York intellectual, and longtime professor at Columbia University. In addition to his noted contributions to some of his generation’s most pressing and nowclassic questions—some chastenedly academic, others perfervidly political—he is well known by way of numerous anecdotes of his connections with many of the twentieth century’s most famous artists. Some of the most prominent include his serendipitous 1935 trip with the cubist painter Fernand Léger to the Morgan Library that is thought to have inspired Léger’s work;1 his 1940 introduction of Robert Motherwell to Kurt Seligmann that helped launch the former’s career as a leading abstract expressionist; his 1952 visit to Willem de Kooning’s studio and the now-canonical canvas—perpetually on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—that subsequently emerged, Woman I; and the furtive support he provided to the proto-color field painter Barnett Newman in 1961 against the philological hairsplitting of one of the century’s other great art historians, Erwin Panofsky.2 The aggrandizing flair of stories like these makes them appealing to some and anathema to others, the pithy anecdote—true, embellished, or apocryphal—being at once a powerful boon and classic boondoggle of historical research. Without spending too much time adjudicating the import or truth of these episodes, the close relations to which they speak between Schapiro and prominent modern artists are nevertheless a recurring focus of this book. As Schapiro himself enjoyed recounting these stories, the numerous moments that directly connect him to celebrated artists and artworks are indeed revealing in that they testify to his sympathy for the artistic production of his time. In

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isolation, however, these almost mythic stories fail to provide much insight into a more encompassing, if romantically elusive, source of Schapiro’s real historical impact: his mind. Stated more boldly, Meyer Schapiro was much more than an art historian, New York intellectual, or longtime professor at Columbia. For the poet Frank O’Hara, Schapiro was nothing less than “a God” of the New York art world; for Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, he was simply the greatest art historian America ever produced.3 Perhaps the most significant basis for these outspoken claims is that Schapiro can be understood to have reshaped the very form of art-historical knowledge itself.4 Among American scholars in particular, Schapiro is often credited with legitimizing the scholarly study of modern and contemporary art—by far the most popular subfield of art history today—and with making pioneering contributions to multiple modes of art-historical argument that are now commonplace. His Marxist writings from the 1930s, his psychoanalytic writings from the 1950s, and his semiotic writings from the 1960s and ’70s, for instance, all helped open new avenues for art-historical research.5 Schapiro’s prominent early contributions to these areas have even been taken to imply that much of that pervasive art-historical paradigm known as the “social history of art”—especially in its investigations of canonical modernist topics, like French impressionism and abstract art, and even in its explicitly feminist formations—is often an extension of Schapiro’s work.6 The extent to which claims like these are true is debatable. What they suggest, nonetheless, is that anyone who has ever bothered to read a gallery didactic in the last forty years—whether a casual visitor, practicing artist, amateur intellectual, or senior sage—or anyone who has attempted to make sense of the bewilderingly diverse artistic production of this period has likely been encouraged to think about visual art through the modes of inquiry that Schapiro popularized if not established. Though Schapiro certainly did not single-handedly invent these discursive frameworks, and his very role in their development likely had as much to do with his secure position at a prestigious university at the very center of the American art world as with his actual published writing, it is one of the central claims of this book that Schapiro’s fluency in and contribution to the forms of thought that were integral to the visual art of the twentieth century made him a major figure of his times. Based on such an understanding of Schapiro, this book is an effort toward a synthetic overview and assessment of the patterns of thinking that lay behind his intellectual formation, development, and legacy.

Introduction / 3

In pursuing this goal, a paradox at the heart of Schapiro’s work that is central to understanding his thought quickly emerges. On the one hand, Schapiro was effusively praised by many of the leading intellectuals of his era. The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky called him the art historian “who knows everything about everything”;7 Morton White, a leading historian of ideas and professor at the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, described him as “by all odds the most brilliant figure in the [entire] faculty of arts and sciences” at Columbia University;8 and William Phillips, the longtime editor of one of his generation’s most distinguished literary journals, Partisan Review, proclaimed that Schapiro had “all the formal characteristics of genius.”9 On the other hand, by his own admission and quite in contrast to other academics and intellectuals of similar stature, there is not a specific theory or discovery that can easily be singled out as Schapiro’s lasting contribution to knowledge. Indeed, in responding to interview questions late in life about his distinctive approach, Schapiro confessed that he had never “synthesized . . . an adequate, satisfying theory of art.”10 Seemingly responding to this situation, at the height of Schapiro’s fame, the Harvard professor Henri Zerner exaggerated the paradox of Schapiro’s reputation by dubbing him the most venerated art historian who had never even written a book.11As Zerner knew, of course, Schapiro had written multiple books; the point was that Schapiro’s books were somehow not the source of his standing. The range of Schapiro’s interests had much to do with this situation. He was trained as a medievalist—a field of study that requires exacting knowledge of Latin grammar, epigraphy, and paleography and relies on precise archaeological fieldwork—and yet he was equally known for his writing on modern art. His early essays on Matisse, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, for instance, are important expressions of his thinking and significant sources of his repute. This unusual dual specialization meant that Schapiro’s mind was constantly moving between fields, time periods, and geographic locales with such rapidity, it would seem, that he was more suited to short-form writing than to full-length monographs. This quality of Schapiro’s thought, however, was his greatest strength. Just as he was constantly shuttling between the medieval and the modern, he was pushing the boundaries of art-historical thought in general by bringing in ideas from well outside the discipline: from Gestalt psychology to semiotics, from psychoanalysis to the philosophy of science, and from Marxism to analytic aesthetics. The speed and range of Schapiro’s mind allowed him to synthesize and apply ideas from widely diverse disciplines to the study of visual art in innovative and compelling ways. In view

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of this great facility, it comes as no surprise that Schapiro was hyperbolically eulogized in the New York Times for his very ability “to master one discipline after another with a speed and a thoroughness that have had few parallels in our century.”12 Exaggerated though such statements may be, it is indeed this aspect of Schapiro’s thought that made him such an innovative scholar and such an inspiring teacher. Firsthand accounts of his lecturers testify to this fact, revealing Schapiro to be an almost cultlike figure, a guru, for a whole generation of students, laypeople, and enthusiasts alike. As the art historian Irving Sandler noted, “The power of Meyer’s mind was without equal, at least in my world. The scope of his knowledge was staggering, encompassing mathematics and physics, economics and politics, the classics, perceptual psychology and psychoanalysis, Hebrew studies and philosophy.” Combined with Schapiro’s skills as a lecturer, this breadth of expertise contributed to the impression that, as Sandler continued, “two or three minutes into a lecture, [Schapiro] would seem to levitate six inches off the floor.”13 In what can only be described as the fantastic style of Schapiro lore, the journalist and novelist Anatole Broyard described one of Schapiro’s lectures as follows: With the dim stained-glass light of the slides and the hushed atmosphere, Schapiro’s classes were like church services. Culture in those days was still holy. If he had chosen his own church, it would have been Romanesque—yet there was something fundamentalist in him, too. He made you want to get up and testify, or beat a tambourine. . . . Sometimes he was so brilliant that he seemed almost insane to me; he seemed to see more than there actually was—he heard voices. His knowledge was so impressive as to appear occult. Because he chanted his lectures, he was like a medieval cantor or Gregorian monk. We were so awed by him that when he said something witty, we were afraid to laugh. It was like the German translators taking the puns out of Shakespeare on the assumption that he had not written them, that they had been added by hacks. I wonder now whether Schapiro ever noticed how tense we were, how pious. Did he realize that students were dropping out all the time, to be replaced by other students? They didn’t drop out because he was disappointing—in fact, it might have been better if he had disappointed us now and then. What drove even his admirers away was a certain remorselessness in his brilliance. It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something; there was no escape. It was like fate. . . .

Introduction / 5

Schapiro spoke rapidly, rhythmically, hardly pausing for breath. When he said that with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck. As he went on, Schapiro’s sentences became staccato, cubistic, full of overlapping planes. I was so excited that I took [my friend’s] hand in mine. . . . [Schapiro’s] voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the projector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque gesture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassembled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in [my friend’s].14 From the perspective of the present, is it easy to look askance at over-the-top reports like this; today Schapiro’s published writing can make him seem rather run of the mill. We are left to speculate that Broyard’s experience must have been fueled by the particular cultural atmosphere that pervaded New York after the social reckoning that accompanied the Holocaust and Hiroshima, an atmosphere of deliverance from and supreme wonder at the technological horrors that defined those events. Moreover, the absolute faith in art that Broyard describes can be seen as a correlate of the dogmatic political ideologies of the Cold War that defined much of American life during Schapiro’s later career and that very much scarred Schapiro himself, making him an appropriate focus of Broyard’s ecstatic avowal. Taken together, Broyard’s and Sandler’s accounts underline a fact that is easy to overlook, particularly because Schapiro’s writing has been so thoroughly absorbed. Schapiro is of interest not just for his pioneering writing and for the models that his scholarship provided, and still provides, to scholars. Schapiro is also a culturally and historically celebrated figure whose work resonates in a powerful way with a truly broad public. And since Schapiro’s students include some of the most studied figures of the subsequent generation—including the poet Allen Ginsberg, the sculptor Donald Judd, and the performance artist Allan Kaprow, to name but a few—Schapiro’s historical position is underlined all the more. Because Schapiro’s protean and prehensile mind was so central to his impact, the wide range of his work is also at the center of this book’s organization. The book is composed of eight compact chapters, each partially named after a seminal year during his long career in which Schapiro engaged in broad,

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critical debate. These debates concern a variety of different topics—from the notion of form itself to the meaning of specific paintings. The discussions were between Schapiro and figures from both within and far outside of his own discipline—from prominent art historians like Ernst Gombrich to the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. They took place in a number of different formats—face-to-face at conferences, published as reviews and essays, and written in private correspondence. Whatever the topic debated, whoever the individuals involved, and whatever the circumstances, each chapter of the book isolates the origins, culmination, and aftermath of Schapiro’s thinking on one debated theme, thus tracing a single thread of his thought concerning a sweeping intellectual controversy. Like Schapiro’s life, these debates span much of the twentieth century, and they simultaneously mark both the development of the scholarly discipline that Schapiro did so much to shape—art history—as well as some of the central tensions of twentieth-century modernism as a whole and even of modernity itself. Because Schapiro was an art historian by training, art objects often and unsurprisingly lie at the center of these debates, and the specific works discussed include some of the most canonical works of modern art: Van Gogh’s still lifes, Picasso’s Guernica, Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. And yet, because of the range of Schapiro’s interests, the lenses through which he interpreted these works also carry each of the chapters quite far from modern art and into contact with much older and more distant forms of image-making: Romanesque sculpture, early Netherlandish landscapes, medieval Hindu carvings. The “critical debates” after which this book is named, therefore, are critical in multiple ways. They are critical to capturing the full range of Schapiro’s mind; they are critical in relation to central ideas and pressures of his time; they are critical to the evolution of the discipline of art history during Schapiro’s career; and they are critical in their sometimes pointed and often still unresolved natures. Consequently, this book’s exploration of Schapiro’s critical debates results in more than a portrait of him; the book also leverages Schapiro’s art-historical perspective to stage confrontations with some of the central questions of twentieth-century intellectual life and thereby aims to further our understanding of how art history and artworks themselves fit into that much larger story. The book commences where most art-historical scholarship begins: with a discussion of form. The first chapter, “1929: Formalism and Perception; From Löwy and Fry to Wertheimer and Gombrich,” focuses on the debates about art and visual perception that lay behind Schapiro’s 1929 dissertation. In so

Introduction / 7

doing, the chapter aims to further our understanding of Schapiro’s particular version of art-historical formalism by analyzing some of the ideas that were central to its development, specifically Emanuel Löwy’s theory of archaic style and the writing of Roger Fry. By analyzing Schapiro’s relation to the writing of these two figures, I argue that Schapiro’s early formalist writing anticipates his later critical engagement with the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer and clarifies his uneven professional relationship with the art historian Ernst Gombrich. The second chapter, “1936: Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft; Foreshadowing the Two Cultures Debate,” broadens the discussion of Schapiro’s specific version of art-historical formalism by discussing his critical response to the writing of the so-called New Vienna School of Art History. I aim to show that the most lasting impact of the scholarship of the New Vienna School on Schapiro was made by way of its attempt to found a “rigorous” study of art on the basis of “understanding”—a philosophical term of art to which Wilhelm Dilthey gave renewed credence at the end of the nineteenth century as part of his general distinction between the Geistes- and the Naturwissenschaften. I show how Schapiro’s 1936 review of the scholarship of the New Vienna School foreshadows Schapiro’s later reaction to the so-called two cultures debate that became especially prominent in the Anglo-American academy in the wake of the writing of C. P. Snow. Titled “1941: Science and the Dialectic; Raphael and Dewey, Courbet and Picasso,” the third chapter turns to Schapiro’s relationship with Marxist ideas, specifically by way of Schapiro’s correspondence with the Marxist art historian Max Raphael as well as his critical relationship to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey. Stated most succinctly, Schapiro disagreed with Raphael about the place of the dialectic within Marxist scholarship and in so doing he revealed his proximity to both positivist and pragmatist theories of knowledge. While Schapiro was often critical of Dewey’s pragmatist project as a whole, his correspondence during this time also shows that his thinking did not escape Dewey’s influence completely. I substantiate this claim by comparing Schapiro’s later writing on Picasso’s Guernica with Raphael’s and thereby measure the distance between Schapiro’s writing and a more classically Marxist form of art-historical argument. The fourth chapter, “1947: The ‘Aesthetic Attitude,’ Coomaraswamy’s Metaphysics, and the Westernness of Art’s History,” concerns Schapiro’s engagement with the Ceylonese geologist turned philosopher of art, Ananda Coomaraswamy, most visible in Schapiro’s celebrated essay “On the Aesthetic

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Attitude in Romanesque Art,” which was originally published in Coomaraswamy’s Festschrift of 1947. I focus on the problem of the Western bias within humanistic research and do so by way of Schapiro’s criticisms of Coomaraswamy in unpublished correspondence and in published exchanges. By contextualizing and excavating the dialogue between these two scholars, I demonstrate how the ideas they debated played a central and often unrecognized role in Schapiro’s thinking throughout his life, particularly in his commitment to the modernist analysis of form and even in his mentorship of key modern artists like Robert Motherwell. In the fifth chapter, “1956: Pragmatic Psychoanalysis and the Confirmation of Woman I,” I unpack Schapiro’s persistent engagement with psychoanalytic theory. I argue that Schapiro’s two familiar articles on Freud and Leonardo from the mid-1950s—both products of an invited talk at the neo-Freudian William Alanson White Institute in New York in 1955—and his later essay on Cézanne’s apples, which reveals his blending of psychoanalytic and pragmatist claims, demonstrate an extensive, creative, and prolonged engagement with psychoanalytic thought. I place Schapiro’s interest in psychoanalysis within the larger context of the rise of psychoanalytic claims within humanities research in Cold War America and argue that Schapiro’s at once critical and celebratory relationship with psychoanalytic theory parallels the uneven position of psychoanalytic research in the United States itself. I conclude this chapter by using my contextualization of Schapiro’s engagement with psychoanalysis to interpret his almost mythic role in helping Willem de Kooning finalize what is likely the painter’s most canonical work: Woman I. The sixth chapter, “1961: Debating Berenson with Berlin; Two Concepts of Art-Historical Liberty,” is dedicated to Schapiro’s trenchant criticisms of the life and writing of Bernard Berenson, to the reactions that those criticisms engendered from the eminent historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, and to the general tensions between lifestyle, politics, and academic inquiry. I argue that Schapiro’s strong critique of Berenson washed over similarities between their scholarship that Berlin’s debate with Schapiro helps reveal: perhaps most significantly, that both Schapiro and Berenson championed an active model of visual perception for the study of art’s history. Though this similarity by no means reconciles Schapiro and Berenson completely, recognizing this and other parallels between their writing does much to articulate how the modes of scholarship that they respectively practiced—connoisseurship and social history—were and still are more akin than scholars today are prone to recognize.

Introduction / 9

The seventh chapter, “1968: Heidegger and Goldstein; Van Gogh’s Shoes and the Liabilities of Ekphrasis,” addresses what is likely Schapiro’s most renowned intellectual exchange: his 1968 criticisms of Martin Heidegger’s description of a painting by Van Gogh made famous by the subsequent deconstructive scholarship of Jacques Derrida. In approaching this widely discussed topic, I attempt to recapture the largely forgotten origins of Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger by articulating the intimate connections between Schapiro’s writing on Van Gogh and the neurological research of Kurt Goldstein, the man to whom Schapiro’s critique was originally dedicated. The broader story that connects Schapiro’s and Goldstein’s scholarship concerns Schapiro’s growing postwar focus on the general relations between language and pictures and shows that Schapiro’s criticisms of Heidegger had as much to do with his understanding of the limits and liabilities of ekphrasis as with Heidegger’s specific description of Van Gogh’s painting, to say nothing of Heidegger’s ontology of art. The final chapter of the book, “1973: Words and Pictures; A Color Field Critique of Structuralist Semiotics,” endeavors to flesh out the historical context and analytic grounding of Schapiro’s general claims about signs. In this chapter I show how Schapiro’s semiotic essays from the 1960s and ’70s should in fact be understood as deeply indebted to the midcentury development of Peircean semiotics by Charles W. Morris and partially in antagonistic relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s application of Saussurian semiotics within his structuralist anthropology. To make my argument, I initially focus on a 1952 exchange between Schapiro and Lévi-Strauss in which they debated the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of visual art, showing how Schapiro’s arguments in this exchange have parallels to the proto-color field painting of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. I conclude by demonstrating how Schapiro further developed and refined his position in this debate in his book Words and Pictures of 1973. As I hope these chapter summaries suggest, the book’s thematic organization around a series of wide-ranging intellectual debates has the great advantage of speaking directly to the seemingly boundless curiosity behind Schapiro’s polymathic interests. Looking back over the twenty-five years of art-historical scholarship since Schapiro’s death, wherein the interdisciplinary connections that he did so much to normalize have become ever more commonplace, it has become all too easy to take Schapiro’s work for granted. The very term “interdisciplinary” has become so pedestrian and mundane that its current associations fail to capture much of the innovative nature

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of Schapiro’s work; the irony of this fact is that Schapiro was likely the first American art historian who could honestly be described as interdisciplinary. Nevertheless, in order to ward off this potential misreading, it seems more appropriate today to think of Schapiro’s thought in different terms. “Maieutic,” meaning generative of new ideas through an ongoing, dialogic process of fundamental, unconstrained questioning, comes close to the mark. Indeed, as I hope to show, there is something deeply creative and dialogic in the relentlessly interrogative attitude that lay beneath Schapiro’s approach to the debates that compose this book, meaning that the chapters help reveal exactly how and why his scholarship can be described as a form of maieusis. Much in keeping with this ambition, the power of the imaginative connections that emerge from these critical debates is both a focus of my account as well as a reminder of the danger of what Schapiro criticized throughout his life: disciplinary border control, art-historical parochialism. The book’s ambitious yet probative scope, however, also has its weaknesses. Perhaps most obvious is that it is not as comprehensive as some might hope; not all of Schapiro’s writings are discussed, and some are given far less weight than a different book about Schapiro might give them. For instance, some of Schapiro’s essays that were very much a part of art-historical debates—“The Frescoes of Castelseprio” being noteworthy here because of the responses it elicited from Kurt Weitzman and Oleg Grabar, both of whom were notable art-historical peers of Schapiro’s—do not figure prominently in my narrative. While this fact is unfortunate, it also follows from my argument concerning Schapiro: his claims about the frescoes of Castelseprio are, in my judgment, primarily of quite specialized art-historical interest and are not expressly representative of the integrative connections among diverse fields of knowledge that he achieved in his other writing. A second limitation resulting from my chosen organization is that all of my chapters chronologically overlap in some way, meaning that the book does not explicitly and directly pursue the absolute timeline of Schapiro’s life as its ultimate goal. With a little shuffling and reworking, the order of the book’s chapters could likely be rearranged, and the single, climatic year after which each of the book’s chapters is named could even be changed. Readers with specific interests that do not map onto my own may find this flexibility frustrating if not problematic, believing that a more strictly biographical account of Schapiro would be more useful. As future Schapiro biographers will no doubt confront, however, the extensive archive of documents that Schapiro bequeathed to Columbia University and upon which this book is so heavily

Introduction / 11

based is also an important reason for this book’s thematic organization. Schapiro’s archive itself testifies to a quality of his work that was widely known by his contemporaries and friends: his extensive editing and ongoing reworking of his arguments over extended periods of time, often using small, handwritten scraps of paper, outlines of varying lengths and states of completion, and transcriptions of his lectures from decades earlier as the source material for subsequent publications.15 This archival fact makes it difficult to divide Schapiro’s thinking into clear chronological periods, as he returned to the same topics so often and at such remove that it can be impossible to determine when a specific thought was written down or formulated. He was known to be a perfectionist, and this trait certainly contributed to his preoccupation with his earlier work. This scholarly habit, however, also lends Schapiro’s writing to more thematic organization; his ongoing work on specific topics and the fact that he returned again and again to similar ideas means that it is often possible to connect his thinking over long periods and to see how it evolved. Finally, it is important to note some intended implications of this book that extend well beyond Schapiro’s life. Within accounts of American intellectual history, visual art is often only discussed in passing—a scholarly habit that is even openly acknowledged within classic collections like David Hollinger and Charles Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition and is likely structurally bound up with American culture itself.16 The frequently defended and naturally assumed linguistic basis of thought makes it especially easy for intellectual histories to give greater attention to writers and their words than to artists and their images. That my monograph is the first to be published about Meyer Schapiro despite the fact that he was a prominent member of one of the most studied groups of twentieth-century America—the New York intellectuals—is a case in point. Schapiro himself was obviously a writer, not a professional artist, yet the simple fact that he primarily wrote about artworks gives his writing a minority status among American intellectuals. Admitting that this book alone is surely no anodyne for this much larger and likely irresolvable imbalance, I hope my focus on and analysis of Schapiro’s engagements with a wide range of artworks can function as a productive insertion of images into some of the classic debates of twentieth-century American intellectual life. In my pursuit of this goal, significant portions of this book end up being necessarily historiographic in scope. Reconstructing Schapiro’s engagements with artworks often and unsurprisingly necessitates reconstructing his debates with other art historians. By anchoring these disciplinary excursions

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to broader, period-wide intellectual tensions, I hope that the book’s historiographic dimension is not bogged down in what might appear as arcane art-historical squabbles. Schapiro’s close connections with many prominent intellectuals and modern artists is especially helpful in this regard and makes his work a clear example of how the specific formulation of art’s histories, the larger development of cultural habits of thought, and the production of art itself are all intertwined. Just as the following chapters show how Schapiro’s specific academic arguments and broader intellectual commitments proleptically speak to the art of his time, so too do they reveal how the art of Schapiro’s time could presciently visualize Schapiro’s arguments and allegiances. In its exploration of the recursive relations of these cultural domains, this book can be thought of as a criticism of the notion that art historiography is some separate domain of art and intellectual history, a concern only of those hyperspecialized scholars known as art historiographers rather than simply a part of the much larger, overlapping domains of intellectual and visual culture.17 As visual art and its histories are inevitably both products of the mind, it should be uncontroversial to note that all studies of them will at least partially be intellectual. Under the banner of this truism, this book can be thought of as a reformulated extension of the much older project that Max Dvořák long ago dubbed Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte—often translated as “art history as the history of ideas,” though “art history as the history of intellect” or even “of mind” are plausible alternatives.18 Beyond his intellectual breadth and his position as a midcentury entrepôt of thought, Schapiro’s critical appropriation and adaptation of pragmatist philosophy to art-historical purposes makes his life and work especially rich examples of these cultural relations. Schapiro studied with John Dewey as an undergraduate from 1920 to 1924, and Schapiro’s fittingly antinomian embrace of Dewey’s work can be thought of as the autochthonous setting against which the various debates discussed in this book take place. As Schapiro’s persistent yet rebellious relationship to Dewey’s writing is an essential background for the eight chapters that follow, it should come as no surprise that Schapiro’s engagement with Dewey is a recurring theme. The extent of my focus on Schapiro’s relation to pragmatist ideas is, furthermore, what most evidently distinguishes my overall interpretation of Schapiro from the existing scholarship about him.19 This does not mean, however, that the book is limited to recounting and evaluating Schapiro’s debt to and reaction against Dewey. The current book aims to identify much more than the single thread of what might be called Schapiro’s pragmatism, a label that Schapiro himself

Introduction / 13

would have surely qualified. In fact, one of the most prominent reasons why I undertook this project is because of how evidently irreducible Schapiro’s work is to its pragmatist dimensions and how admirable and compelling I found that irreducibility. To add clarity in this regard, when I agree or disagree with Schapiro’s views on a topic—pragmatist or otherwise—I try to make this clear and let my voice sound as an interpreter of Schapiro. The historical circumstances that led Schapiro to hold certain views were obviously quite different from the circumstance of the present, and any attempt to overcome those differences would be doomed from the start. However, since it is one of the great purposes of historical research to provide perspective on the ideas and beliefs that shaped past generations, throughout this book I try to let my own voice as an author be heard. Thereby I aim to provide some means— however flawed they may be—for judging the distance between the present and the past.

1929 Formalism and Perception From Löwy and Fry to Wertheimer and Gombrich

In 1929, at the mere age of twenty-five, nine years after entering Columbia University as a sixteen-year-old undergraduate, Meyer Schapiro successfully launched his academic career by defending his Ph.D. dissertation, The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac.1 This academic certification from one of the great bastions of American higher education and culture was remarkable, given that Schapiro had arrived in New York as a three-year-old child from modern-day Lithuania, had grown up in the working-class neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn, and had overcome the anti-Semitic quotas for Jewish students at his alma mater. Moreover, Schapiro’s dissertation was far from the standard, forgettable tome that gives the genre its dusty reputation; it was, rather, a watershed contribution to the study of medieval sculpture, and sections of it are still assigned in undergraduate courses to this day. Unlike the dominant modes of medievalist, art-historical scholarship at the time—which was heavily iconographic and deeply preoccupied with questions of dating—Schapiro’s dissertation approached the sculptures of the Moissac abbey primarily as synchronic, artistic creations marked by a certain style. As he put it at the beginning of his dissertation, his modest goal in studying the abbey’s sculpture

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  15

was to articulate the stylistic “character of the whole and the relevance of the parts to it.”2 With this statement, Schapiro reveals what many have taken to be the unapologetic formalism of his earliest scholarship, that is, his focus on developing a sophisticated and compelling description of the visual configurations of specific art objects.3 What he also gestures toward, however, are the larger psychological questions that unavoidably accompany any art-historical discussion of style. Schapiro’s preoccupation with the visual recognition of the whole in his dissertation is also one of the central questions of perceptual psychology and thus speaks directly to the role of broader questions about vision in art-historical interpretation. Though Schapiro insisted that a Marxist bent also informed his dissertation project—a claim that I set aside for the moment and discuss more fully in the chapter named after 1941—it is hard to deny that Schapiro’s focus on stylistic wholes gives his early writing both formalist and psychologizing tendencies. But what kind of formalism did Schapiro practice in his earliest scholarship, and why has his dissertation had such lasting appeal? Had specific psychological theories of visual perception informed his writing at this early stage? And how might we understand Schapiro’s dissertation in relation to his later thinking as well as in relation to the discipline he did so much to shape? In this chapter I take up these questions in two main parts, each of which has two sections. First I examine what I take to be the most perspicuous theoretical inspirations for Schapiro’s dissertation project: the theory of archaic style of Emanuel Löwy and the Gestalt-like formalism of Roger Fry. Schapiro was not uncritical in his appropriation of Löwy’s and Fry’s ideas, and I frame Schapiro’s critical engagement with their work as his first substantive intellectual debate. Understanding Schapiro’s writing through Löwy and Fry does much to clarify the larger stakes of Schapiro’s formalism by connecting it to broad, analytic questions that still persist today. After I interpret how Schapiro took up and reacted to these two sources, I will then examine how his early relationship to Löwy’s and Fry’s writing remained visible later in his career. Here I focus on Schapiro’s confrontations with the Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer and the psychologizing art history of Ernst Gombrich. While Schapiro’s formalism surely did develop and change as he matured as a scholar, the parallels between his early responses to Löwy and Fry, on the one hand, and his later responses to Wertheimer and Gombrich, on the other, show that throughout his life Schapiro remained sensitive to one especially important art-historical question that is also central to questions of visual perception: the relationship between descriptive stylistic facts

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and normative stylistic valuations. Schapiro’s recognition of the intractable relationship between facts and values within formal or stylistic analysis at once testifies to his reading of pragmatist and Marxist literature—which both defend a knotted relationship between facts and values—and foreshadows his later confrontation with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the poststructuralist criticisms of his scholarship discussed in the final two chapters.

Löwy as Source

By Schapiro’s own admission, the initial impetus for his research on the sculpture of Moissac came from his Ph.D. adviser, Ernest DeWald, who assigned Schapiro the topic for his M.A. thesis in the fall of 1924.4 A preserved and complete draft of that essay is originally dated February 1925, though the handwritten revisions to the document as well as Schapiro’s school records make clear that the paper was not submitted until March 1926.5 What is perhaps most interesting about Schapiro’s M.A. thesis is that it is much more traditional than his Ph.D. dissertation. One looks in vain, for instance, for traces of Schapiro’s innovative appropriation and application of Löwy’s and Fry’s ideas in this first treatment of Moissac. Rather, the major interlocutors in Schapiro’s earliest work on Moissac were Arthur Kingsley Porter and Émile Mâle— two of the most distinguished medievalist art historians of their generation. Alongside Porter and Mâle, in his M.A. thesis Schapiro addresses the traditional art-historical questions of the sources of the Moissac sculptures, their dating, and their potential impact on later Romanesque sculpture in the region. These questions were undoubtedly important for Schapiro’s intellectual formation—and Schapiro himself even eulogized the importance of Porter’s writing for his own at the end of his career—but Schapiro’s very identity as a Jewish immigrant also meant that Romanesque art could not have had the same resonances for him as it did for his mandarin teachers. As T. J. Jackson Lears has shown, the revival of interest in the medieval world in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was deeply connected to an apologetic for the exploitative excesses of Gilded Age capitalism.6 Schapiro experienced these excesses in radically different terms as an immigrant in Brownsville compared with his mentors, who were often independently wealthy precisely because they came from industrialist families. Although the more conventional nature of Schapiro’s earliest work conceals this difference, it also dramatizes the shift his thinking would undergo during the next five years.

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A key part of that shift was Schapiro’s reading of Löwy’s The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, a book that was originally published in German in 1900 and one that, as its title suggests, addresses the classic art-historical problem of the rise of naturalistic depiction within ancient Greek sculpture. Schapiro later recounted that he first engaged with Löwy’s theories during an undergraduate course on Greek archaeology taught by DeWald, and it seems likely that the essay he produced for the course strongly informed his first publication, a 1925 review of Löwy’s book.7 In that review the young Schapiro retrospectively assessed The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art and essentially produced a twenty-five-year commemoration of one of the most remarkable works of art-historical scholarship of the preceding decades. Forasmuch as Löwy’s book remains largely unknown outside of specialist circles today, its theories have proven to be especially influential in the history of art history. Not only did Löwy first articulate the analytic proposition from which Gombrich developed the central theory of artistic naturalism in Art and Illusion, but Schapiro also openly admitted Löwy’s impact on his own thinking and even visited Löwy in person in Vienna in 1931.8 Taken together, such facts make Löwy the teacher of two of the twentieth century’s most celebrated art historians and add significant interest to Schapiro’s later disagreement with Gombrich over definitions of the concept of style—a disagreement with which this chapter will end. Löwy’s book is anchored around a theoretical account of archaic or primitive styles of visual art, and the book can be summarized as explaining the particularities of such styles by positioning them as correlates of fundamental tendencies within human visual perception. Under Löwy’s theory, the rigid, stiff, and schematic qualities typical of archaic or so-called primitive art are best explained as the product of the cognitive tendency to reduce or abstract complete visual experiences of specific objects down to their most recognizable forms. The result of this process of visual abstraction is what Löwy called “memory images,” which he posits were responsible for the similarities between archaic styles of art making the world over. Such a process might be understood as the perceptual equivalent of the logical proposition known as Occam’s Razor: namely, that the simplest argument—or in this case the simplest visual form—has the most staying power. Löwy identified seven specific visual qualities within so-called archaic art that he associated with this tendency. Schapiro, for his part, especially embraced three of these in his investigation of the art of Moissac: the parallelism of relief planes in the rendering of depth, the prominence of shallow contour line over deep modeling, and the reduction of three-dimensional visual forms to their broadest

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Fig. 1 Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, relief of Abbot Durand, end of the twelfth century. © 2018. Photo: SCALA, Florence.

two-dimensional visual aspect. In Löwy’s view, this later tendency is why the feet and faces of archaic art—ancient Egyptian relief being an oft-noted example—are most characteristically shown in profile, whereas hands and torsos are not. With their broadest aspect facing the picture plane, these universally recognizable human features maximally display the qualities that make them most readily identifiable. Schapiro prominently cites Löwy in the introduction to his dissertation and quite clearly relies on Löwy’s theory of archaic style throughout. For instance, in analyzing the pier reliefs of the Moissac cloister—exemplified by the relief of Abbot Durand (fig. 1)—Schapiro repeatedly relies on the three abovementioned visual qualities from Löwy’s theory. Schapiro notes that the reliefs are carved on thin slabs of marble—a fact that is correlated with the archaic preference for shallow line and outline over modeling in depth. He points to the strongly geometric drapery in the reliefs as evidence for the dominance of parallel planes to organize virtual spaces. And he highlights the rather awkward position of certain gestures—like Abbot Durand’s

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  19

splayed left wrist—to show that the figures in the reliefs only perform actions wherein their broadest surfaces remain visible.9 In making sense of the power of Löwy’s theory in his review, Schapiro also expresses criticism, observing that Löwy leveraged his typology of archaic style to make sense of the rise of naturalistic sculpture. Schapiro notes: “However accurate Löwy’s account may be in tracing the succession of the forms of Greek art, it leads him into errors of artistic judgment and interpretation. He overlooks entirely, in his zeal for a scrupulous record, that the change from arbitrary conceptions, from observed facts, generalized and treated abstractly, to literal representation and merely imitative forms, corresponds to a loss of artistic power.”10 The emphasis here on Löwy’s “errors in artistic judgment” illustrates Schapiro’s dismay at the preferences for naturalism evident within Löwy’s writing. In his book, Löwy’s interest in archaic style is clearly anchored to the naturalism that followed it, a fact attested by the placement of archaic Greek sculpture of the sixth century B.C.E. at the beginning of a diachronic development that ends with the naturalistic sculpture of Lysippus some two centuries later. Though this sequence is historical fact, Schapiro notes that it also implicitly overlooks, if not openly disregards, what he termed “aesthetic considerations.” Schapiro continues: “Löwy’s method leads to a reductio ad absurdum, to a higher valuation of . . . the last term in a technical series. Since Greek art develops from memory concepts toward a closer imitation of nature, ergo, such imitation is the specific excellence of art. . . . It is the ‘biological fallacy’ (as Geoffrey Scott calls it) of confusing development with progress.”11 Schapiro’s criticism here is quite pointed; nevertheless, he continues to hold Löwy’s theory in high regard throughout his career. Part of what was clearly behind the appeal of Löwy’s theory for Schapiro was its aspiration toward a comprehensive description of a specific style, a goal that, as noted at the outset, also motivated the blatantly formalist focus on the stylistic whole of the sculpture of Moissac in Schapiro’s dissertation. As a general art-historical focus, style itself would continue to attract Schapiro’s attention throughout his career, likely finding its most familiar expression in his widely read essay “Style” of 1953, which surveys and evaluates the various art-historical approaches to style then extant. A lesser known but equally indicative parallel between Schapiro’s and Löwy’s thinking—and one that testifies to Schapiro’s lasting reverence for Löwy—is found in Schapiro’s subsequent lectures on abstract painting, perceptible already in his 1948 lecture “The Value of Modern Art” and still evident as late as his 1967 course lectures on modern art at Columbia.12 In both of these

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examples, Schapiro echoed Löwy in putting forward what is best described as a general typology of stylistic qualities within a given art form in order to help make sense of a well-known historical development within that art form. Of course, whereas Löwy was concerned with the transformation of archaic to naturalistic sculpture in ancient Greece, Schapiro is concerned with the transformation of impressionistic to so-called nonobjective painting in the modern West. In so doing, Schapiro lists five qualities of late nineteenth-century painting: the visibility of the brushstroke, the self-evidence of the canvas, a certain perceived randomness or freedom in composition, a feeling for the process of creation, and a focus on the most fundamental or elementary units of representation. This list of qualities appears obvious—especially following the fraught legacy of the art criticism of Clement Greenberg, whose “dogmatic formalism” Schapiro criticized—and could certainly be developed independently of Löwy.13 However, precisely because we know that Löwy’s writing was an important source for Schapiro’s intellectual development, it is interesting to note that Schapiro’s schematic description of modern painting inversely parallels Löwy’s original project. Whereas Löwy articulated a descriptive list of general stylistic qualities that help make sense of the rise of naturalism, here Schapiro does the same for the rise of abstraction. While hindsight allows us to see that Schapiro’s stylistic typology is prey to some of the same criticisms as Löwy’s was, Schapiro’s very commitment to such a project within the context of discussions of abstract painting also reveals that his admiration of Löwy’s thought was by no means contained to his writing on Romanesque sculpture. Indeed, Schapiro seems to be adapting Löwy’s project to explain the most recognized developments within twentieth-century painting. To more fully understand Schapiro’s allegiance to and interest in Löwy’s approach, however, and to better understand how it reciprocally shaped his dissertation project, it is helpful to bring Schapiro’s debt to Löwy into contact with his equally large debt to a much more celebrated figure in the rise of modernism: Roger Fry.

Fry and Schapiro’s Holism

Schapiro acknowledged the impact of Fry’s writing on his own thinking throughout his career. In the same 1983 interview in which he recounted his personal visit to Löwy, for instance, Schapiro plainly stated that he “felt a rapport with [Fry’s] insistence on form and his sensitivity to the forms of

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  21

primitive, archaic and exotic works.”14 The trials and tribulations of such a high modernist project are infamous; I address how Schapiro confronted and rationalized his commitment to many of these ideas in more depth in the chapter named after 1947. The prominence today of understanding modernist interpretations like these merely through their faults, however, risks overlooking their nuances. And subtleties of modernist interpretation are precisely the stakes of comparing Schapiro’s and Fry’s writing. It is easy to forget that Fry himself had even written about the very Romanesque sculptures examined in Schapiro’s Ph.D. dissertation. Fry’s 1926 collection of essays titled Transformations contains “Speculations on Languedoc,” a fervid account of the “spiritual terror” found in the Romanesque sculptures of Moissac that struggles to make sense of the extensive medieval sculptural production of the region. One might even wonder if the combination of Fry’s ostensible bafflement over the sculptures of Moissac and Schapiro’s work on Moissac for his M.A. thesis helped solidify his dissertation topic. In this regard it is interesting to note that Schapiro cites Fry’s Transformations in the short bibliography to his 1928 essay “Art in the Contemporary World,” a contribution to a textbook entitled An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, which he wrote simultaneously with his dissertation. While the topic of this 1928 essay is historically far afield from Schapiro’s work on Moissac, a closer look at Schapiro’s “Art in the Contemporary World” helps clarify the extent and substance of Schapiro’s debt to Fry, not to mention how Fry’s work can well be understood to have complemented Löwy’s in Schapiro’s mind. In this preparatory overview, Schapiro surveys the state of painting, sculpture, and architecture in the United States and Western Europe in the 1920s and does so by positioning these traditional forms of high art within long diachronic trajectories that reach back to the origins of Western civilization. Such a perspective reflects the ancient focus and generalizing ambition of Löwy’s project, as does Schapiro’s description of ancient Mesopotamian sculpture as rendering “man in fixed images that were meticulous aggregates of ideas of his separate limbs in a few attitudes” (276). Aside from such passing vestiges of Löwy’s theory of archaic art, however, the unifying standpoint of “Art in the Contemporary World” was likely provided by Fry. This influence is most readily apparent in Schapiro’s frequent use of the term “design,” which appears on almost every one of the essay’s forty-six pages and is climactically explained by Schapiro as a “universal solvent” for making sense of previously incomprehensible works of art (298). Much in keeping with such grandiose claims, Schapiro even uses the memorable turn of phrase “significant form,”

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popularized by Fry’s friend Clive Bell, to describe the common quality found across the world’s diverse artistic production (296). While such wording may have been widespread in the art criticism of the period, Schapiro’s acknowledgment of his debt to Fry and his citation of Fry’s works in this essay makes the connection difficult to ignore.15 “Art in the Contemporary World,” however, is likely the only essay in which Fry’s impact on Schapiro’s thinking rises to the surface. In Schapiro’s other scholarship—both around the writing of his dissertation and even late into his career—the appearance of Fry’s catechistic use of the terms “design” and “form” to describe works of art is much more subdued. Though Schapiro maintained his high modernist loyalty throughout his life and did sporadically use other Fry-like terms such as “sensibility” and “salient features” within his lectures, their appearance is more suggestive than definitive of Schapiro’s debt to Fry, and harping on it brings with it the risk of overstating the intellectual relation between the two men.16 For instance, Schapiro himself even later declared that he felt Fry ignored the content of works of art too forcefully, a fair assessment that was made by many of Fry’s critics; the same critique, however, can also be taken to reveal as much about Schapiro’s partial reading of Fry as about Schapiro’s differences from him.17 Moreover, the frequent connection that Fry made between “good design” and the emotional responses to works of art is simply not found in Schapiro’s writing.18 What Schapiro does seem to have shared with Fry is his interest in how the various visual qualities of works of art cohere together in order to create perceptible wholes. As Adrianne Rubin has noted, this focus of Fry’s writing gives it a Gestalt-like quality, and the same could also be said of Schapiro’s. Just as Fry and Schapiro often focus on how the relations between various visual qualities in works of art bind together as parts of larger perceptible wholes, so too did the Gestalt psychologists develop a similar interest in the perception and recognition of wholes in experience writ large. Since an attention to the perceptual wholes that works of art can elicit, however, has a long history in art writing that reaches back past seventeenth-century critics like Roger de Piles to Aristotle himself, neither Schapiro nor Fry would have needed to engage with actual Gestalt theory to develop a similar focus.19 In fact, even though Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler are usually credited with establishing Gestalt psychology as a school of thought in the 1920s—that is, simultaneously with the development of Fry’s and Schapiro’s thinking—it is likely that neither Fry nor Schapiro confronted the contemporary theories of the Gestalt psychologists when composing his

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earliest writing. Nevertheless, the parallel between Schapiro’s writing and the Gestaltists’ is helpful for understanding the analytic focus of Schapiro’s formalism and important to note because Schapiro did later engage quite directly and extensively with Gestalt research.20 For instance, in speaking of the relief of Abbot Durand in Moissac (fig. 1), Schapiro notes “the expressive immobility of the whole” and “the ritual gravity inherent in the static architectural design of the whole,” and he describes elements of Durand’s chasuble as “typical of the whole in their restless angularity” (emphasis added).21 Schapiro then even sums up his extensive description of both the sculpture of Durand and the series of pier reliefs of which that sculpture is a part as an attempt “to illustrate by this analysis of details a character of the whole,” a claim that patently mirrors the broader focus of his dissertation on the stylistic whole of Moissac’s sculptural program.22 Additionally, lest we believe that Schapiro’s Gestalt-like thinking was contained to his dissertation, an unpublished typescript from this time simply titled “Aesthetics of Perception” lays bare the fact that his interest in artistic wholes extended well beyond his work on Romanesque sculpture. In these undeveloped speculations, Schapiro describes the differences between sensing, sensation, and perception in general and ends by claiming that “the perception of a whole is timeless,” a platitude that he would soon reject.23 While Schapiro likely developed his interest in these Gestalt-like qualities at least partially from Fry’s writing, the long history of such an approach also assures that this shared dimension to Schapiro’s and Fry’s work can also be explained by parallels between their modes of thinking, broadly conceived. For instance, unlike Greenberg, neither Fry nor Schapiro ever separated his understanding of form in artistic production from the perceptual forming activities of visual perception. Just as Fry dialectically played “vision” off “design” in his writing, so too did Schapiro note that “the laws of everyday seeing” were central to his approach to art history, and he once described “the work of artists as an important ingredient in the advance of the science of perception.”24 Schapiro’s insistence here on understanding visual art as a specific subdivision within the study of perception likely also has other proximate causes: for instance, John Dewey. Dewey’s most prominent book on aesthetics—Art as Experience—was not published until 1934; however, he had already begun to discuss works of art in his books of the 1920s, especially in his Experience and Nature of 1926. In this volume Dewey heralds the naturalistic and holistic approach to art that he would later champion by describing aesthetic experience as a kind of consummatory, holistic fulfillment of the individual within a society.25 In such a claim

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one can see how an interest in artistic wholes can also be related to commonly debated period distinctions—for instance, the distinction between a unified Gemeinschaft (community) and an atomized Gesellschaft (society), found in writers as diverse as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Ferdinand Tönnies.26 Parallels like these support the conclusion that Schapiro’s specific interest in holism is unsurprisingly overdetermined. While Schapiro’s discussion of the stylistic wholes of the sculptures of Moissac is not marked by the organic, embodied, and naturalistic holism of Dewey’s early aesthetic theories, what it does share with them—as well as with the various holistic theories of art that preceded them—is its valuation of art objects based on the wholes we can experience through them. Schapiro attends to the various stylistic wholes of the sculptures of Moissac not merely as matters of perceptual fact about those sculptures as objective, physical objects in the world but also as evaluative grounds for understanding the artistic merits of those objects as works of art. By adopting such an approach, however, the basis of Schapiro’s evaluation of the sculptures of Moissac is muted, if not strained. Schapiro never fully clarifies exactly why the perceptual wholes that he painstakingly describes in the Moissac sculptures are inherently positive and lasting sources of value. Rather, much like Fry, Schapiro circularly veils his valuation of the sculptures of Moissac in the very terms he uses to describe the holistic quality of their style; for Schapiro, the sculptures are good because they are perceivably whole. But why, we should rhetorically ask, is a perceptibly whole sculpture necessarily good? Though Schapiro’s avoidance of this question is likely more typical than anomalous within the long history of holistic approaches in art writing, this lacuna also foreshadows an important difference between Schapiro’s Gestalt-like interest in the perceptual wholes of works of art and the reactions by some of the actual Gestalt psychologists to some of the very works of art that Schapiro valued so highly.

Schapiro and Wertheimer

Schapiro’s retrospective dating of his notes on Gestalt psychology suggests that he first began to seriously engage with the writings of the Gestaltists sometime in the 1930s.27 And Schapiro’s later lectures show that he read Gestalt research quite widely throughout his career, citing texts not only by major founding figures like Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler but also by their students and interlocutors, such as Rudolf Arnheim, Robert Ogden, Johannes von Allesch,

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  25

Hans Wallach, and Kurt Lewin, to name but a few.28 Likewise, because Schapiro was well connected to many of the German intellectual émigrés who arrived in New York in the 1930s, it comes as no surprise that he came to know Wertheimer personally. In the late 1930s, in fact, Wertheimer even asked Schapiro about potentially coteaching a night class at the New School of Social Research. The course was to be organized around Wertheimer’s and Schapiro’s respective analyses of a series of works of art from their divergent disciplinary viewpoints and was meant to dramatize the parallels and differences between their approaches. Although the course never occurred, the initial interaction between the two scholars clearly left a strong impression in Schapiro’s memory, inspiring him to write a paper on Wertheimer’s principle of “good continuation” and to repeatedly include Wertheimer when introducing Gestalt principles in course lectures.29 According to Schapiro’s later recollections, when he showed Wertheimer his essay on what he termed the “discoordinate style” of the Romanesque sculptures of Souillac, Wertheimer struggled to see those sculptures as stylistic wholes or even value them as works of art. In fact, Schapiro reports that Wertheimer initially reacted by describing the Souillac sculptures as pathological, perverse, and disturbing.30 Even a brief look at a detail of the trumeau of Souillac (see fig. 21) may explain Wertheimer’s reaction. The sculpture depicts a column of writhing beasts gnawing on one another’s limbs, clambering over themselves in an almost hellish nightmare. Moreover, the column itself is set to the side of a portal rather than centered between its doors as trumeaux often are, and it stands diagonally below a sculptural relief that itself is asymmetrical—contextual details that emphasize the trumeau’s disjointed appearance. Schapiro, for his part, was sure to note when recounting the episode that Wertheimer later accepted the style of the trumeau as orderly when placed within its stylistic tradition, but Wertheimer’s initial reaction nevertheless resonates with some of the basic principles of Gestalt thinking. Indeed, the Gestaltists often approached visual art as a heuristic, functional device for organizing the flux of visual perception into more manageable and comprehensible wholes, a position that can obviously lead to difficulties when confronted with the entangled, irregular sculptures of Souillac; this take, moreover, continued to cause problems for later Gestalt writers.31 Beyond its interest for intellectual history, what is especially poignant about this anecdote is that the Gestaltists pursued their interest in perceptual wholes at least partially because, like Schapiro, they too felt uneasy with the increasing expulsion of all value judgments from the domain of

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scientific inquiry. As Fritz Ringer has shown and as Schapiro himself noted in his course lectures, the rise of Gestalt psychology is a chapter in what is often broadly described as the early twentieth century’s revolt against positivism.32 Wertheimer’s own principle of “good continuation” is a prime example of this connection; the very inclusion of the word “good” in the principle’s title was intentionally meant to indicate that seemingly dry facts actually have an inherently evaluative dimension.33 For the Gestaltists, the implicit goal of such a project was to investigate the natural foundations of valuations, to show that, just like facts, values have a basis in the natural world and are not merely the product of individual tastes or whims. As the above encounter testifies, however, in pursuing this project, Wertheimer and his followers also ended up exposing themselves to the danger of reading values into experiences that were in fact describable without those values. They also appeared to only recognize perceptible wholes that corresponded to their theories of the value and function of perceptual holism in general. Schapiro’s essay on Wertheimer’s principle of “good continuation” makes the first of these points by arguing that the principle is in fact reducible to the more basic principles of “contiguity” and “similarity.” As Schapiro and Wertheimer knew, both of these latter ideas had in fact been used by earlier associationist philosophers and psychologists in their descriptive accounts of visual perception. And associationist thinkers had not needed to claim that there were any natural values inherent within “contiguous” or “similar” forms.34 Forasmuch as Schapiro’s criticisms of Wertheimer’s principle of good continuation are fair, as we have seen, the relation between Schapiro’s own positive judgments of fact and value concerning works of art were far from unassailable. To his credit, Schapiro seems to have been quite aware of this shortcoming within his own writing as he repeatedly sought out and engaged with philosophical discussions of artistic value throughout his career. Schapiro’s course lectures attest to his own interest in Gestalt psychology being at least partially grounded in the Gestaltists’ attempts to overcome similar shortcomings in their own field. The approach to the question of the relation between facts and values in visual art that Schapiro seems to have found most promising, however, came from John Dewey. Not only did Schapiro, already in 1940, laud Dewey’s Theory of Valuation, but as late as the 1970s, he extolled Dewey’s aesthetics for a similar sensitivity.35 In 1975, after summarizing many of the strengths and weaknesses of Gestalt psychology in his course on the theories and methods of art history, Schapiro noted:

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  27

One of the attractive features of the book by John Dewey, “Art as Experience” in the early chapters, is that he tends to describe form and order in art as not restricted to particular types of form or kinds of form, or types of order. Any kind of combination, any kind of element, can be built into a whole. What counts is the drive towards giving the aspect of completeness and inner necessity to no matter what forms you use. . . . He recognized as a philosopher, since he was committed to notions of growth, the concept of growth as the test, the measure, of a good society which permits people to grow to their maximum, to achieve the fullness of their capacity, their potentiality. That led him to see that the variety of art is infinite, that the possibilities are unknown, but that no matter what elements you use, you will try to work towards a cohesion which possesses an interest that arises from the fullness of human nature.36 It was thus the expansive openness and adaptability of Dewey’s aesthetic theory and how that openness gestured toward the social implications of art that made it appealing to Schapiro. In its conception of the artistic whole, Dewey’s theory of aesthetics reaches well beyond the stereotypical questions of the schematic and holistic shapes or forms that are—however incorrectly—still associated with Gestalt thinking about visual art. Rather, the wholes that Dewey speaks of were more temporally extended and were based on transactions between humans and their environment, an environment that included society itself.37 One of the classic examples that Dewey uses in Art as Experience to exemplify his theory is the difference between an automatic, physical impulse—closing one’s eyes when suddenly confronted with a bright light, for instance—and the pursuit and fulfillment of holistic desire, what Dewey calls an impulsion—satiating the desire for friendship after a long period of isolated work, for example. Though we will see in the chapter named after 1941 that Schapiro was far from uncritical of Dewey’s theory, both Dewey’s and Schapiro’s advocacy of and interest in such a position was fitting yet not without its ironies. On the one hand, granting that Schapiro was much more politically radical than Dewey, the two scholars were both on the left of the political spectrum, making their commitment to a progressive and malleable account of aesthetic experience only appropriate. On the other hand, just as Dewey’s interest in modern art largely stopped with Matisse, Schapiro’s largely stopped with abstract expressionism. Despite their advocacy of a profoundly open theory of art, neither Schapiro nor Dewey was able to leave his understanding of artistic or aesthetic

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value uncommitted enough to identify the value of the art produced in their later lives. Schapiro’s inability here at once echoes his adherence to the value of art being grounded in the simplified, abstracted forms that became pervasive within the art of the early twentieth century and the similarities between his formalism and that of the Gestaltists. Schapiro himself even produced schematized drawings of works of art that very much resemble Erle Loran’s well-known Gestalt diagrams of Cézanne’s paintings (see fig. 24). Schapiro’s abovementioned criticisms of Gestalt interpretations, however, also show that he was wary of completely reducing works of art to their perceptual correlates, to framing artworks as if they were pure stimuli within psychological experiments. Dewey’s pragmatic holism and Schapiro’s own socialist sympathies were likely key supports for this conviction. At the same time, Schapiro’s criticisms of Gombrich’s heavily perceptual approach to the question of artistic naturalism suggest that Schapiro’s holistic formalism was also partially grounded in the material dimension of art objects. His commitment to this quality can be traced back to his training in an archaeological tradition of scholarship as well as supported by the evident materiality of artistic practice that the rise of modernist abstraction made so unavoidable.

Schapiro and Gombrich

The professional relationship between Schapiro and Gombrich developed after the latter’s immigration to London in 1939 to assume a fellowship at the Warburg Institute. Schapiro had been in contact with members of that research library since the early 1930s, had welcomed and offered a hand to various members of the school during the Second World War, and had even published an essay in the institute’s journal in 1941. No doubt as part of this expanding professional network, in 1947 Schapiro sent Gombrich a letter in response to Gombrich’s recent article “Botticelli’s Mythologies”; the substance of Gombrich’s reply is quite revealing of the distance that would continue to mark the two scholars’ approaches. By itself, Gombrich’s article is a lengthy analysis of the much-discussed question of the Neoplatonic background to Botticelli’s paintings—a topic that enjoyed a special currency among members of the Warburg school in particular.38 The article adopts a rigorously documentary and quite dry approach to its topic and in so doing, as Schapiro noted to Gombrich, has the potential fault of losing sight of the aesthetic expressiveness

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  29

of Botticelli’s paintings. In his reply to this criticism, dated September 3, 1947, Gombrich agreed with Schapiro’s point but explained his choice as follows: I have a clear feeling (or believe I have) of the distinctive “tone” or “taste” or “twang” that makes up the Botticelliness of a Botticelli for me—but I feel almost as helpless in trying to translate it as I would be if I had to describe the taste of a peach. In other words I feel that there are two distinct problems: the respective role of inferential interpretation and of intuitive response in our understanding of expression is one thing, the task of translating our “understanding” into an inter-subjective rational language is another. I think in the last analysis this uniqueness of personality will always make it inaccessible to the universal concepts of scientific description.39 Gombrich’s insistence here that the “Botticelliness of a Botticelli” will always remain outside of objectifying, scientific description betrays his commitment to a rigorously demystified form of art history that was committed to rational, universalizing language. Two years later, in a letter dated July 20, 1949, Gombrich made a related point to Schapiro when he implied that he hoped to bracket questions of aesthetics from his scholarship by making images, rather than works of art, the focus of his research.40 Of course, as aesthetic judgments have long been recognized as resistant to scientific analysis precisely because of their purported basis in subjectivity, part of what also implicitly accompanies such a position is the ideal of a community of scientific inquiry that can assess its members’ arguments and either definitively confirm or refute them. Though Schapiro was certainly no foe to science, unlike Gombrich, his formalist beliefs entailed addressing a community of inquiry that was more akin to the one described by Kantian aesthetics. The very task of translating our personal experiences of works of art into “inter-subjective” language can well be understood as the paradox at the heart of Kant’s famous definition of aesthetic judgment—that our judgments of taste are at once subjective and universal—as well as the necessary, yet still hypothetical, precursor to achieving Gombrich’s goal of making art-historical observations truly testable. And whereas Schapiro’s probing search for stylistic wholes betrays affinities with the former, Gombrich pledged his allegiance to the latter in no uncertain terms.41 As is well known, Gombrich’s adaptation of this goal—particularly Karl Popper’s articulation of it as a process of “conjecture and refutation”—to the development of naturalism within the

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history of art itself propelled his writing to both fame and infamy.42 What is much less discussed is that Popper was not the only source for Gombrich’s faith in this idea. As mentioned at the outset, Löwy’s theory of archaic art was also a clear source of Gombrich’s theory of naturalism. Both Löwy and Gombrich explained the rise of naturalism within ancient Greek art by way of a transactional model between artists’ mental imagery and their actual experiences of art making— and this parallel is almost certainly why Gombrich partially dedicated Art and Illusion to Löwy.43 Löwy had made a closely related argument by claiming that the natural concatenation over time of single “memory images” of the various views of a given three-dimensional object led to the progression from monofacial, archaic sculptures based on single memory images to multifacial, naturalistic sculptures based on numerous memory images. Similarly, in Art and Illusion Gombrich claimed that the Greek Revolution was the product of the comparison of mental images—what he termed “schemas”—with the diversity of actual visual experience, a process that Gombrich summed up with his now-famous phrase “making and matching.” As one might anticipate, Schapiro pointed out in his course lectures in the early 1960s that Gombrich’s reworking of Löwy’s argument risks making the same implicit valuation of naturalistic art that Löwy had.44 However, whereas Schapiro’s initial criticism of Löwy ended on this point, now in the 1960s, Schapiro further elaborated upon this criticism by focusing on how Gombrich’s theory relied on an ill-defined notion of schema. Specifically, Schapiro noted that Gombrich used the word “schema” to discuss both the style of art objects themselves and the perceptual confrontations with those objects. The result is that the style of physical art objects becomes difficult for Gombrich to distinguish from the perception of those objects and makes his theory of style prone to overlook elements within works of art that do not have evident correlates in perceptual “schemata.”45 If it is hard to completely deny this critique, it is also important to note that Schapiro’s point is based on a common art-historical assumption about Art and Illusion that need not be made: namely, that the book is about works of art tout court rather than specifically about the dynamics between naturalistic works of art and visual perception. As Gombrich himself later stated, the perceptualist approach to naturalistic art in Art and Illusion should be understood more through the book’s subtitle—“A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation”— than through its main title.46 It is this focus on pictorial representation that motivates and warrants Gombrich’s treatments of various historical forms of

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  31

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Chartres Cathedral, west façade, drawn by

Chartres Cathedral, west façade, twelfth to

the architect Robert Garland, 1836. Engraved

early thirteenth century. © 2018. Photo:

by Benjamin Winkles for his book French

SCALA, Florence.

Cathedrals (London: Charles Tilt, 1837), 72. Photo: Britton Images.

art making—from ancient Greek sculpture to lithography—as the products of perceptual transactions between artist and environment. Turning to the example of Chartres Cathedral—or more accurately to pictures of Chartres—adds clarity to Schapiro’s criticisms of Gombrich as both scholars independently analyzed the building alongside some of its pictorial representations. In Art and Illusion Gombrich points to the example of an 1836 engraving of Chartres based on a drawing by the English architect Robert Garland. Gombrich notes that although the image was made in an exacting style and is very precise in its details and verisimilitude, Garland replaced the rounded Romanesque arches of the windows of Chartres’s west façade with their pointed Gothic equivalents (figs. 2 and 3). From this fact Gombrich takes Garland’s engraving as evidence for his thesis that artists project their “mental stereotype[s]”—i.e., schemas—into the works that they produce, a thesis that is especially understandable in this case because of Chartres’s reputation as an important origin and expression of Gothic style.

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In a tacit engagement with Gombrich in his 1968 Harvard lectures on Romanesque architectural sculpture, Schapiro notes that when modern artists like Chaim Soutine painted the west façade of Chartres, they too failed to accurately depict specific details of that façade, though not necessarily because of Soutine’s gestural and highly abstract style. For instance, unlike Garland and despite his style, Soutine correctly depicted the rounded, Romanesque arches of the cathedral’s western portal and central windows (figs. 4 and 5). Like Garland, however, though potentially because of his gestural style, Soutine did not clearly depict the quite anomalous and blatantly uncanonical columns that rise from the crowns of the lower arches of the bay of windows on the façade’s second story. On this single story of the cathedral’s façade, arches are supporting columns, thus contradicting a fundamental stylistic tenet of classical architecture that is entangled with the stylistic inconsistency of Chartres as a whole. Schapiro’s focus on the verisimilitude of subsequent pictorial representations of Chartres’s architectural details parallels Gombrich’s claims, yet Schapiro’s example qualifies Gombrich’s while simultaneously changing its focus. Indeed, Schapiro’s very selection of an artist with a loose, gestural style like Soutine’s shows that his comparison is only partially based on the perceptual confrontations with Chartres itself that lay behind Soutine’s paintings. Rather, Schapiro’s comparison emphasizes the fact that, just like the modern paintings of the cathedral, Chartres as a work of art is uncanonical or anomalous in its style and therefore something of a distortion. Building on this idea and mirroring both his criticisms of Gombrich’s theory of style and the Gestalt-like focus of his dissertation, Schapiro notes that the unusual configuration of columns and arches on Chartres’s southwest tower is in fact a complex, physical whole in spite of being difficult to perceive—and thus, to depict. The seemingly anomalous columns on the façade’s second story create inverted relations with the columns and windows above them; how the arches on the second story support the central columns immediately above them mirrors how the central column of the third story supports the central window on the fourth. Cumulatively, then, this upward progression of forms helps create a tapering effect that finds its natural solution in the tower’s spire—an effect that Schapiro climactically describes as “a progressive triangularizing and narrowing, thinning, moving upward toward an apical solution.”47 Recalling his descriptions of the sculptures of Moissac and Souillac, here Schapiro starts with a seemingly anomalous art object and identifies the stylistic whole within it by closely attending to its formal configuration.

1929: Formalism and Perception  /  33

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Chartres Cathedral, south tower. Photo

Chaim Soutine, Chartres Cathedral, 1933.

courtesy of the Media Center for Art History,

Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images /

Department of Art History and Archaeology,

Bridgeman Images.

Columbia University, Ware Library Photo Collection.

Perhaps more than anything else, Schapiro’s very ability to identify and articulate these unexpected stylistic wholes was heavily based on the highly empirical quality of his practice as an art historian: on his commitment to careful and prolonged moments of looking at artworks. Unlike Gombrich’s empirical devotion, however, Schapiro’s did not aim for purely value-neutral statements. Rather, as we have seen in the Gestalt-like quality of Schapiro’s scholarship, in his very description of the stylistic wholes of the sculpture and architecture of Moissac, Souillac, and Chartres, Schapiro also explicitly put forward positive valuations of the art objects he described. In this regard, Schapiro’s approach to style is especially different from Gombrich’s, a fact that is further evident in Schapiro’s now-canonical essay on style from 1953. Therein

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Schapiro notes the coincidence of stylistic facts and stylistic valuations in various historical writers and emphasizes that this coincidence, though prone to confusion, “should be considered seriously.”48 In contrast, when Gombrich wrote on style in general, he not only reinforced the distinction between stylistic facts and values but argued that the conflation of the two is best avoided.49 It was only “to [his] mortification” that Gombrich discovered many of his own stylistic accounts of art objects in Story of Art were marked by similar pitfalls.50 Given such a confession, we might even speculate that it was not Gombrich’s naturalistic bias that led to the widespread criticisms of Art and Illusion but rather his attempts to avoid aesthetic valuations in the first place. In so doing, Gombrich optimistically closed his eyes to the very values that he elsewhere acknowledged as being unavoidable. Albeit indirectly, this difference between Schapiro and Gombrich hints at two of the most pervasive and debated qualities of Schapiro’s scholarship, qualities that will play parts throughout this book: his pragmatic belief in the scientific method and his Marxism. On the one hand, it is clear from Schapiro’s approach to the objects discussed in this chapter that he was an especially careful scholar whose intellectual debt to an archaeological tradition encouraged him to stay close to his physical object of inquiry. On the other hand, his reluctance to separate his stylistic descriptions of art objects from his valuations of them testifies to Schapiro’s evolving yet persistent socialist allegiances; much of the Marxist tradition is, after all, grounded in an understanding of the intertwined nature of factual knowledge with human interests. The uneasy balance between facts and values that is palpable in Schapiro’s formalist descriptions, however, is also present elsewhere in his scholarship. If Schapiro’s basic art-historical commitment to describe the style of works of art led him to confront this issue by way of the concatenation of ideas that shaped his formalism, his equally important commitment to interpreting works of art as evidence for historical explanations led him to do so through some of the major dilemmas of historical epistemology. Schapiro’s sensitivity to the intellectual complexities of evaluative judgments in his writing, in other words, was matched by his sensitivity to the intellectual complexities of the theoretical foundations of historical facts as such. A fuller discussion of Schapiro’s extensive engagement with such questions, needless to say, exceeds the scope of this chapter. However, it makes a fitting topic for the next.

1936 Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft Foreshadowing the Two Cultures Debate

In the June 1936 issue of the Art Bulletin, Meyer Schapiro reviewed the second issue of a new art-historical journal, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen. Edited by up-and-coming Austrian art historians Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) and Otto Pächt (1902–1988), the periodical appeared at the time to be just another scholarly publication, and Schapiro’s review was one of the few American expressions of interest in its theoretically attuned writing. More recently, however, the work of Sedlmayr and Pächt has attracted increased attention, and the school of thought that they helped codify is now celebrated as a New or Second Vienna School of Art History, making Schapiro’s review prescient indeed.1 Yet for all of the work that Schapiro did to highlight if not unify the writings of these scholars for Anglophone readers, his assessment of their research was not without serious reservation. Just as Schapiro praised Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen as “perhaps the most advanced organ of art historical research in Europe,” he also criticized the essays it contained for their “wishful intuitiveness and vague, intangible profundity,” even going so far as to call out their “lack of historical seriousness.”2 In this chapter I attempt to make some sense of Schapiro’s Janus-like assessment of New Viennese scholarship, in

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regard to its immediate historical circumstances and with an eye on its continuing resonance both within Schapiro’s thought and beyond it. In addressing these topics, this chapter is broken up into two main parts. I begin the first by contextualizing Schapiro’s review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen in relation to his historical relationships with New Vienna School writers. Central to this context, I argue, is Schapiro’s “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art,” an essay that Sedlmayr was instrumental in bringing to publication in 1932 and that itself was a review of a book by the art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Recognizing that Baltrušaitis’s book emerged from an intellectual context distinct from both Sedlmayr’s and Schapiro’s work, the specific claims and original context of Schapiro’s review proves particularly helpful for triangulating Schapiro’s and Sedlmayr’s methodological commitments within a broader historical context. That context was saturated with debates about the very nature of historical knowledge. Spurred on by an acutely perceived tension between humanistic and natural scientific research, these debates became widespread enough to have been dubbed a crisis of historicism by period critics.3 Against this background, I analyze Schapiro’s review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen and ask how the mode of analysis that that journal championed—Strukturforschung—can be understood to relate to the same sweeping epistemological questions about historical knowledge that pervaded the period. Whereas French-trained art historians like Baltrušaitis engaged with these questions by courting vitalistic theories of form—and Sedlmayr did so by transforming ideas from the Gestalt psychologists and Wilhelm Dilthey to suit art-historical needs—in his review Schapiro was largely doubtful of the purchase and import of the purported crisis that rendered these questions tractable in the first place. Schapiro’s later scholarship, however, shows that he was anything but blind to these fundamental epistemological issues. Later in his career, questions similar to those raised by the crisis of historicism swept through the Anglo-American academy as the so-called Two Cultures debate—a debate that remains intensely felt today. Schapiro’s later response fittingly echoes his much earlier engagement with the New Vienna School.4 In attempts to better understand how these two moments in Schapiro’s career relate to each other, in the second half of this chapter I correlate my historical and analytic contextualization of Schapiro’s review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen with art-historical interpretations of specific objects. Here I focus on Schapiro’s and Sedlmayr’s respective interpretations of the work of two canonical artists: Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Paul Cézanne. While the

1936: Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft / 37

comparison of the paintings of these two figures would seem almost perverse, an in-depth consideration of Sedlmayr’s and Schapiro’s respective approaches to them reveals that the two scholars shared an intellectual interlocutor: Fritz Novotny. Much like my initial discussion of Schapiro and Sedlmayr by way of Baltrušaitis, assessing the distance between Schapiro and Sedlmayr by way of Novotny points to the same sweeping epistemological questions that drove the crisis of historicism in the first place. My analysis thereby recursively explains how and why Schapiro’s early review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen relates to his much later engagement with the Two Cultures debate, not to mention explaining why these questions maintained such an abiding presence both within Schapiro’s writing and beyond it.

Schapiro’s Review, Strukturforschung, and the Crisis of Historicism

By the time of his 1936 review, Schapiro had been in contact with members of the New Vienna School for several years. He likely first met Sedlmayr during a visit to Vienna in 1931and thereafter exchanged quite extensive correspondence with him and others in Viennese art-historical circles.5 Though Schapiro’s correspondence with Sedlmayr broke off in 1935 as a result of the latter’s controversial involvement with National Socialism, Schapiro continued to maintain a lifelong correspondence with other members of the New Vienna School, chiefly with both Otto Pächt and Fritz Novotny, the latter being analytically allied with the Strukturforschung of the school despite his initial association with the competing Viennese art-historical institute of Josef Strzygowski.6 Schapiro’s interest in the work of this otherwise diverse group of scholars was almost surely spurred on by their Gestalt-like focus on the “structure” of images; as discussed more fully in the previous chapter, Schapiro’s own version of art-historical formalism was based on similar Gestalt-like concerns. The New Vienna School’s focus on “structure,” however, was often more radical than Schapiro’s interest in “form.” Whereas both attended to the design principles or schemas that underlay works of art and leveraged these schemas to better understand the recursive relations that works of art recorded between visual perception and physical creation, the New Viennese scholars also went beyond this interest. In certain instances, Strukturforschung not only based its interpretations on generalizing claims about the historical Weltanschauungen of various cultures, but in so doing was also fundamentally re-creative in its ambition. As Pächt himself put it, “The true object of

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art history is not identical with the physical presence of the work of art: it is something to be extracted from the material substrate through an act of seeing that is also a re-creation.”7 Such a description positions the ostensibly simple act of viewing upon which art-historical analysis obviously depends as vaguely akin to the experiments of modern-day reconstructional archaeologists, who re-create past tools and techniques in the present so as to “extract” an understanding from them. Like these archaeologists, the New Viennese scholars attempted to derive historical knowledge from re-created historical practices that were in turn derived from historical objects. The practices that the New Viennese scholars attempted to re-create, however, were modes of visual experience itself and therefore did not theoretically depend on the creation of physical replicas of the art objects they studied. Such an ambitious goal, no matter how fundamental, also begs for a theoretical model that explains its very possibility. As we will see throughout this chapter, this model was understandably elusive, yet Sedlmayr’s attempts at articulating and applying it had moments of brilliance, however dubious or even politically disturbing they may be. Against this backdrop, it is informative to consider Schapiro’s 1932 review of La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane by Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Schapiro titled that review “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art” and included an English version of the text in the first volume of his selected papers in 1977, itself a vote of confidence in the essay’s merits as an independent and enduring statement of his thought. Through Sedlmayr, the editors of Kritische Berichte had solicited a review from Schapiro, and his choice of Baltrušaitis’s volume as his subject was certainly appropriate.8 Baltrušaitis— like Sedlmayr and Schapiro—practiced a version of art-historical formalism, and thus his book was a fitting topic for Schapiro’s burgeoning discussion with members of the New Vienna School about the possibilities and limitations inherent in formalist approaches to art’s history. In his review, Schapiro summarizes the thesis of Baltrušaitis’s book as follows: The basic idea of Baltrušaitis is that Romanesque form is determined by the union of two antagonistic elements—the objects given by the content, with their own natural shapes and canons of proportions, and an antecedent geometric form or schema. The imposition of the schema on the object destroys the natural form and produces the distorted, even disordered appearances of Romanesque figures. But careful study of the sculpture reveals an inner geometric ordonnance and structure conferred by the

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Fig. 6 Abbey of Saint-Pierre, Mozac, lintel, twelfth century. Photo: JAUBERT French Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

primary schematic principle. B. distinguishes several types of schema. The first, and most characteristic, is that which is imposed by the frame, for the frame is a generating, ordering principle. (265) As this excerpt suggests, Schapiro focuses much of his attention on what he took to be Baltrušaitis’s theory of schemata, mainly by way of his conception of the frame as an active force in Romanesque sculpture. Baltrušaitis himself plainly states his theory of the frame in such terms: “The frame [in Romanesque sculpture] is not a passive element. It acts on the composition of the relief. It organizes it” (266). To justify such a bold assertion, Baltrušaitis points to examples like a lintel from Mozac (fig. 6), where the figures gradually enlarge toward the center of the composition, a pattern that matches the pentagonal frame of the stone into which the relief is carved. In his review, Schapiro emphasizes the dangers of such a generalizing view and quickly and forcefully rebuts Baltrušaitis’s argument by pointing to examples like the portal of Vézelay (fig. 7). Here, the figure on the trumeau, a prominent figure on the lintel, and the central figure of Christ all violate or break the “frames” that contain them, which, according to Baltrušaitis’s theory, would

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Fig. 7 Abbey of Vézelay, portal, twelfth century. Photo: Robert Harding / Alamy Stock Photo.

distort them. In Schapiro’s view, quite the opposite of Baltrušaitis’s theory occurs at Vézelay. For the purposes of this chapter, the validity of Schapiro’s critique of Baltrušaitis is less important than its analytic stakes, as those stakes parallel Schapiro’s later critique of the New Vienna School. Schapiro’s critique of Baltrušaitis is based on the disconnect between Baltrušaitis’s appeal to a purported law that defines and helps make sense of a specific style as a whole, and the historical particularities of the objects that make up that style and that the theory washes over. In short, Schapiro’s objection to Baltrušaitis would seem to be familiar enough to all historians: the model of knowledge pursued in the natural sciences, wherein predictive and general theories or laws are the object and aim of study, does not seamlessly map onto historical research, wherein particular objects and events and their intention-laden specifics are the focus. As Schapiro certainly knew, noting this disconnect was merely the beginning of a much larger problem. Indeed, Schapiro himself would note in his 1936 review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen that, in the German-speaking context in particular, this question had caused much

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recent debate and discussion. With the writings of Dilthey in the 1880s and continuing through those of Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Ernst Troeltsch, and Friedrich Meinecke—to name but the most prominent examples—generations of German philosophers had focused their attention on making sense of the uneven relation between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften.9 Stated simply, the question was: if historical knowledge could not be secured against some kind of covering law or some kind of generalization, then what was it based upon? What was the nature of historical knowledge? Baltrušaitis’s very attempt to identify a law of a specific art-historical style, of course, speaks directly to this question. Briefly considering some of the intellectual background to Baltrušaitis’s book helps clarify some of the motivations lying beneath Schapiro’s critique of it. Though Baltrušaitis would later go on to be best known for his scholarship on anamorphosis, his earlier writing, including La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane, existed in close proximity to the work of his doctoral adviser and father-in-law, Henri Focillon, whose own book L’art des sculpteurs romans, also of 1931, was its complement.10 Building on this relation, in 1938 Focillon would develop and explicitly argue for his own version of “the law of the frame” in Romanesque sculpture, the very law that Schapiro sharply criticized in Baltrušaitis’s book.11 Thus, Schapiro’s critique of Baltrušaitis can be—and has often been— read as a critique of Focillon. Though such a conflation of the work of two scholars can surely never be absolute, Focillon and Schapiro themselves were especially attuned to it. In fact, when Focillon visited Schapiro at Columbia in 1936, Baltrušaitis’s theory became a central point of a contentious debate. As Walter Cahn has documented, at that meeting Focillon received what he plaintively described as an “uncontrolled lambasting” that at least partially centered on Schapiro’s pointed review of Baltrušaitis’s book.12 Turning to a brief examination of some of the important reasoning behind Baltrušaitis’s and Focillon’s work helps partially explain that “lambasting” as it highlights the conflicts between their work and Schapiro’s, not to mention partially making sense of the appeals that Focillon and Baltrušaitis made to a “law of the frame.” As is well known, the most extensive and influential theoretical statement of Focillon’s school was his own La vie des formes of 1934, a complex, somewhat aphoristic treatise that, in many respects, is difficult to summarize if not fully comprehend. Central to the book’s arguments is the idea that works of visual art, as necessarily made up of visual forms, are always most efficiently explained by way of earlier forms in visual art.13 However unfashionable such

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a strong version of art-historical formalism might be today, this insight is based on a fundamental recognition that is often ignored: a greater inferential leap will always be needed to connect the forms that compose works of art to other domains of human activity than to connect those forms to similar forms in earlier works of art. As Focillon pithily and dramatically put it, “The most attentive study of the most homogeneous milieu, of the most closely woven concatenation of circumstances, will not serve to give us the design of the towers of Laon.”14 Like best explains like. On this view, the domains of scientific knowledge, religious belief, and social practice are, for better or worse, more distinct from the domain of artistic creation than the domain of artistic creation is to itself; therefore all interpretations of works of art as embodiments of knowledge or belief or social norms will always be less direct than interpretations based simply on preceding artistic forms. Many today would no doubt challenge such an assertion as facile and as timorously avoiding the deeper problems of art’s history. Perhaps its greatest strength, however, lies in the severe limitations that it places on the possible causal influences that effect works of art. Focillon’s limitation offers up a justification for circumventing the seemingly endless and irresolvable debates about the meaning and value of every artwork and in so doing promises to make them more understandable. One of the ostensible correlates of this approach is Focillon’s and Baltrušaitis’s belief that the apparent repetitions that are perceptible within art’s history—for instance, the purely formal commonalities between the ornament of Baroque architecture and the ornament of the flamboyant Gothic style—are not merely coincidental but rather are evidence for the internal workings of form itself, workings that they described as laws. Such a strident position follows from Focillon and Baltrušaitis’s strong formalism, because their position implicitly demands that art’s form not only be explained by art’s earlier forms but also that the cause of the changes in art’s form are internal to it, as if forms were alive. One can hear an expression of this vitalistic commitment in Baltrušaitis’s abovementioned claim that the frame is an active force in Romanesque sculpture; on this view, the frame is necessarily active in Romanesque compositions because it exerts some kind of agency on the very work of which it is a part. These assertions are why Focillon’s treatise is often positioned as a version of the Bergsonian vitalism that was prevalent in French intellectual culture at the time, even if Focillon clearly did not need the full complexity of Bergson’s theories to formulate his own.15 Schapiro’s distance from Focillon and Baltrušaitis is helpfully explained by this background. Whereas Focillon wrote against what he saw as a

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fundamental and unnecessary mistake within sociological approaches to art like Hippolyte Taine’s, Schapiro very much embraced socially focused explanations—albeit by way of what he declared at the time to be his Marxist understanding of history.16 Granting that the French context of Baltrušaitis’s and Focillon’s work was no doubt distinctive, the analytic considerations that their arguments raise are fundamentally similar to those discussed in Schapiro’s later review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen. As many scholars have noted, despite its claims about a rigorous scientific approach, a version of intuitive vitalism—what in the German context is often broadly referred to as Lebensphilosophie—also played a fundamental role in Sedlmayr’s art history.17 For instance, in his “Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft,” Sedlmayr chides empirically minded art historians for studying mere art corpses (Kunstleichen) and thereby echoes the championing of life forces also found in Focillon and Baltrušaitis.18 Such vitalistic arguments were widespread at the time and—similar to the rise of Gestalt psychology—are often associated with a period dissatisfaction with the effects and results of positivist science.19 Though complex and overdetermined causes undoubtedly lay behind each instance of such arguments, in Sedlmayr’s case, much like in Focillon’s and Baltrušaitis’s, appeals to the living nature of visual art enabled him to reinforce the independence and distinctness of his preferred mode of research while simultaneously positioning his work as a development beyond the impasse raised by the crisis of historicism. Apart from this basic parallel, Sedlmayr also reinforced the distinctive nature of his version of art history by looking to broader arguments about the differences between the natural sciences and the humanities. Most specifically, in his methodological writings Sedlmayr repeatedly championed a new form of “understanding” that he claimed followed from his distinctive mode of research. Thereby he at least partially appealed to a distinction that enjoyed widespread currency at the time, thanks to the popularity of Dilthey’s writing: that between the Verstehen (understanding) sought within the humanities and the Erklären (explanation) sought in the natural sciences.20 For Dilthey, whereas the explanatory task of the natural sciences rested on lawlike generalization, the historical understanding that occupied the humanities rested on an individualizing and empathetic model of knowledge. As Dilthey put it, “The first condition of the possibility of historical science lies in the fact that I myself am a historical being: that he who investigates history is the same as he who makes history.”21 In making this distinction, Dilthey framed the sphere of the humanities as coextensive with the domain of self-reflexive

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inquiry and positioned the lived experiences (Erlebnisse) that make up that area of human experience as fundamentally different from those studied by the natural sciences (Erfahrungen). However many have questioned Dilthey’s distinction, through it and to his credit, he was able to offer up an explanation for why the application of predictive, causal laws to historical research had been so unsuccessful. As Daniela Bohde has noted, Sedlmayr seems to have inherited this distinction indirectly, partially from the Gestalt psychologists—who were heavily influenced by Dilthey—and partially from secondary sources about Dilthey.22 In his methodological introduction to the first volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, for instance, as well as in other writings from the period, Sedlmayr frequently uses the term “understanding,” sometimes even in scare quotes, to distinguish his research from what he termed a more empirical mode of art history. After first announcing in that introduction that he will “demonstrate precisely what this ‘understanding’”is,23 Sedlmayr goes on to describe it as being able to “reconstruct [works of art], not because it knows from reports or concludes from physical markings that a part looking a certain way is missing from this object and needs to be replaced but rather because it understands the inner organization of a work and immediately sees the need for the replacement of a specific missing part.”24 While this distinction does not perfectly mirror Dilthey’s, the difference here between intuitive, immediate “seeing” on the one hand and inferential, labored “knowing” on the other corresponds well to associations that Dilthey made through his dyad of Erklären and Verstehen, the former being a sober activity of the intellect and the latter being more immediate, holistic, and intuitive. Sedlmayr continued to defend his form of art history as a new, alternate form of “understanding” through his career, though he never did take up Dilthey’s parallel distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung—a refusal that would seem to tacitly parallel his own ambition to create a truly new “scientific” approach that transcended the divide between the humanities and the natural sciences.25 In his 1936 review of the New Vienna School journal, Schapiro notes his familiarity with these developments within continental philosophical literature and expresses his admiration of the sophisticated art-historical interpretations that resulted from it. Despite this praise, Schapiro also rejected the substance of Sedlmayr’s distinction between a first merely empirical and a second truly scientific mode of art history quite harshly. As he put it: “Such a distinction . . . puts a premium on wishful intuitiveness and vague, intangible profundity in the sciences that concern man. The natural sciences, no less than the sciences of

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history and culture, require accuracy and the utmost respect for fact. Actually, there is little difference, so far as scientific method is concerned, between the best works of the so-called first and second sciences of art. They both depend on relevant hypotheses, precise observation, logical analysis, and various devices of verification.”26 Schapiro’s critique here is fair in many respects, yet he also fails to note what motivates the distinction he is criticizing and what seems to have motivated his own earlier criticisms of Baltrušaitis: the uncertain place of nomothetic, or law-directed, hypotheses within historical research. If the humanities and the natural sciences actually are the same, then covering laws would have to be applicable to history. And of course, Schapiro himself, as shown in his critique of Baltrušaitis, was wary of recent art-historical expressions of such a position. Thus, while Schapiro’s critique of Sedlmayr’s “vague, intangible profundity” surely is warranted—especially in relation to Sedlmayr’s later politics—he also skirts the issue. Schapiro’s intellectual formation and network around the time of his 1936 review sheds some light on why he would have been conflicted about this topic. Though it is widely known that Schapiro was very much committed to a form of Marxism at this moment, what is less discussed is that he was also closely connected with logical positivist or logical empiricist philosophers.27 Significant figures within the logical positivist movement, in fact, had quite strong left-leaning political aspirations, despite the claims to political neutrality that are often associated with rigid forms of midcentury science.28 Schapiro’s previously noted education under Dewey—who conceived of his pragmatism as a development of previous forms of empiricist philosophy—not to mention his ongoing friendship with Dewey’s students like Sidney Hook, no doubt made him even more prone to such approaches.29 Moreover and much in keeping with this context, in 1937 Schapiro would begin corresponding with a key midcentury figure in logical positivism, Otto Neurath, who shared Schapiro’s leftist politics. For Neurath, the epistemological distinction to be made was not between the natural sciences and the humanities but rather between science and metaphysics, the latter in his eyes being a pejorative term.30 Schapiro eventually had a falling out with Neurath over his criticisms of Schapiro’s writing. His beliefs, however, were initially close enough to Neurath’s that in the late 1930s Schapiro agreed to write a volume for the Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, Neurath’s longtime editorial project.31Like the other volumes of that series—the most celebrated almost certainly being Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—Schapiro’s book was to adopt a philosophically sophisticated yet empirical point of view on a topic

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within his specialty, in his case, the interpretation of visual art. Although he never finished his contribution to this project, the surviving outlines, notes, and typescripts for it provide a clear sense of the affinity between Schapiro’s work at the time and the characteristic claims of logical empiricism. For instance, in one of the surviving outlines for the book, Schapiro takes up that most beloved tool of logical empiricism, algebraic notation, and applies it to basic questions of the spatiotemporal ordering of works of art based on style. Abbreviating space with the letter S, time with the letter T, a work of art with the letter W, and certain properties of that work with the letter P, Schapiro notes: All the works of a given time and space are alike in certain readily visible characteristics. We may state this as a law of the following forms: f(S0T0) = W(P0); and we convert; f(W(P0)) = S0T0. This is a law of the constancy of characteristics of art-products in any region at a given period of time. In order to take care of apparent differences, the coexistence of two styles, we define P0, that is the constant properties, as a range of values between 2 points, and we avoid arbitrariness by fixing the points with reference to a larger range which is correlated with a larger S,T.32 Schapiro’s very willingness here to attempt to apply algebraic notation to stylistic analysis is deeply revealing of his thinking around midcentury, if not more generally. It should be noted, however, that his failure to publish the text speaks to his lack of satisfaction with it—and thus makes extensive criticisms of it as a finished argument unfair. Further, even though similar assumptions to Schapiro’s “law of spatiotemporal constants” are common enough within archaeology even today, Schapiro’s claim that such a law exists obviously tempers his earlier criticisms of Baltrušaitis; it was clearly the kind of law that Baltrušaitis was proposing and not the idea of an art-historical law itself to which Schapiro objected.33 In fact, as the typescripts from his long-running course on the theories and methods of art history make clear, throughout his career Schapiro repeatedly defended the similarity rather than the difference between the forms of argumentation within the humanities and the natural sciences.34 From the perspective of the present, being as we are on the other side of the apotheosis of poststructuralism across the humanities, Schapiro’s defense of this similarity is unfashionable and makes his writing easy to criticize; I take up these criticisms of Schapiro’s work explicitly in the final two chapters.

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In order to be able to better discuss such criticisms, it is important to initially frame Schapiro’s commitment to the idea of the unity of science by way of an additional intellectual development that shaped his career. After giving up on his book for Neurath’s Encyclopedia, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Schapiro saw many of the same debates behind the crisis of historicism take on new form in the postwar context of the Anglo-American academy, this time going under the name of the Two Cultures debate and usually referring to the writings of C. P. Snow.35 Snow’s work—like the crisis of historicism before it—raised the question of the similarities and differences between the natural sciences and the humanities, yet within this new context the tone and the substance of the earlier debate had changed. Dilthey, his peers, and his followers had taken up the hopeful task of trying to solidify the foundation of historical knowledge on new, albeit shaky, models of the mind; Snow, in contrast, largely undercut that foundation by lamenting the dominance of humanistic education in British universities and blaming it for a general lack of preparedness for modern, technological careers. Schapiro weighed in on these debates most explicitly in his posthumously published essay of 1963 titled “Humanism and Science: The Concept of the Two Half-Cultures,” wherein he expresses his distrust of the rising call for increasing technological education. Schapiro notes that the real question to be asked is not whether scientific or humanistic education is preferable— Schapiro no doubt considered his own version of art history as informed by science—but rather “whether the training of the public, and especially political leaders, in the sciences would improve their judgment in dealing with matters of policy. Or would a better education in the humanities, which means literature, make men more capable of wise decision?”36 Schapiro’s longterm adherence to the unity of science project would surely have made him reluctant to even answer such a question. However, Schapiro did give voice to his long struggle with the growing skepticism toward the humanities, a trend that culminated with Snow, in his unpublished essay “Two Legends of the Invention of Flying,” which he began in 1937 and reworked throughout his life.37 In order to interpret this essay as an art-historical answer to the Two Cultures controversy and to align it with Schapiro’s earlier review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, I turn to Schapiro’s interpretations of specific works of art. For it is fittingly only in those interpretations—specifically in his interpretations of the paintings of Bruegel the Elder and Cézanne—that Schapiro’s art-historical approach to these issues comes fully into focus.

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Schapiro and Sedlmayr on Bruegel and Cézanne

Schapiro was not a specialist in the early modern painting of the Low Countries, let alone in Bruegel’s oeuvre. However, he did speak on an impressively wide range of art-historical topics throughout his career, particularly at the New School of Social Research, where he frequently lectured to a broader public. In one of these lectures, in 1946, Schapiro put forward an interpretation of the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (fig. 10), which at the time was still thought to be a Bruegel original.38 This interpretation, despite its brevity, at once looks back to Schapiro’s disagreement with Sedlmayr as well as forward to his response to the Two Cultures debate. Before using Schapiro’s interpretation of that painting to connect these two moments in Schapiro’s life, however, it is first helpful to consider Sedlmayr’s approach to Bruegel’s style in some detail, as that approach serves as a powerful contrast to Schapiro’s own. In 1934, Sedlmayr put forward what is now a well-known reading of Bruegel based on what he termed the painter’s macchia, or color patch. Stated simply, Sedlmayr claimed that close, extended, and attentive looking at Bruegel’s paintings—and he used Netherlandish Proverbs most extensively (fig. 8)—reveals a tendency within the paintings “to shed [their] content and to appear to the viewer purely as a lively pattern of color patches.”39 Under close looking, Bruegel’s paintings, so Sedlmayr asserts, “begin to disintegrate” and a field emerges of color patches that seem to “lie unconnected and unordered, beside and above each other in a plane at the front of the picture. These are . . . the atoms of the image.”40 For Sedlmayr this unconnected, random patchwork of colors is key to understanding Bruegel’s paintings, for through it “what has become representable . . . is not madness and its manners but the very structure of a mad world.”41 The underlying randomness to the Gestalt or Struktur of Bruegel’s works, in other words, is not a simple, descriptive fact about the paintings, but rather it is value-laden and emotionally fecund. Sedlmayr summed up these values and emotions with a single word: Entfremdung (estrangement). For scholars today this unapologetically negative and surely overweening reading of Bruegel may be best understood as no more than a curious historiographic nostrum. Sedlmayr’s interpretation is of special interest for this chapter, however, because it can be understood as an adaptation of Dilthey’s conception of historical knowledge to art-historical purposes. Just as Dilthey advocated that empathy was a foundation for historical research, so too is Sedlmayr here treating Bruegel’s paintings as replete with an emotional condition that can be reexperienced by the historian in the present.

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Fig. 8 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 1720. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A key part of Dilthey’s analytic model that is central to Sedlmayr’s argument is the parallel between the individualizing nature of historical inquiry and the individualizing basis of empathetic experience itself. Indeed, as Sedlmayr no doubt knew, ever since Wilhelm Windelband, historical, humanistic research had often been distinguished from natural scientific research precisely because it is not nomothetic—that is, concerned with establishing general rules or principles under which particular objects can be explained—but rather is ideographic—that is, focused on distinct historical particulars for their own sake.42 In the wake of this distinction, Sedlmayr’s claim about basing his reading of Bruegel on his individual experience of the individual painting that is Netherlandish Proverbs would have had special currency and surely would have abetted Sedlmayr’s assertion that his project was more truly historical than those other forms of art history that relied on the generalizing, inductive, and more commonplace methods of the natural sciences. Moreover, and not unimportantly, in making such claims, Sedlmayr could also position his writing as leveraging the one-to-one relationship between individual minds that is fundamental to the very possibility of empathetic experience and that he emphasized as central to his own “second study of art.”43 On this view, the individually accessible, empathetic transfer purportedly made possible by an individual art object in the present reinforces the distinctive nature of Sedlmayr’s approach and further clarifies its distance from its supposedly more basic, first-order cousin. As described by Pächt and as quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the re-creative dimension to Sedlmayr’s interpretations speaks directly to the re-

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Fig. 9 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–4. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins Collection, E1936-1-1. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

creative ambition of Strukturforschung44—though Sedlmayr’s very attempt to realize such a goal, it should be acknowledged, surely draws on more than a reading of Dilthey’s broader claims about humanistic epistemology. In the case of Bruegel in particular, Sedlmayr also relies on a source that is more proximate to his own writing, in that it is explicitly art-historical, and yet also more remote, in that it is based on some antithetical assumptions: Fritz Novotny’s Cézanne und das Ende der wissenschaftliche Perspektive of 1938. Parallel to Sedlmayr’s claims about Bruegel, in this book Novotny describes Cézanne’s painting as the product of an estranged form of viewing, though for Novotny this is not evidence of Cézanne’s own estrangement from his society (e.g., Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire; fig. 9). Novotny speaks about Cézanne’s estranged vision in order to describe his emotionless, value-neutral, and even subject-denying style. In this way, he can distinguish it from both the paintings of the impressionists—whose style, according to Novotny, captures the charm of experience—and from the naturally perceptible emotional qualities that can be experienced in real landscapes—for instance, the curiosity created by a bend in a road or the other side of a hill.45 Novotny claims these qualities were suppressed in Cézanne’s paintings, meaning that Cézanne’s style was distinctive precisely because it was emotionless. The inverted relation between Sedlmayr’s and Novotny’s deployment of this notion of estranged seeing is but one reason to doubt that Sedlmayr would have needed Novotny to develop his particular version of it; the documented historical circumstances surrounding the writing

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of Novotny’s book, however, make it clear that Sedlmayr had read Novotny’s writing.46 Additionally, in his most widely known work—Verlust der Mitte of 1948—Sedlmayr redeploys the notion of estranged seeing and this time does so explicitly in relation to Novotny’s interpretations of the “pure seeing” of Cézanne.47 Thus, Sedlmayr’s debt to Novotny in his interpretation of Bruegel seems, however antithetical, almost assured. On top of this metamorphic instrumentalization of Novotny’s thesis, the intellectual relation between Sedlmayr and Novotny is all the more peculiar because the epistemology that seems to underlie Sedlmayr’s writing is quite opposed to Novotny’s own. Whereas Sedlmayr’s work focuses on individual paintings and stresses their irreducible singularity, Novotny’s project is fundamentally inductive, comparative, and generalizing. Novotny aims to build up an understanding of Cézanne’s painting not from the vitalistic relationships that his paintings could engender between the art historian in the present and the artist in the past but rather by comparing Cézanne’s paintings, on the one hand, with the paintings of the impressionists who helped form his style and, on the other hand, with photographs from the actual sites that he painted.48 In making such comparisons, Novotny seeks to understand and painstakingly describe the slight distortions that Cézanne introduced into the perspectives of his paintings and thereby better clarify the artist’s style and technique as a whole. In this regard it is interesting to note that Novotny’s interpretation of Cézanne also inspired Schapiro’s writing, and, as might be expected, it was precisely the inductive nature of Novotny’s approach—rather than his claims about Cézanne’s estranged vision—that attracted Schapiro. Schapiro even explicitly corresponded with Novotny about induction in art-historical interpretation and later noted the impact of Novotny’s study of Cézanne on his own work.49 Though Schapiro’s approach differs from Novotny’s in its focus on Cézanne’s “self”—and the two scholars later disagree about Schapiro’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Cézanne in 196850—both Schapiro and Novotny build up a theory of Cézanne’s oeuvre and style that puts the rather matterof-fact, empirical tasks of historical research into practice.51 Here Schapiro’s and Novotny’s shared commitment to inferring more general claims by way of the concrete particulars of Cézanne’s individual paintings—and expressly in relation to the actual environments in which those paintings were made— can be understood as stemming from the same “relevant hypotheses, precise observation, . . . and various devices of verification” that Schapiro had championed in his earlier review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen.52 It should

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therefore come as no surprise that the crux of Schapiro’s approach was later described as the “ability to find a general problem in a particular detail that sharpens and gives significance to . . . observation” (emphasis added).53 Notwithstanding these allegiances, the inductive nature of Schapiro’s research does not mean that his arguments were completely opposed to Sedlmayr’s. In fact, it is what Schapiro shares with Sedlmayr, rather than what he shares with Novotny, that sheds light on how Schapiro’s art history can be understood to most fully respond to the Two Cultures debate. It is even Schapiro’s interpretation of Bruegel—the very artist whose estranged seeing Sedlmayr made so much of—that attests to Schapiro’s overlaps with Sedlmayr. However distorted Sedlmayr’s appropriation of Novotny’s work is, the resultant interpretations are less different in kind from Novotny’s and Schapiro’s own research than Schapiro’s critique of the New Vienna School’s “vague intangible profundities” may suggest. Turning to Schapiro’s interpretation of Bruegel’s painting of Icarus sheds light on this unexpected relation. Starting in the late 1930s and following the work of Charles de Tolnay, Schapiro straightforwardly argues that Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (fig. 10) alluded to period beliefs concerning financial speculation, which speaks directly to the painting’s original time and place of creation in the Low Countries in the 1550s, because of the economic havoc wrecked by the king of Spain’s defaults on various loans. In this reading, Icarus’s risky venture in flight and subsequent crash is equated with the financial ventures and crashes of the period’s markets. To support this claim, Schapiro points to the fact that Icarus himself is overshadowed in the painting by the everyday work of the farmer, the shepherd, and the fisherman, who go about their daily tasks undisturbed by Icarus’s misadventure. The painter’s peculiar choice to relegate Icarus to a secondary role in the composition, therefore, amounts to a moralistic comment on the values that ought to guide society, a statement about bourgeois prudence and work ethic. Schapiro further supports this interpretation by pointing to an especially prominent, albeit later, depiction of Icarus that was placed above the doorway to the room in the town hall of Amsterdam where debtors went to declare their insolvency. The placement of such a relief highlights the fact that the link between the myth of Icarus and the risks of financial speculation enjoyed some currency during the broader period. Quite apart from whether or not we are convinced by Schapiro’s reading, what is important for this chapter is that Schapiro’s interpretation, though primarily objectifying like Sedlmayr’s, is also directed toward a form of historical morality. Whereas Sedlmayr turns Bruegel’s Icarus

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Fig. 10 Attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1560s. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 4030. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

into a statement about social estrangement, Schapiro turns it into a statement about virtuous behavior and financial norms. Such a parallel holds very generally between many art-historical interpretations. Within the longterm context of Schapiro’s and Sedlmayr’s disagreement about art-historical method, however, this shared characteristic points back to the topic with which their acquaintance began: the place of nomothetic reasoning within art-historical interpretation. Indeed, the realm of morality—the domain of “ought,” as Schapiro’s logical positivist friend Ernest Nagel may have put it— is precisely the area of humanistic research that is stereotypically excluded from the natural sciences and that Schapiro is unable to exclude from his art history, however logicoempirical he wanted it to be.54 Thus, the Januslike reaction that Schapiro initially had to Sedlmayr’s scholarship and his assertion that Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen was at once highly sophisticated and yet prone to fundamental mistakes reverberate within Schapiro’s own later interpretations of the same objects that Sedlmayr interpreted. The moral distance, as Sedlmayr put it, that his interpretation of Bruegel’s painting was attempting to overcome is also a focus of Schapiro’s inquiry.55 In the wake of the Two Cultures debate and in the midst of a growing postwar assault on humanistic education, Schapiro would fittingly return to his interpretation of Bruegel’s Icarus in 1971. Much like in his earlier lectures on Bruegel, here Schapiro places the painting within a sweeping historical overview of depictions of two “legends of the invention of flying.”56 These tales bear directly on the Two Cultures debate by way of their commentaries on the dangers inherent to man’s capacity for scientific invention and thus

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within scientific education as well. The two legends are the Daedalus and Icarus myth—which, Schapiro notes, begins with Daedalus’s desire to escape from Crete and be free from his employer, Minos—and a story about Alexander the Great, who in his endless pursuit of conquest is said to have once fastened flying animals to a basket in which he sat, luring the animals upward with pieces of meat attached to the ends of spears. Unlike the tragic ending to the Daedalus story, however, Alexander returns to earth safely after heeding the advice he heard at the apex of his flight from a voice in the sky. In the Daedalus and Icarus legend, man’s inventiveness, his penchant for technological innovation, and his desire for freedom are the sources of the invention of flying; the result, however, is death. In the Alexander story, man’s pursuit of dominance and his desire for boundless power are the causes of the invention; their result is man’s recognizing and accepting his place below God and being rewarded with his safe return home. Within the long-term dynamic of the pictorial afterlives of these two legends, Schapiro positions Bruegel’s Icarus as a watershed moment. For Schapiro, Bruegel’s choices to depict the Daedalus and Icarus myth rather than the Alexander legend, to focus solely on its tragedy of Icarus’s death, and to relegate that tragedy to a secondary place in the story are all significant. Each of these choices further intensifies the painting’s meaning as a warning against bourgeois hubris, as each implies a criticism of man’s attempt to fly and move beyond his earthly state of affairs. Moreover, in reinforcing this point in the story of human flight, Schapiro seems to assert his belief in the painting’s moral lesson and not just his historical interpretation of it. To further this message, Schapiro ends his lecture “Two Legends of the Invention of Flying” with a beautiful yet pessimistic poem from the First World War by William Butler Yeats titled “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”; in his notes for the essay’s never-finished conclusion, Schapiro even explicitly connects his account of the painting to the earlier debates between Bertrand Russell and J. B. S. Haldane about the ethical implications of scientific advances, which were fittingly titled “Icarus” and “Daedalus.” In Schapiro’s reading, therefore, legends of the invention of flying, just like the histories of human mastery of natural laws, reveal scientific fallibility: historical knowledge acts as an important check on scientific belief. As a narrative, Schapiro’s lecture also shows that his own version of art history was grounded on the same methods as the natural sciences and yet was envisaged as a necessary complement to them. Within a postwar world dominated on the one hand by an exultant belief in the laws of natural science and on the other by the stereotyped claims about

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Fig. 11 Meyer Schapiro, Icarus, undated. With kind permission by the estate of Meyer Schapiro. Photo: Columbia University Libraries.

the inevitability of human nature made by communists and capitalists alike, this role for art history ratifies Schapiro’s tempered socialist commitments. Whereas the young Schapiro voted for the Communist party and wrote outspoken invectives with the zeal of a fellow traveler who believed in the justness—if not the certainty—of a coming revolution, the older Schapiro was no longer so self-assured. In his 1971version of “Two Legends of the Invention of

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Flying,” the role of Schapiro’s art history was no longer to promote and help realize a coming utopia but rather to use art-historical knowledge in order to temper expectations about what was humanly possible.57 Schapiro dramatized this pivotal twentieth-century transition within leftist politics in relation to the motif of Icarus on more than one occasion. In an unpublished essay on Picasso, for instance, Schapiro noted the historical circumstances surrounding Picasso’s own monumental depiction of Icarus for the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, specifically the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union and the evident repression of political freedom in the Communist Eastern Bloc.58 Here Icarus’s fall represented—at least according to one early biographer of Picasso—a somewhat cloying metaphor for communism as the god that failed. Though Schapiro himself expressed some suspicion about this interpretation, he not only shared Picasso’s deep disappointment over the atrocities of the Soviet Union, but he himself even made paintings and drawings of the fall of Icarus on more than one occasion (e.g., fig. 11).59 Whether or not Schapiro’s own depictions of this theme speak to his sorrow about the history of twentieth-century socialism, of course, is speculative. What is not lost to history is how those regrets shaped Schapiro’s work both as a scholar and a public intellectual, a topic that is one of the great questions of Schapiro’s career. And so it is to that fraught affair that we now turn.

1941 Science and the Dialectic Raphael and Dewey, Courbet and Picasso

In 1941, in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Schapiro published a culminating statement of his Marxist thinking: “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïveté.” Not only does this essay apply some explicitly Marxist ideas to art-historical objects that themselves are central to the tradition of radical socialism, but it did so during the Second World War, when Schapiro’s own politics—not to mention leftist politics in general—were under tremendous pressure. Perhaps the most evident expression of this stress in Schapiro’s published writing was his outspoken 1943 debate with Sidney Hook in the pages of Partisan Review about the participation of the United States in the war. Despite his Jewish heritage, Schapiro opposed American involvement not on the isolationist grounds that were common at the time but because he believed the working class disproportionately bore the war’s burden.1 Such an antiwar stance appears extreme today; the drama of it blatantly exposes how Schapiro boldly met the political pressures of the time head on. His art-historical scholarship was no exception. Indeed, Schapiro’s wartime correspondence with the Marxist art historian Max Raphael about his Courbet essay reveals that, at almost the same moment as his exchange

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with Hook, Schapiro’s art history was also faced with the broader implications of current events; it was not the pro-war majority, however, but the generalizing asseverations of classic Marxism that Schapiro confronted. The well-known outcome of this twofold political assault on Schapiro’s thought was the postwar tempering of his politics, a result that was common enough for members of Schapiro’s generation. For him, though, the emergence of his more subdued and more independent leftist commitments never entailed the wholesale public renunciation of Marxism that marked so many of his peers. This chapter seeks to make some sense of the long-term transition within Schapiro’s relation to Marxist ideas by situating Schapiro’s article on Courbet as its climatic pivot. In what follows, I first contextualize the arguments of Schapiro’s Courbet essay by way of his earlier writing. As previously noted, part of Schapiro’s work from before the war was composed of an array of explicitly Marxist essays and reviews, some written under pseudonyms to protect Schapiro from the potential professional and personal ramifications of his convictions.2 The other half of Schapiro’s writing up to this point in his life was quite objectifying and apolitical. Both parts of Schapiro’s thought, however, reflect the basic agreement—discussed in the previous chapter—between his art-historical research and the reasoning found in the natural sciences. Such a parallel can seem straightforward. Schapiro’s Marxist views, however, undoubtedly complicated his relationship to natural scientific method, perhaps most notably by way of the widespread Marxist claims at the time about the so-called dialectic. With the publication of texts like Vladimir Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1909 and Joseph Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism in 1938, Marxist theory further developed the cosmological claims initially put forward by Friedrich Engels about the dialectical relationship between thought and the universe itself and thereby attempted to bring traditional scientific methods into harmonious agreement with its theory of human history and society.3 In the aftermath of such arguments, it comes as no surprise that the criticism Schapiro received from Raphael about his Courbet article centered precisely on the issue of dialectical reasoning. After first contextualizing and analyzing Schapiro’s and Raphael’s disagreement about Courbet and the dialectic, in the second half of this chapter I consider how the analytic positions articulated in their debate played themselves out in their later careers. To do so I compare and contrast Schapiro’s and Raphael’s starkly opposed interpretations of a specific painting that, although not by Courbet, has also proved to be a central object of leftist art-historical research, not to mention of modernism itself: Pablo Picasso’s

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1937 antiwar mural, Guernica. Whereas Raphael’s more explicitly Marxist interpretation saw the mural as a rather inept attempt at a political statement by an artist unable to break through the chains of his political consciousness, Schapiro understood Guernica as an important testament to the very real struggle of the time between artistic and political freedom. Quite apart from whether or not one of these interpretations is more convincing than the other, comparing Schapiro’s and Raphael’s claims about Guernica helps flesh out important dimensions of the ongoing art-historical obsession with this artwork—a hypercathexis no doubt tied to the continuing import of Marxist thinking for modern art in general—while also distinguishing some of the peculiarity of Schapiro’s approach. The difference between Schapiro’s and Raphael’s interpretations of Guernica, I argue in closing, revolves around a disagreement over the value of works of art tout court, and in this regard Schapiro’s interpretation divulges as much about his fraught relationship to the pragmatist philosophy of Dewey as his more recognized and celebrated Marxist arguments.

From Brownsville to Courbet

Schapiro’s socialist allegiances started early in life. His father brought leftist ideas with him from the Jewish Socialist Bund in his native Lithuania—then part of the Russian empire—and subscribed to the Jewish Daily Forward and the New York Call after settling the family in Brooklyn in 1907. Keeping with this environment, Schapiro joined the Young Peoples Socialist League as an adolescent and attended meetings at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum.4 During his undergraduate years, however, Schapiro confessed to being somewhat apolitical—at least after an initial confrontation during his freshman year.5 Later in life he pointed to the years 1930–33 as the moment of his true discovery of Marx.6 Such an account both matches his publications up to that point in his young life as well as the wider radicalization of American politics following the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. One significant inconsistency with this story is Schapiro’s dissertation of 1929, which contains a never-published section that he later claimed was based on a Marxist conception of history.7 Exactly what such an assertion entails is far from straightforward, especially in view of Schapiro’s nonconformist views regarding official Marxist theory and the trials and tribulations of those theories since. As a result, Schapiro’s claim has been denied and

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defended in various ways. Though this controversy may be unresolvable, a simple explanation—and one that also proves useful for understanding Schapiro’s thought over the long term—is to understand Schapiro’s dissertation as the source of historical observations that he would later develop and describe in explicitly Marxist terms.8 For instance, though his dissertation does not include the prototypical Marxist art-historical claims about class conflict analogously mirroring period stylistic developments, it does discuss the incongruous coexistence of Romanesque and Mozarabic styles at Silos— the very stylistic curiosity that some ten years later Schapiro would explain in more recognizably Marxist terms.9 Moreover, in its section on the “origin of the historiated capital,” Schapiro describes the clerically dictated artistic content and meaning of Romanesque capitals as being in opposition to the “individual powers and fancies of the recently born Romanesque sculptors” and thereby concludes that “by the 12th century the capital was no longer canonically determined.”10 Here again one can see a foreshadowing of Schapiro’s later, more explicitly Marxist claims about the power of the artistic imagination as a portentous and revolutionary force within history. Such parallels, of course, are only possible to draw in retrospect. But considering that Schapiro maintained that his postwar scholarship was informed by his reading of Marx, Schapiro’s relation to Marxism both before and after the war may best be understood by way of such indirect and attenuated associations. A constant throughout Schapiro’s career was his lifelong faith in the liberating effects of secularization within artistic production; and as has been pointed out, the epigraph to Karl Marx’s own dissertation—“In one word—I hate all the Gods”—also captures Schapiro’s persistent belief in the power of artistic imagination to overcome superstition.11 Such ambiguities aside, Schapiro’s more established Marxist statements and engagements during the 1930s and ’40s were extensive and have been much discussed. Here I merely summarize some of the most canonical texts from this period with an eye on the analytic stakes they raise for Schapiro’s disagreements with Raphael over Courbet and Picasso. In the most traditional of terms, Schapiro’s Marxism first expressed itself in his vote for William Foster and James Ford—the candidates of the Communist party of the United States—in the 1932 presidential election and his continued support of the party into 1933, even after initial concerns had been raised about political censorship among party members and supporters.12 It was in this period that Schapiro wrote what are surely his most explicitly Marxist essays: namely, his several short articles and reviews under the pseudonym

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John Kwait that addressed issues of modern architecture and urban housing as well as the function of visual art within the revolutionary movement. For instance, in reviewing an exhibition at the John Reed Club in New York in 1933 for New Masses—both the club and the journal were at that point officially affiliated with the Communist party of the United States—Schapiro called for “genuinely militant paintings . . . pictures, illustrating phases of the daily struggle, and reenacting in a vivid, forceful manner the most important revolutionary situations” (23). He then described his ideal revolutionary art at this moment as having “the legibility and pointedness of a cartoon, and like the cartoon it should reach great masses of workers at little expense” (23). The call for literalism and directness in such trite pronouncements would later find a parallel in the more problematic calls for social realism by official Soviet critics, though at this time the exact role of visual art within the communist movement remained undefined; Schapiro’s other writing from this same moment suggest that he was not advocating constraining artistic production to a single style or for a specific end.13 Though these pseudonymous essays from the early 1930s clearly reflect Schapiro’s communist political principles, his independence from the party line soon became clear. By 1940, Schapiro held Shactmanite beliefs that the Soviet Union had created a form of state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism that made it as detestable as other imperial powers.14 Two revealing and often-discussed essays concerning this transition are “The Social Bases of Art” of 1936 and “The Nature of Abstract Art” of 1937. On the one hand, the divergent contexts of these essays account for many of their differences, as Andrew Hemingway has pointed out.15 The former was given as a lecture to an organization founded by the Communist Party of the Popular Front, namely, the first American Artists’ Congress, which partially accounts for its rather sweeping and general statements about “modern” art. The latter was written for an explicitly Marxist journal—the Marxist Quarterly—as a review of Alfred Barr’s MoMA exhibition and catalog of the previous year, Cubism and Abstract Art. On the other hand, it is important to note that it was precisely in these years—specifically starting in March 1936—that Stalin’s Moscow show trials began, causing serious fractions within the whole spectrum of American politics and raising concerns about the causes of radical injustices carried out under the name of communism.16 These widely discussed events were far more than newspaper headlines for Schapiro. Schapiro’s closest friend from his undergraduate years—Whittaker Chambers, with whom he traveled around Europe in the early 1920s and who would go on to be one of the most

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famous American poster children of anticommunism—was directly caught up in the fallout of these trials. As is well known, since 1932 Chambers had been working as a spy for the communist underground, and as he began to equivocate in his covenant with the communist cause he found himself and his family in immediate and real physical danger. To capture the breathtaking drama of this situation, I cite a letter that Chambers wrote to Schapiro around this time in full: Dear Meyer— Please consider carefully what I am going to write, putting aside all foreign elements, and thinking only humanly. I shall not even write on the basis of right or wrong, on which I have strong convictions but which I shall abdicate to give complete force to the one human point at issue. You have it in your power, and you alone have it to save or destroy us all. Useless to argue how or why, for this is the fact, inescapable and precise. It is not too strong an image (it corresponds exactly with my feelings) to say that you stand like a man with an axe which you can bring down into the brains of my children, or you can lay it aside quietly at some cost to your own feelings, the degree of which our misery is too complete for me to judge rationally. We are utterly defenseless before you, I physically, and the others for their whole lives. For my own stupid life, you would never have got this appeal from me, or even for my wife’s who would not want me to have made it, but for the children I would eat filth, if necessary, to save them. Therefore, I plead to you, save us now, withdraw from a public position and let the right people hear about it. What you do privately, is not my concern: what you do a little later, I cannot be responsible for. Esther joins with me in this appeal. Forgive us. And love from us to all of you. Whittaker17 If the precise events and circumstances surrounding the writing of this letter remain unclear, Chambers’s extreme plea can nonetheless be contextualized by his equally melodramatic description of his defection from the communist underground in his best seller of 1952, Witness (though the book’s sensational tone and fraught politics assures that it will always be looked at with a degree of suspicion).18 Nevertheless, the undeniable pressures Chambers’s letter documents make academic quibbles by scholars today about the import of the theoretical divide between “The Social Bases of Art” and “The Nature

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of Abstract Art” seem rather petty. The letter shows that the analytic differences between Schapiro’s two essays were at one time part and parcel of a truly momentous divide that marked anything but casual methodological possibilities for the writing of art historiography. Therefore, though it is incontestable that both essays speak to the evolution of anti-Stalinist positions within the left, to classic debates about the relationship between individual and collective agency, to social pressures in art-historical causation, and finally to evaluative judgments about the function of art or of the aesthetic within Marxist arguments, it is important not to lose the forest for trees.19 A clear reason why “The Social Bases of Art” and “The Nature of Abstract Art” dramatize central questions of Marxist art-historical research is that both put forward quite suggestive statements about the import and nature of artistic freedom, a topic around which, however ambiguous and cant, so much politics obviously revolves. In approaching this topic, the essays take as their point of entry the rise of the idea of pure art or art for art’s sake, yet they address it in perceptibly different ways. Whereas Schapiro in both essays quite explicitly ties the rise of the idea of pure art to the emergence of individualism within late capitalist society, in the “The Social Bases of Art,” he is more damningly critical of this development. After first associating the idea of “pure art” with “mainly young people with inherited incomes” and then discussing the insecurity and the wretchedness of artists who practice or defend it, he dramatically concludes: “Such art cannot really be called free, because it is so exclusive and private; there are too many things we value that it cannot embrace or even confront. An individual art in a society where human beings do not feel themselves to be most individual when they are inert, dreaming, passive, tormented, or uncontrolled would be very different from modern art. And in a society where all men can be free individuals, individuality must lose its exclusiveness and its ruthless and perverse character” (128). Schapiro’s demand here that “individuality must lose its exclusiveness” so that all men can be free makes the freedom of the individual contingent upon the freedom of the collective, itself a classic Marxist claim that all men can be free only once the notion of individuality itself changes. This mandate parallels some quite canonical, radical, and ominous Marxist propositions, including the call for the abolition of bourgeois individuality in The Communist Manifesto and Georg Lukacs’s 1922 assertion that true freedom “must entail renunciation of individual freedom.”20 Lukacs elaborates that this freedom, “implies the conscious subordination of the self to that collective will that is destined to bring real freedom into being.” Straightforward as these similarities may

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be, the sweepingly negative statements about art for art’s sake that build up to Schapiro’s call for a reformulation of individuality also foreshadow the types of criticisms of abstract art and aestheticism that would later become dogmatically de rigeur within the Soviet Union. Schapiro’s essay itself does not advocate such positions, but scholars have understandably read a partyline call into his words. However close or distant to the official policy of the Soviet Union Schapiro’s claims in “The Social Bases of Art” were intended to be, it is worthy of note that it was not until after his death that the essay was republished in the most widely accessible collection of his scholarship, the five volumes entitled Selected Papers. This being said, Schapiro did not prevent the text from being republished during his life, let alone altogether, as some of his contemporaries did with their own early Marxist writings.21 Forasmuch as Schapiro’s precise original intentions in “The Social Bases of Art” are likely lost to history, comparing them to his claims about modern art from the following year does suggest a change in his thinking. For instance, in “The Nature of Abstract Art,” Schapiro claims: “By 1885 only artists had freedom and integrity, but often they had nothing else. The very existence of Impressionism, which transformed nature into a private, unformalized field for sensitive vision, shifting with the spectator, made painting an ideal domain of freedom; it attracted many who were tied unhappily to middle class jobs and moral standards, now increasingly problematic and stultifying with the advance of monopoly capitalism” (192). Here, just one year after “The Social Bases of Art,” a central style of aestheticist art—impressionism—is now associated with a much broader segment of the population. What had previously been the domain of “inherited incomes” has here become solidly “middle class.” Moreover, this 1937 text also positions impressionist painting itself as “an ideal domain of freedom,” a statement that seems to go back on the much more radical theory of individual liberty proposed the previous year. By even suggesting that some people in a capitalist society could have freedom and “nothing else,” Schapiro implies that the complete reconceptualization of individuality itself that he had called for in “The Social Bases of Art” was no longer necessary. There is, naturally, considerable polysemy in Schapiro’s words here, a fact that is partially the product of the indistinctness of the term “freedom” itself and the unstable ways in which Schapiro uses it.22 Such ambiguities aside, in comparison to “The Social Basis of Art,” “The Nature of Abstract Art” can be understood to put forward a less explicitly totalizing demand concerning freedom, even if its rhetoric is still clearly indebted to a form of Marxist

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analysis, and its discussions of the freedom of impressionist artists is still critical of the exploitative social relations that supposedly produced it. The shifting positions about artistic liberty articulated in these essays prove useful for considering the claims of “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” written in their wake. As its title suggests, Schapiro’s Courbet essay articulates how Courbet’s paintings reflect a taste for folklore and popular forms of art—a taste found widely among his associates and members of his petit bourgeois class. Just as Courbet’s friends Max Buchon and Pierre Dupont wrote poetry that celebrated popular forms of poetic expression—“crude, gay masculine songs of the brasserie,” as Schapiro called them—so too do Courbet’s paintings betray an interest in popular prints that are simple and plebian in style.23 Schapiro’s recognition of this fact seems commonplace enough; however, its significance also speaks directly to the above-elaborated tension within Marxist interpretations of artistic freedom. Schapiro connects Courbet’s art to his class interest and thereby makes the characteristic Marxist association between a style of art and that central entity within Marxist theory: class consciousness. Much of Schapiro’s essay on Courbet can be unsurprisingly understood as occupied with parsing the extent to which Courbet’s preference for popular or primitive styles of art can be considered willfully or unconsciously determined—in other words, the extent to which his art is free from or caused by his class interests. And as one might anticipate from Schapiro’s apparently altered position about artistic freedom after 1937, he does identify a certain willful freedom in Courbet’s stylistic choice. According to Schapiro, in Courbet’s grand allegorical self-portrait L’Atelier, the depiction of the child who lies on the floor at the right and draws at the feet of Champfleury—the very critic who defended Courbet’s style as naïve— is a conscious affirmation or defense by the painter of his chosen childlike style.24 Schapiro seems to have known that this assertion would be controversial among leftists and conservatives alike—he notes that his thesis might “circumscribe Courbet’s intention too narrowly”—yet he also reinforces his claim by pointing to a footnote by Courbet himself in the 1855 catalog entry for L’Atelier that proudly insists on Courbet’s status as a self-taught artist. The implications of this point drew the criticism of Raphael, communicated in a letter dated August 18, 1942. In assessing Schapiro’s essay, Raphael backhandedly writes that he “could never share the opinion of certain theorists according to whom history can only produce individuals” and concludes that “in giving a materialist reason [for the primitive qualities of Courbet’s style, Schapiro had] forgotten the dialectic.”25 Raphael here questions Schapiro’s

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very approach to his topic and insinuates that his explanation of Courbet was oversimplified and did not sufficiently account for ideological causes in his art. In response, Schapiro asked Raphael for further clarification; Schapiro had, after all, done much in his essay to connect Courbet’s art to his petit bourgeois identity. He received the following reply of August 25: I asked myself . . . if you can treat your subject as you have done, if one wants to treat it in a scientific way. It is this methodological question which forms the basis of my letter, but I must admit that, from this point of view, additional and essential problems seem inevitable. To put it more concretely: suppose you want to write a study on the world crisis of 1929. Is it possible to do so without having a general theory of capitalist crises? Is it sufficient, from a scientific point of view, to give a detailed description (or narration) of the phenomenon? Can one try to find the causes without comparing them with all the other crises and without analyzing the functioning of capitalism as a whole?26 Raphael’s series of rhetorical questions makes particularly clear the prominent place that totalizing theories had within his thinking—a quality that is shared by many writers in the tradition of Western Marxism.27 On this view, the very possibility of research in any discipline presupposes the necessity of a holistic theory within which individual, empirical observations can be understood. Such statements do not imply, however, that Raphael’s work was not deeply sensitive to empirical considerations, which will become clear when analyzing his interpretation of Guernica. Yet it is hard to deny that Raphael’s totalizing approach to Marxist art history is reminiscent of the more formalized and metaphysical veins of Marxist thinking found in writers following in the tradition of Engels, a point that Schapiro himself notes elsewhere.28 Though Schapiro’s argument about Courbet did not share this assumption, it is important to note that he still considered his interpretation Marxist. As he responded to Raphael: “Your argument that one can’t study the cause of a crisis without having analyzed the functioning of capitalism tout entier, is beside the point; we could never advance at all if we had to have so complete a theory of every phenomenon; even the [Communist Manifesto] of 1847 presents a theory (or 2 theories?) of crisis long before Capital is written. It is by constant effort along both lines of piecemeal problems and more general ones and their mutual interplay that scientific knowledge is achieved.”29 Schapiro’s belief here in the beneficial transaction between piecemeal observations and

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general theorizing is typical of his non-Marxist writings.30 And yet, as is evident from the content and context in which this specific defense of scientific induction is made, Schapiro thought of Marx’s own writing in such terms. This is not to say that Schapiro’s approach to Marx was in line with the vulgar positivism or “scientific socialism” of the Second International; it was not. Schapiro in fact wrote a review of perhaps the most relevant piece of scholarship for his own work to come out of that moment—G. V. Plekhanov’s Art and Society—but he never published it because it was so negative.31 Rather, Schapiro’s Marxism is more accurately understood along the lines of the interpretation of Marx put forward by Schapiro’s lifelong friend—if sometimes adversary—Sidney Hook, whose 1932 book Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx excavated and emphasized the naturalistic tendencies within Marx’s early writings. Under such an interpretation, Marxism is very much antimetaphysical and grounded in Marx’s own astute empirical observations concerning the economic evolution of Western societies. For Hook, as for Schapiro, therefore, Marxism is not a cosmological and deterministic theory of human history but rather a theory that—like any other scientific proposition—can be engaged with experimentally and potentially confirmed or refuted. This approach to Marx’s legacy aside, Schapiro did show significant sympathy for the very mode of thought that more classical Marxists like Raphael used to criticize his own writing: dialectical reasoning. Not only did Schapiro translate and help publish part of Raphael’s treatise Zur Erkenntnis Theorie der konkreten Dialektik, but in corresponding with Hook in 1935, he wrote: “If I myself refuse to adopt dialectical philosophy, it is because I find it too narrow and cumbersome to fit all experiences into an a priori frame of polarities, but on the other hand I am interested in the attempts to formulate a dialectic philosophy because such attempts offer to discover significant constancies or forms in the flux of development.”32 Schapiro’s framing of dialectical materialism here as a mode of reasoning that might discover “constancies of forms in the flux of development” reveals the naturalism and experimentalism of his Marxism. The value of dialectical materialism would thus lie in its potential insight into otherwise obscure situations rather than in the eternal and essential truths it codifies. Insofar as Schapiro was open to both “dialectical” and “scientific” modes of Marxist thought, his writing can be said to resemble that of Karl Korsch, whose early dialectical and later empirical Marxist writing came to serve respectively and somewhat paradoxically as models of the Hegelian and the anti-Hegelian traditions of Western Marxism.33

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Beyond his actual art-historical interpretations from the 1930s and ’40s—sometimes explicitly Marxist, sometimes not Marxist at all—Schapiro’s interest in both dialectical and empirical modes of thinking is pithily reflected in his answers to a questionnaire about dialectical materialism that were published in the journal Dyn in 1942. Schapiro, along with a dozen or so other distinguished intellectuals, was asked, “Is the ‘dialectic method’ a scientific method of investigation? Does science owe important discoveries to this method?” Whereas Hook sharply and clearly refuted these questions, Schapiro categorically demurred by answering, “Not clear” (52). Along similar lines and around this same time, Schapiro helped organize a debate about dialectics that grew out of his friendship with the pioneering surrealist André Breton, an artist who was quite taken with claims about dialectical reasoning. Recruiting the logical empiricist philosophers Ernest Nagel and A. J. Ayer to his side, Schapiro later recollected that he defended the view that the dialectical method was not “different from the logic of practical theory” and that its value lay in its ability to expose unrecognized problems with and abet criticism of idealistic views, a quality it shared with everyday dialogue.34 It was this aspect of dialectical reasoning that appealed to Schapiro. One can thus speculate that it is also what he must have meant to highlight when he tried to convince Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer that Walter Benjamin’s influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” agreed with the basic principles of logical empiricism.35 Considering the thoroughgoing critique of instrumentalist reason that Horkheimer developed specifically in relation to modern scientific practice, it is no wonder that he and Adorno were unsympathetic to Schapiro’s suggestion.36 While Schapiro’s Marxism was more optimistic about science than the Frankfurt School’s, and he himself was more open to dialectical thinking than Hook, his approach to Marx was also inflected by his reading of Dewey, with whom both he and Hook had studied. Hook’s reading of Marx, however, was especially close to Dewey’s own philosophy; so close, in fact, that Max Eastman dubbed Hook’s 1936 book on Marx, “What Marx might have thought and said had he been a pupil of John Dewey.”37 Beyond the abovementioned naturalism of the early Marx—a scientific commitment that was not yet rigidified into a dogma—the main point of this comparison is the relation between Marx’s dialectical method of inference and Dewey’s instrumentalist logic. Both were based on the practical outcome of thought, and both had the goal not only of building knowledge but also of changing the world through it. While it is tempting to understand Schapiro as having closely

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followed this interpretation, he also went beyond it by seeming to side more with Marx than with Dewey. For instance, in a typescript dated April 16, 1943, and simply titled “On Dialectics,” Schapiro notes: Dewey makes the same assumption [as Trotsky and Lenin]; he constantly argues that the old logic presupposed a conception of the world as fixed, uniform, crystalline, and that modern science and social life therefore require another logic, more flexible, more adequate to deal with a content of change or growth. The logical empiricists accuse Dewey of confusing logic and application, but without denying the correctness of his conception of practice. The same people attack dialectics, but refuse to consider its conception of practice which preceded Dewey’s and which is far more radical and thoroughgoing. . . . By discrediting the general theory or method [of dialectics], they hope to discredit the results. But the history of science teaches us that some of the most revolutionary advances were made in the face of methodical uncertainties and contradictions: the creation of the calculus, the development of projective geometry and other branches of mathematics; not to mention modern physics, involved a willingness to introduce concepts and procedures that couldn’t be justified by the traditional logic and rules or scientific procedure. It was only afterwards, when these discoveries had proved their worth that a theoretical foundation was created for them by re-writing the definitions and rules of application to include the new fields.38 Here we see more clearly just how experimentalist Schapiro’s approach to Marxism was; the dialectic itself is interpreted comparatively through its relation to quite canonical scientific discoveries. Later that same year, Schapiro built on this interpretation of the dialectic and called for a more forceful confrontation between Marx’s and Dewey’s approaches so that some synthesis between their views might emerge; he hoped Morton White, who had studied with him as an undergraduate, would one day produce this synthesis. In a letter from June 25, 1943, to his novelist friend and fellow intellectual James Farrell, Schapiro discusses some of his frustrations with the rigidness of dialectical reasoning under orthodox Marxism and observes: Although I do not believe Engels and [Trotsky] were right in their conception of [dialectical materialism] as a formal science and as a set of laws, they were correct in their idea that experience itself, the world of man and

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the world of non-human nature show characteristic features of process, movement, concreteness, crucial increment in change, interaction, and (in man) continuity and mutual determination of theory and practice, which must be recognized and studied if we are to have a sound working knowledge of natural and human affairs. The concentration on the formal dialectic by the Stalinists has something bureaucratic in it (although it isn’t necessarily bureaucratic in origin); people who no longer create living things, but guard an already achieved structure are inclined to be highly formalistic, attached to the rules, the boundaries, the formulas; and in the same way, their enemies, who also have no concern with revolutionary action or thought but are busy mainly with destroying the bureaucratic as such, devote themselves to disproving the formulas and the rules, rather than to reviving the repressed, famished living core of historical materialism. Because of this situation I think it is one of the more important tasks of our times to analyze Dewey’s philosophy from this point of view, to show to what extent the best in his thought agrees with Marxism, and then to reveal the contradictions and confusion that exist in his thinking because he has not carried out his program of thought consistently, compromising with traditional American political and social ideas, fearing to study social conflicts deeply, ignoring the vast contributions of the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th century, and refusing to face the failure of his ideas about education, society, politics, war, culture (and even art).39 Schapiro is clearly criticizing Dewey’s philosophy from a Marxist point of view in this passage. In his correspondence with White in a letter dated July 30, 1943, Schapiro specifies this point further by noting that Dewey’s rejection of Marxism on the grounds that the revolutionary violence for which Marxists often advocated was not an intelligent means of solving problems was hypocritical; Dewey himself had, after all, supported American wars in the past.40 Critical as Schapiro was of Dewey, he was also indebted to him. In the quote above, Schapiro does not reject Dewey completely but rather calls for an analysis of Dewey’s philosophy, which would be “one of the more important tasks of our times.” Considered in light of his typescript “On Dialectics” from earlier the same year, this call is clearly far from coincidental. In fact, taken in conjunction with that text, Schapiro’s statement to Farrell might be

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best summarized as an inversion of Eastman’s characterization of Hook; Schapiro wanted to know “what John Dewey might have thought and said had he been a student of Karl Marx.” Keeping with his hope for such a synthesis, Schapiro himself once began an essay titled “The Sources of Pragmatism” that he never finished. The essay traced pragmatist ideas back to ancient sources that, in light of Schapiro’s frustrated reliance on pragmatist ideas, might have offered him insight into their shared roots with Marx’s own thought.41 By the same token, the emphasis in Schapiro’s letter to Farrell on the dynamics of “experience itself” within Trotsky’s and Lenin’s writing should not be overlooked. “Experience” was one of Dewey’s key terms, and Schapiro had learned as an undergraduate to think about traditions of philosophy through it. One of the courses that Schapiro took with Dewey was described in the course catalog as an attempt “to place and interpret the chief types of philosophy as having a specific origin in some describable phase of experience. The treatment of each as originating in a special phase of experience and as a response to some characteristic problem will serve as a standard of valuation and criticism.”42 Schapiro’s tendency to think about Marxism along these Deweyan lines is suggested in his letter to Farrell, and other passages from his writing during this period also point toward it. For instance, in Schapiro’s critique of “pure art” in “The Nature of Abstract Art,” he famously argues, “There is no ‘pure art,’ unconditioned by experience; all the fantasy and formal construction, even the random scribbling of the hand, are shaped by experience and by nonaesthetic concerns.”43 Here again the term “experience” is importantly twice repeated—just as in the catalog description of Dewey’s course—and the term thereby takes on an all-explanatory and yet unexplained role in Schapiro’s argument. Dewey’s own philosophy suffered from a similar crutch.44 These general tendencies likely raise as many questions as answers. For instance, how does Schapiro’s use of the term “experience” correspond to or diverge from Dewey’s or, for that matter, from other Marxists’? Is Schapiro’s art history closer to what Martin Jay has called the pragmatist cult of experience or the Marxist crisis of experience?45 And how does Schapiro’s penchant to frame art production in relation to the experience of the artist relate to his own devotion to a naturalistic and experimentalist reading of the Marxist tradition? These questions are difficult to definitively answer and are compounded by the fact that Schapiro’s own Marxism underwent considerable change soon after his most evident statements concerning the parallels between Marx’s and Dewey’s writings. In retrospect, one might speculate that the above-discussed confrontation between Marxist and Deweyan philosophy

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that Schapiro called for during the war was part of his own unease with the reality of the communist project in the Soviet Union and thus part of his own political transition. Accepting this hypothesis would mean that the first part of Schapiro’s career was marked by the dominance of his Marxist commitments over his pragmatist education and that after the war Schapiro’s long-held pragmatist tendencies began to assume greater hold. A closer look at Schapiro’s postwar writing begins to test the validity of this interpretation, in a fittingly pragmatist way.

Schapiro’s Picasso and Dewey’s Value

However indirectly, August 27, 1948, was the beginning of a watershed moment in Schapiro’s political life. That evening marked the publicly broadcast beginning of the saga of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, figures whose explosive accusations of espionage, perjury, and defamation against each other are often pointed to as an important beginning of the McCarthy era. Chambers’s authority to accuse Hiss of espionage rested on his confession that he too had once been a spy for the Soviet Union. And since Chambers was one of Schapiro’s closest friends, their friendship soon became part of the Hiss-Chambers affair and would eventually bring Schapiro to testify before a grand jury in February 1949.46 Though Schapiro was just a single and minor witness in this complex story, and major national figures such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Supreme Court justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed were also involved, one might suppose that playing even a minor role in such a sensational event at the outset of the Cold War would have been concerning, especially for an intellectual with quite real— and now quite public—relations to former Communists. To Schapiro’s credit, it is difficult to assess how his friendship with Chambers affected his own politics. Some might be tempted to point to Schapiro’s later defense of Chambers against the wild, psychoanalytic claims of a 1968 biography as proof that Schapiro eventually did abdicate his Marxist beliefs.47 Chambers, after all, was likely the most notorious American advocate of communism as the god that failed. Yet there is too much continuity in Schapiro’s writing to fully support such an inference. In fact, though Schapiro’s later writing is free from the strong Marxist language that marked his early reviews under the pseudonym John Kwait, the notion of a transformed idea of individualism that he had put forward in “The Social Bases of Art” in 1936

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does reappear in his postwar thought, albeit in modified form. For instance, in concluding his essay “The Value of Modern Art,” which had first been given as a lecture at Columbia in 1948, Schapiro asserts: If a truly democratic society were realized (and by that I mean the kind of society which was foreshadowed and sketched already at the time of the French Revolution and shortly after), a society in which no man has power over another, and the peculiarity of individuals is really respected in their everyday life and in their work, and not only in formal courtesies, I believe that under such conditions, the individualism of modern art would be maintained, but it would be another kind of individualism— with altogether new motives, motives arising from a genuine achievement of those values of love, of comradeship and joy that cannot exist unless these original social ideals are fulfilled.48 An echo of the connection between freedom writ large and a transformed notion of individualism is still clearly present in this statement. Schapiro would even go so far as to state in this same lecture that most individuals had given up “the struggle to be free very long ago,”49 thereby implying that postwar America was not in fact a free society. Yet here the political touchstone of Schapiro’s call is the French rather than the Russian revolution—the former being an event whose bourgeois ideals, Schapiro knew, were much more palatable to the American public despite being protosocialist in the case of Gracchus Babeuf. Further, at this point in his career, Schapiro was less categorical in his critique of the current form of individualism that pervaded modern art—in America and elsewhere—and positioned the transformation of individualism itself more as a hypothetical than as a necessary end. Building on this point in his posthumously published lectures on impressionism—first delivered in 1961 but revised throughout the rest of his life—Schapiro even went so far as to imply that Marx’s own pejorative description of bourgeois society as “a world of ‘atomized, mutually hostile individuals’ in collision and conflict” insufficiently recognized that “this restless, chaotic world [of the atomized individual] . . . was also a ground of liberty.”50 Here we can see that, after the war, Schapiro came to further qualify his Marxist allegiances, and even did so in explicit relation to Marx’s own original claims. Apart from comments like these, Schapiro’s refusal to join the Committee for Cultural Freedom on the grounds that he would not participate in red-baiting combined with his role in founding the magazine Dissent in 1953—a journal that explicitly

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described its politics as democratic socialist rather than Marxist—were likely the most publicly visible expression of Schapiro’s political shift; committees and magazines, after all, functioned then as they still function today, as important markers of fealty—political, philosophical, or otherwise—among the intelligentsia. A clear correlate of this qualified Marxist stance was Schapiro’s postwar championing of the avant-garde. “The Value of Modern Art” is a text that is largely concerned with positioning the practices of modern artists as they existed in postwar America as noble models of freedom, even if, as Schapiro says in the above quote, the individualism upon which modern art is so heavily based would be different in a truly democratic society. On this interpretation, the bohemian, marginal form of life so stereotypically associated with avant-garde artists acts as a reminder of the potential freedom that postwar society itself left unrealized. Many of Schapiro’s later statements about modern art echo these romantic ideals, most prominently his essay “On the Liberating Quality of the Avant-Garde” from 1957, though Schapiro did not give this essay its outspoken title. For Schapiro, the avant-garde artists’ pledge of perpetual revolution within their own art, their dedication to make their living with their hands in an age of ever increasing automation, and their pursuit of these goals despite great financial hardship and societal estrangement was a real, potent, and rare reminder of the active pursuit and incomplete achievement of a more equal society. Like many at the time, Schapiro associated avant-garde artistic production with “the School of Paris” and saw Picasso as its ideal representative. There is much, unequivocally, concerning Picasso’s life and art that will always make his place as a model of freedom problematic. Schapiro’s blindness to this fact speaks very much to the patriarchal tendencies of his time and gives credence to his reputation as an avant-garde apologist. This being said, much of Picasso’s life and oeuvre does fit Schapiro’s avant-gardist model, overly quixotic as it is. Three qualities concerning Picasso were especially important to Schapiro.51 First, Picasso’s nationality as a Spaniard who worked in Paris among other émigrés meant that his art was inevitably and intentionally international. Second, and building on this first idea, Picasso’s use of non-Western, stylistically schematic, and purportedly primitive art objects as source material reinforced the notion that all human mark-making tended toward unity of form and toward expression, thereby evincing a fundamentally universalizing ambition, spirit, and power within Picasso’s practice. And finally, and perhaps most importantly for Schapiro, Picasso’s ability to work in different styles at

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the same time allowed him to reject the deeply entrenched dual assumption within art history of styles as cultural achievements and as the basis of artistic value along nationalistic lines. Taken together, these qualities of Picasso’s art and life point to how his work was instrumental in the creation of what Schapiro thought of as the first truly democratic language of art, a language that was seemingly accessible to everyone and that therefore liberated visual art in important ways. As Schapiro put it, after the school of Paris, a “washerwoman may, if given canvas or pencil, produce a work more interesting than her employer can, precisely because she has a simple, open nature and no pretension to skill.”52 This economic and class-based example—however fantastic it may be—nicely connects Schapiro’s praise of Picasso back to his socialist beliefs. The concrete implications of Schapiro’s avant-gardist ideals are elaborated by his specific interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica (fig. 12), which he developed and reworked from 1939 until his death with almost corybantic attention.53 Schapiro’s thesis was simple and in many ways no revelation; the forms and content of Guernica reflect the struggle between Picasso’s artistic practice and political commitments, and the painting itself represents an important step in the artist’s integration of his revolutionary artistic production with the full spectrum of his everyday experience. Before undertaking Guernica, Picasso’s art had been largely apolitical, and it was only with the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 that Picasso had been thrust into the political spotlight; that year Picasso made his anti-Franco position known in his acceptance of the honorary director-in-exile post for Madrid’s Prado Museum. The Spanish Republican government then commissioned Picasso to create a mural for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, and he produced the monumental canvas titled Guernica. Building on his previous work, Picasso initially considered the innocuous, if not insouciant, theme of the artist in his studio for the commission; however, he was compelled by the bombing on April 26, 1937, of the Basque town after which the mural is named to switch his theme. He painted the mural over the course of the following month. As Schapiro points out, Picasso made an explicitly political picture that was also stylistically akin to his larger oeuvre. This decision both discarded the politically unavailing themes of his previous work and simultaneously flew in the face of the Soviet call from the previous year for artists who were sympathetic to the cause of communism to paint in what Schapiro called “a spirit of radical partisanship,” i.e., in a social realist style.54 Given Schapiro’s own struggles with the function of art within the creation of a socialist society, the confluence of factors that

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Fig. 12 Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, DE00050. © 2018 Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

lay behind Guernica were clearly dear to his own thought and give his interpretation of the mural an autobiographical tinge. In pursuing his thesis about Guernica, Schapiro focuses on the month-long period of gestation that led to the painting’s creation: May 1937. For Schapiro this month represents an extended period of self-critique and perpetual questioning within Picasso’s practice, during which time the artist continuously reworked his own efforts for the commission. Schapiro notes, for instance, that the first sketches for Guernica show a small figure of Pegasus emerging from the wound in the central horse’s side—a cloying detail that Picasso was right to remove, Schapiro claims—and that the limbs of the slain soldier on the mural’s left were fundamentally rearranged in the course of its development (e.g., fig. 13). Moreover, Schapiro shows how the long history of French art plays a role in Guernica’s composition: the bold extended arm gestures and triangular compositions are reminiscent of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and even François Rude’s sculpture The Marseillaise. Schapiro emphasizes that each of these were readily accessible to Picasso in Paris and also expressed statements concerning “justice, protest, victimization, heroic resistance, and revolt.”55 Rather than enumerating a mere laundry list of sources and adaptations for Guernica, Schapiro interprets the painting in this traditional art-historical

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Fig. 13 Pablo Picasso, Guernica (first state), May 11, 1937. © 2018 Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dora Marr. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

mode because it shows that the mural’s process of creation was a kind of struggle. Through Schapiro’s interpretation, Guernica itself becomes a testament to the kind of active, perpetual self-criticism that moves beyond mere aestheticizing cavils and that Schapiro valued so highly in the practices of avant-garde artists. To dramatize this point, Schapiro concludes that Guernica is not, in fact, a finished whole—let alone an ineffable masterpiece—but rather a mere record or index of an individual’s struggle to balance his everyday practice against some quite serious and intractable political questions. It is precisely because the painting lays bare this struggle between the artistic and political that Schapiro values it. For insofar as the painting betrays the conditions of its creation to us, so too does it reveal the critical, avant-gardist spirit from which it emerged—that, for Schapiro, was an essential reminder of freedom in the postwar world. We too, Schapiro seems to be saying, can and should struggle like Picasso with these questions. On this point it is interesting to note that Schapiro was also highly suspicious of the contemporaneous criticisms of Guernica as not politically effective.56 For Schapiro, such assertions followed “the official Soviet line in art,” and considering his abovementioned exchanges with Raphael, he may have had his

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former friend in mind.57 While it is unclear when Schapiro would have read Raphael’s specific interpretation of Guernica—a text that was not published until 1968—Schapiro did associate Raphael with what he saw as an irrational sympathy with the Soviet Union after the Moscow show trials. Just prior to Raphael’s criticisms of Schapiro’s Courbet essay, Schapiro had sent Raphael a copy of the Dewey Commission’s exoneration of Leon Trotsky from Stalin’s accusations, a report that forced moments of reckoning—if not apostasy— among many on the left. Raphael never discussed the report with Schapiro; however, the mere sharing of it led to a caesura in their correspondence. This fact gives credence to Schapiro’s assumption that his own confidence in the report’s conclusions were connected with Raphael’s subsequent criticisms of his Courbet essay. Later that year Schapiro dismissively wrote to John Farrell, “I suppose [Raphael] will also find Trotsky insufficiently dialectical and therefore guilty of the charges.”58 Schapiro’s backhanded comment aside, Raphael’s largely pejorative judgment of Guernica resembles the Marxist criticism of the mural as politically inadequate, most clearly in its claim that the painting “relieves [man] of the responsibility for not making his own history.”59 Going further, Raphael even dubbed Guernica an unwitting “Fascist twist backward” and supported his judgment by pointing to the extreme diversity of interpretations of the mural’s iconography.60 For Raphael, the machinations over Guernica’s symbolism functioned to redirect attention away from the world of action and politics and into an interior realm of meaning that had the effect of maintaining the status quo. As was well known, Picasso himself had made inconsistent statements concerning the meaning of the bull in Guernica, and Raphael was sure to collect some of these statements and the contradictory interpretations that they engendered as evidence for his claim concerning the mural’s problematic obscurantism. Raphael’s positions on these matters follow closely from his general theory of art, which is helpful to consider in order to understand the motivations underlying his and Schapiro’s different interpretations. Stated simply, the value of works of art for Raphael lay in their ability to help stimulate their viewers to action, and true artworks achieve this end by facilitating the re-creation of the act of creation itself in the viewer’s experience of them. As he puts it, “Art is an ever-renewed creative act, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man’s creative powers in crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.”61 Such a claim reveals an important continuity with Schapiro’s own approach; as we have

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seen, Schapiro values works of art as models of active individual engagement and as reminders about the incompletely realized ideals of a democratic society. In this way, Raphael’s model of an active analysis of art can be productively compared to what Schapiro called “critical seeing,” an aspect of his work that I will more fully address in the chapter “1961: Debating Berenson with Berlin.” Despite this similarity, however, Schapiro and Raphael interpret some of the same specific qualities of Picasso’s art in fundamentally antonymous ways. For instance, Raphael explains Picasso’s habit of moving between different styles—the same quality of Picasso’s oeuvre that Schapiro saw as a testament to Picasso’s artistic freedom—in sweepingly collective terms, even claiming that it was “inevitable in an artist whose personality is the symbol of the bourgeois ruling class, because he himself and his epoch are experiencing the most contradictory tensions.”62 Similarly, whereas Schapiro interprets the black, white, and gray color scheme of Guernica as evocative of period films—in relation to the mural’s screenlike scale and the fact that Picasso had experienced the bombing primarily through the media—Raphael has a different take.63 He claims that the color palette had “a metaphysical rather than an empirical reality. . . . In the colors of Guernica Picasso has realized a never-changing conscious-being: for him this is not a self-destructive contradiction in terms but the highest reality.”64 The distance, of course, between Raphael’s grand, sweeping extrapolations and Schapiro’s commonsense, literal inferences parallels their disagreement about dialectical reasoning, not to mention their divergent intellectual formations. In addition to these differences, Schapiro and Raphael’s disagreement about Guernica also seems to partially rest on their fundamentally different understandings of the ground of value in works of art. For Raphael, Guernica fails as a work of art but achieves value as testimony to abstract truths about Picasso’s world. “Even Picasso,” as Raphael dramatically puts it, “the greatest artist of our time, was unequal to the challenge of his age, belonging as he did to a class and intellectual climate which had outlived their usefulness.”65 Raphael sets up the mural’s black and white colors as binary oppositions, in effect turning them into abstractions that are valued for the insight that they offer about the structure of the world from which they emerged. Schapiro, in contrast, is less willing to separate the value or interest of Picasso’s art from his conscious experience. He values those same colors for the evidence they purport to provide concerning the distance between Picasso’s actual experience producing the mural and the experience that is represented in it.

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Following this interpretation, it is interesting to note that Schapiro long felt unsatisfied with the underlying axiology of the Marxist tradition. As noted in the first chapter, already in 1940 Schapiro had asserted that “Dewey[’s] . . . recent little book Theory of Valuation far surpasses in clarity and sharpness anything in Marxist literature.”66 Dewey’s book advocated a naturalistic and experimental approach to value judgments—meaning that judgments of value should be treated much like judgments of fact and submitted to public debate and experimentation. Schapiro’s admiration of Dewey’s book would therefore seem to reinforce his embrace of empirical and naturalistic approaches to art, value judgments included. Schapiro continued to engage with pragmatist theories of value throughout his career, and his interpretations of works of art were sometimes even praised for being confirmable.67 For instance, in Life Magazine’s 1948 Roundtable on Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art, Schapiro built his interpretation of Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror on a lengthy description of the painting’s specific visual qualities. In so doing, according to the philosopher T. M. Greene, Schapiro enabled “any intelligent layman” to assess the “validity” of the painting.68 However precarious his arguments are, however bound up with the formalist assumptions that pervaded both his interpretations and the artistic production of his generation, one of the great appeals of Schapiro’s approach is precisely that its strong empiricist commitments strive to overcome the seemingly unavoidable differences between individual responses to works of art. They thereby identify some ground for the potentially shared value of those works. In its attempts at reconciliation, Schapiro’s approach is therefore fundamentally hopeful and optimistic, yet it also walks a tightrope. As Schapiro’s career progressed, his arguments did not become any less perilous. An example of the danger inherent in Schapiro’s position can be found in his 1970 response to the request of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) to remove Guernica from display at the Museum of Modern Art. During the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War, and especially after the massacre at My Lai, the AWC claimed that MoMA was a fundamentally inappropriate venue for the painting as the museum had strong governmental ties. The implication was that the same kinds of war crimes that Picasso painted were now, in 1970, connected to—if not embodied in—MoMA itself. As the AWC brashly put it, Americans should not “be indignant about the crimes of others—and ignore our own crimes.”69 Schapiro, unsurprisingly, did not agree with such statements, and one can suspect that his very understanding of the value of Guernica as a work of art would have informed his reasoning. As previously

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noted, Schapiro did not see the value of Guernica as solely a protest painting but rather as a testament to Picasso’s struggle between artistic freedom and political beliefs. In contrast, the AWC’s call to remove the mural from MoMA framed Guernica as a more straightforwardly political image—an interpretation whose calls for direct action are reminiscent of Schapiro’s early, more clearly communist essays. Accordingly, the AWC’s own attempt to remove the mural from MoMA can be seen as a continuation of the important work that Guernica itself, on their reading, had been doing all along. Overall, conflicts like these between Schapiro’s thought and others on the left are suggestive of how his Marxist convictions had long been quite partial and sat neither particularly well with the forms of Marxism that developed among continental intellectuals of his generation nor with the Marxism of the generation that preceded him, dubbed the New Left. Schapiro’s Marxism, though marked by a shift away from a more orthodox position and often expressed through claims that belong to Marxist argumentation, was so inflected by traditional scientific commitments to naturalism and experimentation that he was easily understood to be as much outside of Marxism as a proponent of it. However unsatisfactory such a conclusion may be, the status of being both within and without also defines political independence, Marxist or otherwise, an affiliation that perhaps most succinctly defines Schapiro’s politics over the long term.

1947 The “Aesthetic Attitude,” Coomaraswamy’s Metaphysics, and the Westernness of Art’s History

In 1947 Schapiro published what is now one of his most well-known and widely read essays: “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art.” Therein he argues that an appreciation of art objects as sources of sensuous or aesthetic delight already existed in the Western Middle Ages, thus turning the period’s art and thought into an important forerunner of the modern, aestheticizing art world of his own time. Considering the import of such a claim for the diachronic art history of Western Europe and its ties to Schapiro’s aforementioned Marxist critiques, the essay’s original place of publication is somewhat curious: the Festschrift of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. The British-Ceylonese intellectual was a pioneer in the study of the art and thought of South Asia and worked as a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1917 until his death. Although Schapiro had corresponded with Coomaraswamy since the late 1920s, because Coomaraswamy’s writing primarily concerned a topic that was undoubtedly far afield from Schapiro’s Western focus, the original bibliographic context of “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” raises several important and unanswered questions. First, exactly why was Schapiro’s essay a fitting contribution to Coomaraswamy’s Festschrift,

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and how might we understand it as the end point of the almost twenty-year exchange between the two men? Second, given the prominent place of the essay’s ideas within Schapiro’s writing, how might Schapiro’s long-term debate with Coomaraswamy relate to his thinking more generally, and what type of broader lessons might it entail? To answer these questions, I will describe the origins and substance of the critical exchanges between Schapiro and Coomaraswamy both chronologically and in detail, arguing that the sweepingly diachronic and comparative perspective of “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” relates synecdochically to Schapiro and Coomaraswamy’s extended debate about the appropriate general framework for the study of art’s history. Whereas Schapiro—as initially discussed in the first chapter and further elaborated in the previous one—was committed to a mode of sociohistorical analysis that was closely bound to a modernist conception of form, Coomaraswamy based his scholarship on what he termed the “traditional” theory of art, a theory rooted in a transcendental metaphysics that claimed truly international support as well as ancient origins. This chapter contends that Schapiro’s long-standing debate with Coomaraswamy about such frameworks is what made “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” a fitting contribution to his Festschrift. Schapiro’s confrontation with Coomaraswamy’s attempt to base his art history on a single theory of art, however, also has wider implications; the debate between the two men exposes tensions that parallel two persistent yet contradictory qualities of Schapiro’s writing broadly conceived. On the one hand, Schapiro was sensitive to the political perils of generalizing art-historical arguments. He was, for instance, deeply suspicious of the racialized explanations of style that were widespread in his day and of the potentially hegemonic ends to which generalizing art-historical claims could be put.1 On the other hand, Schapiro’s own commitment to defending modernism as a unified, international style of artistic production and to the formal analysis of nonmodern art objects as if they were modernist creations meant that he himself also relied upon a universalizing framework for the study of art’s history. Such conflicting allegiances echo the uneven connections between Schapiro’s scholarship and natural scientific reasoning; they have remained central to ongoing debates about the study of cultures from around the globe. I end this chapter with a discussion of this tension as it relates not only to Schapiro’s and Coomaraswamy’s writing but also to the forms of modernist artistic production that they respectively defended. In so doing, I seek to diffuse and complicate the almost knee-jerk reaction of many scholars today

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against global, universal, or world art histories by showing that generalizing art-historical ideas and practices have long had important correlates in visual cultures outside the “West.” The seemingly straightforward criticisms of universalizing forms of art-historical argument become much less secure, it seems to me, when tied to both art writers and art objects that themselves were part of the very cultures that are all too often washed over by art history’s Western bias.

Contextualizing Schapiro’s Engagement with Coomaraswamy

Schapiro’s scholarly exchange with Coomaraswamy began while Schapiro was still writing his dissertation. On December 22, 1928—in the winter before Schapiro would file his Ph.D.—Schapiro wrote a lengthy letter to Coomaraswamy concerning the possible South Asian sources of Western medieval imagery.2 The conversation had been spurred on by Coomaraswamy’s interest in the potential connection between the common Indian motif of Brahma as being “navel born” and the iconography of the Old Testament story of the Tree of Jesse, which showed a tree springing from the protagonist’s navel.3 Such a topic was typical of art-historical research of the time, as an extensive debate was then raging about the extent and particulars of the Eastern sources of early Christian imagery; Schapiro’s M.A. thesis of 1926 even notes in passing the potential “Asiatic” sources of the Romanesque sculptures of Moissac.4 As Schapiro’s 1928 letter and Coomaraswamy’s subsequent article about the Tree of Jesse show, however, their respective approaches to this research topic speak to much more than the particular facts that pertained to this individual case. While Coomaraswamy affirms the potential and import of this cross-cultural connection, Schapiro is suspicious of it. In his letter to Coomaraswamy, he stressed how depictions of the Tree of Jesse often diverged from depictions of Brahma. As we will see, this divergence is quite fitting, as it foreshadows the conflict between the empirical foundation of Schapiro’s historicism and the metaphysical basis of Coomaraswamy’s “traditional” theory of art. Building on this early encounter—although departing from its rather neutral tone—a more developed and especially revealing conversation between Schapiro and Coomaraswamy began in the spring of 1932; in a letter of April 29 of that year, Coomaraswamy sent Schapiro one of his recent books, “Introduction to the Art of Eastern Asia.”5 The title suggests the book is a basic text—and to a certain extent it is. The actual arguments of “Introduction to the Art of

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Eastern Asia” are, however, quite different from those that Coomaraswamy put forward in his abovenamed 1929 article on the Tree of Jesse. As Roger Lipsey notes, around this later point in his career, Coomaraswamy began to more fully integrate the documentary focus of his earlier scholarship with his long-standing moral, if not sanctimonious, beliefs.6 Whereas Coomaraswamy’s early writing adopts a fairly straightforward and commonsense approach—and thereby reflects his training and survey work as a geologist—by the 1930s, he began to position his writing on art as a mere appendage to a much grander transcendental metaphysics that was infused with strong value judgments. His 1932 “Introduction to the Art of Eastern Asia” testifies to this change, as the essay connects a historical account of art objects with a theory of ideal human conduct that built off of a tough critique of industrialized society and that Coomaraswamy connected to Indian, Christian, and ancient traditions of thought. To get a better sense of what this view entails, I will first briefly sketch Coomaraswamy’s critique of Western art and then introduce Schapiro’s initial reaction to it. As is the case with many of his other texts from this period, Coomaraswamy’s “Introduction to the Art of Eastern Asia” frequently points to the “naturalism” and “aestheticism” that characterizes much of Western art since the Renaissance as representative of its superficiality. Coomaraswamy points to naturalism in this regard because it testifies to a focus on the mere surface appearance of objects. For Coomaraswamy, true artworks only earn their title and value by being mechanisms through which their observers come to learn something deeper about the world. As he put it, true “art is not concerned with Nature, but with the Nature of nature; in this respect it is nearer to science than to our modern idea about art” (196). The aestheticism of much of Western art—that is, its focus on the pleasurable effects of art objects based on their appearance alone—was also problematically facile because it turned art into an object of leisure and denied its important twofold connection to work. Art objects themselves should be the products of the fulfilling labor of an artisan, and the perception of these objects should require effort on the part of the perceiver; if not, then the pleasure they could provide was fleeting at best. As Coomaraswamy laments: “We have convinced ourselves that art is a thing too good for this world, labor too brutal an activity to be mentioned in the same breath with art; that the artist is one not much less than a prophet, the workman not much more than an animal. Thus a perverted idealism and an amazing insensibility exist side by side; neither condition could, in fact, exist without the other. All that we need insist upon here is that none

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of these categories can be recognized in Asia” (212–23). This passage implies the integration of art and work that was the basis of Coomaraswamy’s ideal of human conduct. He saw the separation of these two aspects of human life as a peculiarly harmful product of Western industrialized society and of Western thought concerning the visual arts. Quite apart from the facticity of such a claim, Coomaraswamy’s strong attachment to this moral position was the partial product of his education in England and his reading of nineteenth-century reformers like John Ruskin and socialists like William Morris. In fact, Coomaraswamy himself took over Morris’s Kelmscott Press, which even printed his first book.7 Against this Victorian background, however, Coomaraswamy also identifies his theory with medieval Christian as well as Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and frequently used terminology in Pali and Sanskrit to make his arguments. For instance, in making his critique of aestheticism, he once described the religious function of iconography within Rajput paintings (e.g., fig. 14) as follows: “The life of simple herdsmen and milkmaids is denotation (abhidha), the Sports of Krishna connotation (laksana), the harmony of spirit and flesh the content (vyanjana). These, operating in the media available, have made the paintings what they are. If we ignore these sources of the presented fact, the painting itself ‘unique in the world’s art,’ how can we expect to find in the fact any more than a pleasant or unpleasant sensation—and can we regard it as worthwhile (purusartha) merely to add one more to the abundant sources of sensation already available?”8 As these lines make clear, the moralizing bent of Coomaraswamy’s writing extends well beyond nineteenth-century ideas concerning social reform in England. Interestingly, however, neither the diversity of Coomaraswamy’s sources nor the long-term development of his thought makes his theory inconsistent. In fact, as Katherine Gilbert and Coomaraswamy himself note, Coomaraswamy’s theory can be summarized as several interrelated theses.9 In addition to the negative dimension of his approach, as manifest in his critique of aestheticism and naturalism, the positive dimension of his theory consists of a handful of common enough propositions. First, iconographic correctness in art objects is especially important for Coomaraswamy, as iconography was the central means by which art objects made the moral lessons of religious teaching visible. Second, and very much following from this first principle, the value of art for Coomaraswamy is tied to its moral instructiveness and its role as a guide to just behavior. Third, what makes an artist is not his imaginative or creative power but rather the satisfaction he gains from his morally instructive practice. Fourth, artists need to

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Fig. 14 Attributed to the family of Nainsukh, The Hour of Cowdust, 1810–15. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Denman Waldo Ross Collection, 22.683. Photo © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

be sheltered from the commercial pressures of capitalism in order to be able to carry out their work freely. And fifth, the beauty of art is not some form of pure delight but rather a reminder of art’s moral value. These axioms form the basis of Coomaraswamy’s general theory of art, and he claims that all art through human history that is worthy of its name reflects these principles. As we might expect from such categorical claims, Schapiro was provoked by Coomaraswamy’s “disparaging contrast of Eastern and Western art . . . to write a defense of ‘naturalism’ and ‘aestheticism,’” not just in Western art but as principles of artistic production in general.10 In the same letter of April 29, 1929, Schapiro states: “Without that ‘naturalism’ and without the

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distinction between artist and artisan, your own effort to introduce us to a deeply philosophical art, like the Eastern, which is foreign to our civilization, would be meaningless; since it is only in a culture in which the values of contemplation have become detached from the values of daily use (instrumentality) that remote arts, of varying style, of varying ‘naturalism,’ can become accessible.”11 Schapiro’s point here is simple enough. The naturalism that Coomaraswamy disparages is unavoidably a part, if not an extension, of the development of what we might colloquially call a scientific attitude in general. Naturalistic depictions are premised on a detached and—at least to a certain extent—value-neutral position; that is why perspectival depictions look like the objects they depict not just to the people who made them but for everyone, even people from different cultures. And Coomaraswamy’s own ability to write a historical account of Eastern art in English and for an American audience is premised on a similar development. However problematic naturalism may be, without the distinction between subject and object, upon which naturalism is based, the notion of introducing non-Western art to a Western audience would not only be meaningless but would have likely been historically occluded. Though Schapiro’s criticism here undercuts the very foundation of Coomaraswamy’s claims, Coomaraswamy did not let it disable his argument. Rather, he replied to Schapiro in letters from April 30 and May 3 by acknowledging that he could “make allowances for naturalism . . . but not for the distinction between artist and artisan.” As he continues: “It is only too easy for me to think that the contemplative life has deeper value than any other, yet it cannot be lived all the time, and I feel that our modern insistence on the purely contemplative value of art not merely ignores that art is related to the whole of man, but is rather fantastic in relation to our characteristic extroversion in other respects. . . . To my mind, speculation about a kind of truth conceived to exist in vacuo is nothing but ‘curiosity.’”12 For Coomaraswamy, the point of writing about art is not to merely document its facts for their own sake, to pursue some kind of scientific “truth in vacuo,” because the facts of art do not exist apart from the communities of readers who might benefit from them. As Coomaraswamy states later on in his reply, his writing is not a form of disinterested scientific inquiry but rather “a means of becoming what we are,” that is, a device for attaining “the summum bonum,” or ultimate good, that he believed was inherent in everyone.13 Here we can see that Coomaraswamy’s beliefs at this time—much like Schapiro’s romantic anticapitalist tendencies—were heavily directed toward an ethical end and

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that much of his criticism of Western art concerns what he took to be its lack of moral direction.14 Despite this parallel between their thinking, in his correspondence with Coomaraswamy, Schapiro did not disclose that he was also the author of some quite extreme critiques of Western art, aestheticism included. Rather, Schapiro’s last letter in this 1932 exchange, dated May 6, reveals some frustration on his part, particularly in its tone and length. Schapiro reasserts his initial critique and claims that Coomaraswamy’s criticism of his position was directed at an imaginary foe. On Schapiro’s view, to separate “naturalism” from all value claims—as Coomaraswamy suggested Schapiro proposed—is both an inaccurate representation of his position and impossible. For Schapiro, naturalism “cannot be identified with the idea of obtaining facsimiles of an objectively known exterior world, for any knowledge implies a number of special viewpoints, assumptions, purposes, and specifically valued contents and qualities.”15 If this fact seems undeniable and somewhat obvious, in a nod to Coomaraswamy, Schapiro also insists upon an important lesson that follows from it: namely, that the entanglement of naturalistic knowledge and human interest is not sufficient to turn science or naturalism into a defensible moral code. As he describes it: “Science can become a religion only in the metaphorical sense that laymen will bend their knees to scientists; that the Nobel Prizemen will be cardinals of a sacred college; and that people will make pilgrimages to the tomb of Einstein. But science itself will not give us our moral or metaphysical values, since science is itself a value derived from a more central naturalistic-rational world view and an aggressive culture.”16 The fact that Schapiro ends his description of science by noting its origins in an “aggressive culture” is fitting. Earlier in the same letter and much in keeping with his then-communist beliefs, Schapiro strongly advocated curbing the exploitative dimensions of Western capitalism. What this means, of course, is that Schapiro by no means saw his defense of a disinterested scientific or naturalistic worldview as incompatible with the evidently value-laden and openly interested politics of communism. Rather, science and the interests of the working class are, for Schapiro, complementary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schapiro’s subsequent exchanges with Coomaraswamy continue to address this issue and even provide a specific instance of how the issue played itself out in Schapiro’s more disinterested scholarship. For instance, in 1941 the two men again exchanged letters, this time published in the Art Bulletin. They focused on an interpretation of an ancient relief sculpture of the Persian king Darius fighting with a monster (fig. 15). In a previous

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Fig. 15 Palace of Darius, Persepolis, relief of Darius fighting a monster (detail), ca. 500 B.C.E. Myron Bement Smith Collection: Antoin Sevruguin Photographs, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Katherine Dennis Smith, 1973–1985, FSA_A.4_2.12.Sm98.

review, Schapiro had insisted that the expressionless face of Darius in this relief could not—as a book that he had reviewed suggested—be taken as evidence for a “national ideal of decorum in behavior and restraint in artistic expression.”17 Drawing on his previously discussed debt to Löwy, Schapiro noted that such an interpretation ignores the well-documented fact that the very visual qualities that seem to give the relief these “decorous” and “restrained” qualities—specifically the figures’ stiff postures positioned to show their greatest

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breadth—are found across ancient art traditions the world over. Because of this, the archaic style of this relief almost certainly emerges more from general conditions of human perception and image-making than from any culturally specific expressive tendency. Such an assertion at first seems rather value-neutral and thus would not seem to relate to Schapiro’s socialist politics. However, the universality of the claim—that the common qualities of archaic style are found across cultures and throughout time—also complements the ideal of the unity of humankind that lay behind the communist project. Consequently, Schapiro was quite opposed to the general notion that styles could express culturally specific or national characteristics, a penchant of his that also tacitly reiterates his strong opposition to any form of racialized explanation. Interpretations of style based on cultural or racial boundaries divided humanity into oppositional groups while Schapiro was trying to unite it. The universalizing undercurrent of Schapiro’s critique here has not aged particularly well. Criticisms of art-historical generalization are one of the most common refrains of more recent scholarship on non-Western art, yet many today surely do share Schapiro’s aversion to historical explanations based on race. Considering this conflict, it is interesting to note that Coomaraswamy challenged Schapiro on a related point, although not one that would likely fall on sympathetic ears today. For Coomaraswamy, Schapiro’s complete rejection of the notion that style can in some way be expressive not just of an individual but of a cultural milieu was a grave mistake. As he insisted, “There is no such thing as ‘simply the style.’”18 Parallel to his abovementioned perspective on visual art as an instrument for the realization of an idealized community, Coomaraswamy posited a necessary relationship between the style of this sculpture and the culture that produced it: “Primitive” art is essentially an “imitation of the actions of Gods and Heroes,” and as Plato says in this connection, whoever would represent these invisible realities “truly” must have known “themselves as they really are.” But nothing can be known except in the mode of the knower; to the extent that the Gods are man-made they “take shapes that are imaged by their worshippers,” and these are an index to the worshippers themselves. . . . Things such as facial expression and gesture are therefore significant of states of being . . . these gestures are matters of prescriptions, not of taste, the intention being to conform the icon to its paradigm, so that there may be what Plato calls not so much “likeness” as an “adequate” representation.19

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Coomaraswamy’s interpretation here saves the notion that the Darius relief could express the culture that produced it. However, it only accomplishes its goal by positioning the relief within the general framework of Coomaraswamy’s transcendental and moralizing aesthetics, a framework in which the very purpose of works of art is to function as tools in humankind’s striving for social perfection. Such an interpretation flies in the face of several of art history’s foundational premises, most evidently that works of art should be disinterestedly understood in historically and culturally specific contexts and as evidence for the diverse peculiarities of those contexts. Schapiro’s brief reply to Coomaraswamy’s letter makes a similar point; the correlation that Coomaraswamy draws between art and moral traits simply does not hold in all cases, and because of this, it is easily disproven from an empirical point of view.20 Though art historians today will likely share this perspective, accepting the idea of art without an ethical framework also makes the field blind to general claims about art’s efficacy. And to narrate a history of art without a theory of art, we can also imagine Coomaraswamy saying, is an equally perilous endeavor as it leaves the identification of objects that are worthy of the attention of art historians precariously open. Schapiro’s 1947 essay “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” was written in the wake of this ongoing conversation and can well be understood as following from it. Schapiro summarizes the essay’s principal claim: “By the eleventh and twelfth centuries there had emerged in western Europe within church art a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art. This new art, on the margins of the religious work, was accompanied by a conscious taste of the spectators for the beauty of workmanship, materials, and artistic devices, apart from the religious meanings.”21 Schapiro’s argument follows directly from his defense of the aestheticism that Coomaraswamy strongly criticized both in his publications and in his correspondence with Schapiro himself. Moreover, the very idea that aestheticism was not merely the product of Western industrialization had been an integral part of Schapiro’s letter to Coomaraswamy of May 6, 1932. Schapiro then explicitly insisted that the “purely contemplative value of art” was “not merely modern,” a claim that he elaborated in the 1947 essay by way of an examination of the aestheticizing contemplation of art objects documented in the writing of the Western Middle Ages.22 While this connection largely explains why “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” was a fitting addition to Coomaraswamy’s Festschrift,

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it only captures half of Schapiro’s initial critique. As summarized above, in 1932 Schapiro had also claimed that aestheticism was but one correlate of the contemplative view of art. Another and potentially more important correlate was the rise of naturalistic depictions and of a scientific attitude in general. Forasmuch as Schapiro never fully articulated this side of his position, its presence in his correspondence with Coomaraswamy undoubtedly complicates his unapologetic modernism in important ways, most notably by revealing that Schapiro’s embrace of modern art and the aestheticizing attitude it embodies were much more than a personal, fashionable, or generational aesthetic preference. Rather, Schapiro’s modernism was also part and parcel of his embrace of science and of science’s attempt to understand art from around the world within a unifying framework. Building on this connection, in what follows I frame the relation between Schapiro’s aestheticism and his commitment to science by way of what is likely his most developed description of this connection: his essay “The Fine Arts and the Unity of Mankind.” The essay not only speaks to this aspect of Schapiro’s writing by way of his above-elaborated debate with Coomaraswamy, but it also brings out the possibilities and dangers inherent in the generalizations put forward by both scholars, thereby helping to further articulate the potentials and liabilities of a global history of art as it was formulated and defended in their scholarship.

“The Fine Arts and the Unity of Mankind”

Granting that it was published posthumously, Schapiro’s essay “The Fine Arts and the Unity of Mankind” was finished between 1943 and 1947, right in the middle of his ongoing exchange with Coomaraswamy. Within this historical context, it comes as no surprise that the essay explicitly addresses and criticizes the “perennial metaphysics” underlying Coomaraswamy’s globalizing claims. For Schapiro: “The pretended unity of metaphysical tradition is itself a myth, which has to be defended with the paradoxical assumption that the contradictory beliefs are only dialectical negations and the stages of ascent to a higher truth, reached in overcoming the negation. Under this theory there is no real error, and it is wrong for those who believe they possess an absolute truth to condemn error, since the latter must always be a partial truth and a step toward a higher doctrine that also abolishes their preceding beliefs.”23 Here we see that Schapiro’s critique of Coomaraswamy, like his criticism of Raphael, is based on his embrace of a positivistic epistemology and his belief

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that knowledge about art—just like knowledge about the world—can be either right or wrong. He believes that art and our knowledge of it are not merely a part of a larger process of human becoming and self-realization. G. W. F. Hegel’s work, of course, and his long philosophical shadow within art history also partially motivate these criticisms, and Schapiro’s critique of “dialectical negations” underscores his intentional self-distancing from the scholarly tradition that Hegel largely established. It is, however, important to note that Schapiro was not as critical of Hegel as was his near contemporary and interlocutor Ernst Gombrich, who, in his classic essay “In Search of Cultural History,” positioned Hegel and his epigones on a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. In contrast, Schapiro was embarrassed by the lack of specificity within art-historical appeals to Hegel’s thought—most notably to the notion of Weltanschauungen—but did not write off those appeals entirely. In his essay “Philosophy and Worldview in Painting,” Schapiro puts forward a typology of art-historical Hegelianisms and thereby attempts to further specify and understand their varied arguments. Though Schapiro makes his critical stance toward the existing art-historical appropriations of Hegel clear, his very engagement with the material and his attempt to parse its differences and subtleties is quite opposed to Gombrich’s positioning of the entire Hegelian tradition as irredeemable. This difference makes one wonder what Schapiro would have thought of the more recent debates about Hegel’s aesthetics that have emerged from a return to original notes taken during Hegel’s lectures. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, for instance, has argued that Hegel had a much more experimental attitude toward individual artworks than the initial editions of Hegel’s aesthetics would lead one to believe. And beyond aesthetics, recent analytic philosophers who very much follow in the tradition of pragmatism that Schapiro at least partially embraced—most notably Robert Brandom—have relied on a rereading of Hegel to construct their own arguments.24 Nevertheless, it is against metaphysical presuppositions and a priori frameworks like Hegel’s and Coomaraswamy’s—at least as he understood them—that Schapiro largely wrote. He likens the “detached standpoint” from which he seeks to reveal the unifying potential of visual art to developments in modern geometry, a comparison that he developed by way of his friendship with the philosopher of science Ernest Nagel.25 Just as mathematicians had realized that Euclidean geometry was partially based on arbitrary and conventional assumptions—meaning that one can develop alternative geometric systems with different rules as well as general rules for transforming

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theorems from one geometry into another—so too has art history recognized that its assumptions about art were arbitrary and conventional while at the same time developing a more encompassing and general perspective so as to be able to speak about art across cultures. Of course, Schapiro admits that this analogy did not hold entirely—most obviously because it excluded from its analysis the culturally specific values that lay behind the creation of works of art in the first place. However, he nonetheless believed in the importance of developing something like a geometrically detached standpoint for art history because of two seemingly banal and important facts. First, the extant historical record of visual art objects from throughout human history and from disparate corners of the globe offers a much more comprehensive picture of human cultural production than the record of any other cultural activity—for instance, in comparison to the extant historical record of music or literature or performance. Second, because visual art objects have been made primarily to be looked at and the human visual system is often understood as more culturally independent and more historically and evolutionarily stable than language, the history of visual art offers the viewer in the present an incomparable opportunity to experience and even begin the long process of understanding corners of humanity that would be otherwise completely inaccessible. As Schapiro romantically put it, “The minds of all the peoples of the world are brought to us through their visual arts. We may be unable to converse with a Chinese or Hindu in his own tongue; we would have the greatest difficulty in sharing his way of life; but through his imagery and design, his heart and deepest thoughts are directly available to us.”26 Schapiro’s assertion here is clearly overstated, and the extent to which even a more modest formulation of this claim would be true is highly debatable. Seemingly partially aware of this fact, Schapiro was sure to add that the unity that visual art offers is also potentially superficial if not dangerously homogenizing. The very possibility that the visual arts might provide access to some kind of cross-cultural and diachronic understanding of humanity is often premised on identifying qualities in non-Western and nonmodern art that are valued only because those qualities are also found in modern Western art. A stereotypical example under Schapiro’s modernist framework is African sculpture described and valued as proto-Cubist rather than as specific and diverse products of their own specific and diverse cultures. More problematically, the practice of doing so can also become, as Schapiro notes, “an instrument of domination.”27 A modernizing approach to non-Western art can hold up a Western understanding of a non-Western object as superior to the

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understanding of that object of the people who made it. At the same time, it can discourage those people from assimilating European knowledge and techniques into their art practice in the interest of preserving the universal insights gained through their purported primitiveness. Here the awareness of the unity of humankind that the study of visual art offers also incentivizes the perpetuation of social inequality. These dangers are real, and Schapiro was sure to explicitly recognize them. They did not, however, convince him that the potential human unity that the visual arts can provide was merely specious, let alone completely delegitimized. Schapiro had made similar points already in his widely cited and previously discussed essay of 1937, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” noting that the appropriation of non-Western art forms within modernist artistic production was both problematically exploitative and importantly progressive.28 Building on this point and seeking to more fully understand the positive side of intercultural interactions, he writes in “The Fine Arts and the Unity of Mankind”: “Just as Greek art strengthened the ties of Athenians with one another as citizens of the same community through their common participation in Greek art, so, too, can modern art strengthen the ties of all peoples with one another as participating together in a world art. . . . Just as science is both individual and collective, local and global, and based on a common process of human intelligence and cooperation toward knowledge, so art strives toward a corresponding universality based on the common human organism and life problems.”29 Reading these words some seventy years after Schapiro first wrote them, the type of universality to which Schapiro refers is easy to misunderstand. Given his explicit foregrounding of the problem of universalization within art history in this essay, and given his political awareness and his explicitly self-critical attitude toward such efforts, it is unfair and simply inaccurate to understand Schapiro’s generalizations as just another problematic reduction of the diverse range of world art to a Western category. Rather, Schapiro’s search for universality is, as he openly states, an attempted contribution to the collectively produced knowledge that is directed at the common life problems of humankind. Based in an undefined concept of humanity, Schapiro’s arguments here are symptomatic of the extensive literature on the perceived “crisis of man” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, which includes Dewey’s writings on “the problems of men.”30 In this sense and context, Schapiro’s modernist conception of form can be more charitably and more modestly understood as a heuristic device for achieving a more adequate future state of affairs of increased intercultural understanding.31 With this hope in view, the hard-won historical

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achievement of the more encompassing, general, and open approach to visual art objects that accompanied the rise of modernism was an especially important milestone for Schapiro. Before this achievement, as Schapiro was unsurprisingly prone to note in his courses and lectures, it was a widespread belief that art was an exclusively Western creation and that non-Western cultures simply did not produce it.32 Though scholars today are justifiably wary of applying the labels of “art” and even “form” to objects produced outside of a modern Western context, to dismiss such applications without considering the longerterm historical context of even being able to do so opens the study of visual art up to an equally dangerous fate: that of cultural isolationism. Two key examples of artistic production that analytically—if not historically—follow from related arguments help to make the purchase of this last point expressly clear: the paintings of Robert Motherwell and the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz. As in Schapiro’s writings, a committed internationalism heavily tinctures the writing of Motherwell and stands as important background for his commitment to modernist abstraction as a style or mode of art making. For instance, in writing to the French art critic Christian Zervos in 1947, a moment when abstract expressionism was still very much in its formative stages, Motherwell says: “Some of us artists are beginning a small review to combat the indifference to, and reaction against, modern art in the United States. . . . We are trying as hard as possible to make a magazine which is international in character, and in a moment in which the entire world is becoming chauvinistic, the task is not easy.”33 As David Craven points out, much like Schapiro did, this explicitly internationalist view was not only fundamental to the creation of Motherwell’s mature style, but it also remained stable throughout Motherwell’s career.34 Moreover, also like Schapiro, Motherwell rejects the notion that abstract expressionism is nationalistic or jingoistic in character and even mocks the widespread thesis that 1945 marked the beginning of the “triumph of American art.”35 Motherwell’s most memorable series of paintings—the more than two hundred canvases that make up his Elegies to the Spanish Republic—have similarly international and generalizing ambitions. Not only is it a commonplace to recognize that Motherwell himself conceived of those paintings as a “lamentation or funeral song” to the fundamentally internationalist ideals that stoked the Spanish Civil War, but the very forms of those canvases—their repeating black, vertical elements against a white ground and their evident, if overwrought, references to themes of life and death—similarly betray Motherwell’s ambition to create paintings that speak across borders.36 Because of this, the often nationalistic context in which Motherwell’s paintings were exhibited

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and the widespread and well-known use of abstract expressionist paintings like his as anticommunist propaganda during the Cold War is simply a distortion of the ideas and intentions that initially inspired them. If it is obviously problematic to reduce Motherwell’s paintings to the Cold War representations of them, we should ask ourselves, why are we less hesitant to write off Schapiro’s internationalist adherence to formal analysis as hegemonic? Without a general category like “form” or something like it, how can art history speak across borders at all? The Cold War ideological divides across which Schapiro and Motherwell both hoped to speak, naturally, were different from those between the “West” and “non-West” that are often evoked in postcolonial conversations today. But how should we—or can we—differentiate with precision the “West” from which Schapiro and Motherwell spoke? Surely complicating these boilerplate divisions was precisely one of the motivations for Schapiro’s and Motherwell’s internationalism. And surely, the very act of demarcating an area known as the non-West would be just as problematic as attempting to ignore the real differences that this border marks. Alas, because identity, and especially race, so heavily shapes discussions like these, additional and perhaps more powerful evidence for this point is found in the unexpected alliance between Stieglitz’s photographs and Coomaraswamy’s writing. Despite his self-consciously “traditional,” if not conservative, theory of art, Coomaraswamy was a friend and champion of the outspokenly modern and “straight” photography of Stieglitz, a figure who also had blatantly universalizing ambitions for art. In 1923 Coomaraswamy even convinced the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to acquire a small collection of Stieglitz’s photographs, a pioneering effort at treating photography as an art form that was worthy of the professional display and care of a museum.37 On a general level, this unusual professional alliance may be best understood through the underlying arts and crafts commitments of both Stieglitz and Coomaraswamy, a deep-seated congruency between the two men that may have encouraged the latter to look past his views on mechanized artistic production when considering Stieglitz’s photography. Stieglitz’s famed journal, Camera Work, was a highly crafted and carefully produced magazine, and its exceptional production quality reflects a taste for the handmade that Coomaraswamy undoubtedly also shared. In addition to this general point, Dorothy Norman once claimed that Coomaraswamy recognized a “correct” use of symbols in Stieglitz’s photographs and thereby was confident in placing them within “the great tradition” of art making that he championed.38 Though this last point is based on hearsay, if correct it would mean that

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Fig. 16 Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait (8), 1919. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Alfred Stieglitz, 24.1728. Photo © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Coomaraswamy’s insistence on the import of iconography within artistic production also made Stieglitz’s photography an unexpected ally of his work. Coomaraswamy himself had reproduced photographs of various hand gestures in South Asian artistic production on several occasions, and these images can be productively compared to Stieglitz’s own famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, themselves part of the initial collection of photographs acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts thanks to Coomaraswamy’s support (e.g., fig. 16). The upshot of this unexpected propinquity is that the very recognition of Stieglitz’s photographs as art, their establishment as objects worthy of institutional preservation, only came about through the support of a figure who explicitly fashioned himself as outside of the Western tradition.39 This fact makes Stieglitz’s generalizing modernist ambitions not a homogenizing effort at all but rather, to use Lauren Kroiz’s phrase, a “creative composite.” As an example, it casts doubt on the extent to which modernisms in general should be criticized simply because of their universal ambitions. Indeed it was precisely

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the affinities—unwitting though they may have been—between Coomaraswamy’s and Stieglitz’s generalizing ideas that brought them together. A productive way to move forward from this recognition is to avoid scapegoating the generalizing theories of Westerners like Schapiro and non-Westerners like Coomaraswamy as somehow the cause or problematic symptom of domineering power relations—surely such a problem is much more complex and overdetermined than pointing fingers at specific authors and specific concepts. Rather, it seems more productive to take general theories like theirs—as well as the generalizing artistic production that they championed—as contingent efforts at achieving what is obviously a common and persistent goal: namely, the development of adequate means of describing and understanding the deep historical crevasses and distant geographical corners of the world’s visual culture. To remind his students of the import and power of this traditional and eponymous art-historical project, Schapiro himself once noted in a presentation on “The Present State of Art History” that in our ineffable, ambiguous, and naïve visual experiences of historically and culturally foreign art objects, “whole worlds of meaning and value” as well as the “feelings, moods, ideas, desires, of all types of human beings” can become present to us, even if only minutely.40 For Schapiro, the potential inherent within these experiences is what can make and has made the objects of art history “the starting point of a sense of humanity as universal, as global, and as, in a way, eternal.”41 Whatever we may think of the unabashed romanticism that motivates these lines, surely replacing and revising the means that Schapiro advocated for achieving such a noble end is central to furthering our understanding of art’s history. I contend that this positive work is as important as the negative impulse to highlight and criticize our persistent failure to do so.

1956 Pragmatic Psychoanalysis and the Confirmation of Woman I

In 1956, on the centennial of Sigmund Freud’s birth, Schapiro published “Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study” in the Journal of the History of Ideas. The essay would go on to establish itself as a familiar critique of Freud’s claims about Leonardo da Vinci, exemplifying the wider period interest in submitting Freud’s famous arguments to reevaluation and revision. Due to the use of psychoanalysis as an important therapy for the numerous traumatized veterans of the Second World War, the practice enjoyed widespread support in the postwar United States, and the Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud was assigned reading in many American medical schools.1 This intellectual backing helped make the 1950s a high-water mark of Freudianisms of all stripes—from neo-Freudian attempts, like Erich Fromm’s, to broaden psychoanalysis to explain more social and cultural phenomena; to clinical attempts by ego psychologists like David Rapaport to make psychoanalytic theory itself both systematic and testable. Besides being very much of its milieu, Schapiro’s interest in Freud was also quite particular to his own art-historical writing and can even be considered a bulwark for his arguments concerning some of the broad, philosophical antinomies discussed in

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previous chapters. For instance, as examined in the chapter “1936: Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft,” Schapiro resisted the more radically ideographic and individualizing approach of the New Vienna School and refused the idea that advanced humanistic research was different in kind from that of the natural sciences. Psychoanalysis’s promise to place the study of the individual on more generalized footing would have appealed to Schapiro as a possible way to reconcile his commitments to the individualizing necessities of history on the one hand and to the generalizing mandates of natural science on the other. Additionally, as discussed in the chapter “1941: Science and the Dialectic,” in his effort to pursue a Marxist approach to art history after his break with the Communist party, Schapiro became preoccupied with articulating how the generalized lawlike regularities of orthodox Marxist theory failed to capture the particularities of historical individuals. Faced with this tension, psychoanalysis would have promised Schapiro an alternative model of the individual that was also partially social in its theorization, meaning that a psychoanalytic approach might provide him with just the counterbalance—however contradictory it may be—to his Marxist leanings.2 With these dynamics in mind, this chapter delves into Schapiro’s prolonged struggle with psychoanalytic ideas and treats Schapiro’s various engagements with Freudianisms of all stripes as a debate manqué with the Viennese father of psychoanalysis himself. The chapter’s pivoting point is Schapiro’s 1956 essay on Leonardo and Freud, which is Schapiro’s most extended engagement with Freud’s own writing and foreshadows a continuing interest that would lead to several fragmented and unpublished manuscripts, as well as “Further Notes on Freud and Leonardo” of 1994.3 Leading up to his 1956 essay, Schapiro had engaged in psychoanalytic theory largely indirectly and tacitly, as in a long footnote to his 1939 essay “From Romanesque to Mozarabic in Silos” or in his unacknowledged use of Paul Schilder’s ideas about body image in the 1948 MoMA Round Table on Modern Art. With the publication of “Leonardo and Freud,” however, Schapiro became more explicit in his confrontation with psychoanalytic arguments; this change in his thinking would eventually express itself in his 1968 essay “The Apples of Cézanne,” in which Schapiro put forward his own positive and quite extensive psychoanalytic interpretation. Notwithstanding this transformation, throughout his involvement with psychoanalytic theory, Schapiro never completely adopted Freud’s ideas and repeatedly looked to pragmatist social psychology to mediate his psychoanalytic arguments. Just as his early, more implicitly Freudian claims about Van Gogh’s painting share much in common with Dewey’s psychologizing

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aesthetics, so too do his later, more explicitly psychoanalytic assertions about Cézanne owe a debt to the pragmatist social psychology of George Herbert Mead. Even though Schapiro’s psychoanalytic writings would obviously not have been possible without Freud’s precedent, much like Dewey and Mead, in his engagements with psychoanalysis, Schapiro frames the individual as more perpetually emergent and optimistically oriented toward the future than Freud’s original model. In making this argument, I organize this chapter in two main parts. The first section recounts and contextualizes Schapiro’s psychoanalytic writings leading up to his essay on Leonardo and Freud. I frame Schapiro’s two books from the early 1950s on Van Gogh and Cézanne as initial climactic moments, contextualizing them against Schapiro’s other pre-1956 writing with psychoanalytic adumbrations. The second section begins with Schapiro’s essay on Freud and Leonardo—initially given as a public talk at the William Alanson White Institute in January 1955. The criticisms that Schapiro put forward in that publication are his clearest articulation of what he saw as the main problem of psychoanalytic theory for art-historical purposes: Freud’s theory of sublimation. I use Schapiro’s problematization of sublimation to situate and analyze Schapiro’s presumed corrective: his 1968 essay “The Apples of Cézanne” and its explicit use of Mead’s pragmatist social psychology to abet and transform more classically Freudian claims. By interpreting Schapiro’s lifelong critical engagement with psychoanalysis through a pragmatist lens, I highlight the place of confirmation within Schapiro’s art-historical practice once again, and I use it in closing to contextualize Schapiro’s oft-noted studio visit to Willem de Kooning in 1953 and the import of Schapiro’s thinking to what is one of the best-known canvases of abstract expressionism: Woman I.

From Silos to Cézanne’s Self

Schapiro recorded later in life that he first learned about Freud’s ideas when reading the New York Call, a socialist newspaper, sometime around the Russian Revolution and soon thereafter devoured The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.4 Though this would make Schapiro just a teenager when he first read Freud, the memory is not irrelevant, as Schapiro’s first clear engagement with psychoanalytic ideas comes in a footnote to one of his most celebrated Marxist essays, “From Romanesque to Mozarabic in Silos” of 1939. In the course of analyzing one of the central Romanesque artworks for his essay—the Doubting Thomas

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relief in the Silos cloister—Schapiro cites Otto Rank’s book Der Kunstler in order to raise the hypothetical possibility that the image was “a richly charged sexual symbol.”5 Developing this possibility, Schapiro notes a variety of aspects of the relief that can be connected to basic premises of psychoanalytic theory. These visual details include the representation of a fortified city as a metaphor for a woman, the male and female musicians with their seemingly gendered instruments, and the very act of Thomas inserting his finger into Christ’s wound, with its obvious sexual innuendo. Though this sexualized interpretation is undoubtedly speculative, overly sanguine, and, as O. K. Werckmeister claimed, even heavy-handed, it also reveals quite clearly that Schapiro was drawn to psychoanalysis precisely to attempt to resolve the abovementioned tension he saw in Marxist theory.6 Indeed, later in the same footnote Schapiro explicitly notes that his nascent psychoanalytic interpretation of the relief would not contradict his main Marxist argument in the essay. To demonstrate this fact, Schapiro concludes his footnote by historicizing Freud’s own theory, claiming that the potential sexual relations depicted in the image are tied to historically emergent forms of life—for instance, the growth of cities, the rise of the burgher class, and the tension between ascetic repression and sensual enjoyment, which found ever greater expression with the unfolding of the Middle Ages. As we will see, Schapiro’s preference for a more historically dynamic or emergent understanding of the forces theorized by psychoanalysis was one of the points he repeatedly made and attempted to develop throughout his career. Of course, Schapiro was far from the first writer to make such a criticism of Freud, let alone the first to do so by blending his ideas with Marx’s. Some of Freud’s own avowed followers, like Otto Fenichel, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Wilhelm Reich, all had Marxist leanings, and the latter notably attracted Freud’s ire in his attempt to reconcile the master’s theories with Marxism.7 Beyond these precedents, Schapiro’s friendship with the various members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research surely made him attuned to the currency of psychoanalysis among prominent Marxists of his generation.8 Later in 1955, as part of his work on the editorial board of Dissent, Schapiro would even become directly involved in Fromm’s spat with Herbert Marcuse over the claims of Eros and Civilization and the vexing question of Freudian revisionism.9 Though Schapiro was friendly with Fromm, Schapiro never followed suit to castigate the libidinal focus of Freud’s writings, making Schapiro’s interest in Freud fairly orthodox in that he believed that the sexual basis of psychoanalysis was key to its explanatory power. The libido theory—rather

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than Freud’s metapsychology—was central to Schapiro’s interest in the biological purchase of Freud’s arguments and in their ability to explain individual behavior. Following these positions, Schapiro was later highly critical of a Jungian interpretation of the late-antique wall paintings in the synagogue of Dura Europos; Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious were too far removed from the experimental and clinical dimension of Freud’s original work for Schapiro’s natural-scientific preferences.10 Despite these ongoing forays, Schapiro continued to maintain a certain distance from psychoanalytic claims after the long footnote to his 1939 essay on Silos. This position, as Martin Jay notes, also mirrors the preference of several Frankfurt School writers.11For instance, in the abovementioned MoMA Round Table on Modern Art of 1948, Schapiro clearly interpreted Picasso’s Girl Before A Mirror through Schilder’s psychoanalytically informed concept of the “body image” (fig. 17).12 He pointed to the painting’s supersaturated color palette and the double face and distorted body of the depicted girl— qualities that the organizer of the panel had introduced as representing a “crazy world” without “the warm natural values of life . . . without morals, and hence, without meaning”13—and noted, “Our knowledge of the human body is not only anatomical; there is also an image of the body which does not conform to the anatomist’s picture and is full of distortions and strange relationships. When you have a toothache, for instance, one side of your face feels bigger than the other. Your so-called ‘body image’ changes. In a similar way, in fantasy, our conception of the bodies of others is affected by our feelings and desires.”14 Schapiro’s use of the situational example of a toothache to clarify the notion of a “body image” betrays his reading of Schilder, who coined the term and even used the same example of a toothache.15 Yet Schapiro never published this intellectual debt. Rather, he seems to have preferred to acknowledge his reliance on Schilder’s work in person or in private correspondence, a fact that several subsequent writers have noticed and about which Clement Greenberg even complained.16 In light of this public secrecy, Schilder’s controversial position within the psychoanalytic movement and the relation between his ideas and Freud’s are worth noting. Though Schilder’s professional fate may not have affected Schapiro’s decision to keep his reliance on Schilder’s work unpublished, it speaks volumes to the controversies surrounding Freudian ideas in New York at the time and the blending of those ideas with other established American schools of thought. As Schapiro almost certainly knew, Schilder was a pupil of Freud and had both an M.D. and Ph.D. in philosophy—the former being particularly

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Fig. 17 Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2.1938. Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim. © 2018 Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

important in the drawn-out debates about the professionalization of psychoanalysis within the United States. However, Schilder had also been disqualified as a training analyst by the New York Psychoanalytic Society because he himself had not been systematically analyzed.17 Schilder argued for an exception to this rule on multiple grounds, pointing out that many early psychoanalysts—including Freud himself—had also not been analyzed and that there were inconsistencies in the ways in which analysts underwent analysis that undermined its authority. Because Schilder was from the second generation of psychoanalytic practitioners, however, his arguments were considered no excuse, a judgment that Freud ratified. Such problems aside, Freud did not dismiss or attack Schilder’s arguments as he had attacked other revisions to his original theories; Schilder’s ideas subsequently attracted much attention in Schapiro’s New York, where Schilder was a research professor at New York University from 1929 until his untimely death in 1940. The appeal of Schilder’s research in the United States was reinforced by the fact that its underlying assumptions were in basic agreement with ideas that were current in American academia and that, as we have seen, were very much a part of Schapiro’s intellectual milieu: the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. As Schilder put it, his preferred psychology “necessarily places emphasis on the action and does not consider the organism in its psychic and somatic aspects

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as a theoretical entity with merely perceptive qualities (perceptions, imaginations, and thoughts). Perception and action, impression and expression, thus form a unit, and insight and action become closely correlated to each other. . . . It is easy to see that the pragmatism of James and the instrumentalism of John Dewey express the same principle in a philosophic way.”18 To this parallel Schilder added a criticism of the overly regressive nature of Freud’s original model, by which he meant that Freud neglected “the principle of emergent evolution, or, as I would prefer to say, of constructive evolution, which leads to the creation of new units and configurations.”19 In so doing, Schilder connects his and the pragmatist’s preference for basing thought on action with a more sweepingly philosophical notion concerning the ongoing and continual nature of evolution in both matter and mind.20 These ideas undoubtedly parallel Schapiro’s other interests of the time, even if Schapiro seems to have felt that Schilder was problematically “unhistorical in his treatment of the social element.”21 Indeed, as discussed in the chapter named after 1941, Schapiro’s qualified openness to the Marxist dialectic was based on similar beliefs about the historical emergence of knowledge and thereby begins to reveal how the otherwise opposed approaches of Marxism, pragmatism, and psychoanalysis were related in Schapiro’s work. One of Schapiro’s own most sweeping (though certainly not unassailable or unproblematic) statements about the fundamental philosophical presuppositions of his writing is revealing in this regard, even if it only came in the 1990s. In a response to a question about the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity in his scholarship and the possibility of “value-free” research, Schapiro responded with the following statement: “What is a fact? According to most languages, it is a product of labor. Consider the word for fact in German, ‘Tatsache’—which means ‘thing done’—in French, ‘fait’—which means ‘made’—or even the Latin base for the English word ‘fact’ which is the word ‘factum’ and is related to manufacture, which means ‘made by hand.’ . . . What is the truth? The truth is what is made.”22 Rather than a more traditional understanding of “facts” and “truth” as relations of correspondence between what is and what is understood, between the physical and the mental, here Schapiro pegs his understanding of these basic epistemological terms to labor, making, and action. By defining truth in this way, Schapiro aligns his thought directly with pragmatist principles—most specifically with William James’s claim that the truth is what works and that reality is not static but rather constantly in the making.23 Important historical precedents for these ideas are the works of Giambattista Vico—about whom Schapiro

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wrote an unfinished essay—and the early writings of Marx, who also theorized knowledge as something that was actively produced between man and his environment and who hinted at a similarly radical theory of truth.24 If Vico’s and James’s articulation of this idea reveals its potential connection to a human-centered form of scientific experimentation, the idea can unsurprisingly take on an explicitly political tinge through a Marxist lens, implying that power relations between social groups are constitutive of truth or that truth is created by the victors. Yet the Marxist tradition was not unified behind this position. As Schapiro no doubt knew, Lenin had argued in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that man’s action is fundamental to the Marxist conception of truth because action helps verify the truth, a position that maintains a more traditional correspondence theory of truth and that reflects the more conservative but common marriage of Marxism and the rigid positivism of the Second International. In Schapiro’s 1950 book on Van Gogh, one can see some of the ramifications of his burgeoning theory of truth in his art-historical thought. Schapiro characterizes Van Gogh’s painting as itself emergent, specifically as developing out of the artist’s experience “that the world around us is an object of strong desire or need, as a potential means of fulfillment of the striving human being, and is therefore also the necessary theme of art.”25 Schapiro’s focus in such arguments on how desires lead to artistic creation is, naturally, deeply reminiscent of Freud. In fact, insofar as Schapiro positions Van Gogh’s desires as unconscious urges that nevertheless result in actions, Schapiro can be taken as making a classic Freudian argument. In Schapiro’s insistence, however, that those desires were completely and directly fulfilled in the making of art, he departs from typical Freudian art criticism, which not only frames art in relation to repressed desires but usually considers the persistence of a minimum amount of repression as necessary to explain artistic creation.26 Schapiro is clearly sensitive to the inadequacies of the Freudian model in relation to Van Gogh’s practice, as he later cites one of the artist’s own letters as “a strong statement of a view contrary to Freud’s” theory of repression.27 Faced with these doubts, Schapiro looked elsewhere in his theorization of Van Gogh’s practice. With his claim that Van Gogh’s art was integral to the fulfillment of the artist’s holistic desires, Schapiro’s reading edges especially close to perhaps the most characteristic idea of Dewey’s Art as Experience. In that book—as I already noted the first chapter—Dewey describes this fulfillment as the result of an “impulsion,” meaning the striving of an entire organism within a specific environment, and identifies it as the foundation

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Fig. 18 Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Rising Sun, 1889. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

for “having ‘an experience.’”28 In his book on Van Gogh, Schapiro describes the twin vanishing points of Wheat Field with Rising Sun as “a powerful desire and its fulfillment,” an account that directly parallels Dewey’s notion of an impulsion (fig. 18). 29 Accordingly, it is only appropriate to understand Schapiro’s Van Gogh as much in relation to Dewey’s aesthetics as in relation to psychoanalysis. Given such statements, it is important to note that Schapiro’s inclination to mediate psychoanalysis by way of Deweyan ideas did not stop with his interpretation of Van Gogh.30 In a draft of a letter to Adrian Stokes—who was himself one of the most sophisticated psychoanalytically informed art writers of his generation—Schapiro suggests that Dewey’s aesthetics offers a “more comprehensive” and “more adequate” approach to Cézanne’s paintings than the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s, a fact that reveals Schapiro’s preference for Dewey’s model was not necessarily overcome by more contemporary developments in psychoanalytic theory.31 Regardless of this stated preference, however, and as Kerstin Thomas points out, there are evident affinities between Schapiro’s and Stokes’s interpretations of Cézanne, a fact that may well betray Schapiro’s reading of Stokes’s writing.32 The exchange between the two scholars, however, clearly went both ways, as Stokes quoted Schapiro at length and approvingly described Schapiro’s construal of Cézanne’s “ego integration.”33 In attempting to parse these intellectual overlaps, Schapiro’s 1952 book Paul Cézanne proves useful, both in terms of illuminating Schapiro’s stated preference for Dewey and for understanding how that preference nevertheless speaks

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Fig. 19 Paul Cézanne, Three Apples, 1878–79. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, BF57. Photo: The Barnes Foundation.

to an affinity between Schapiro and Stokes. Therein Schapiro described the style of one of Cézanne’s still lifes (e.g., fig. 19) as follows: The apple looks solid, weighty, and round as it would feel to a blind man; but these properties are realized through tangible touches of color each of which, while rendering a visual sensation, makes us aware of a decision of the mind and an operation of the hand. In this complex process, which in our poor description appears too intellectual, like the effort of a philosopher to grasp both the external and the subjective in our experience of things, the self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perception and a practical ordering activity, mastering its inner world by mastering something beyond itself. (10; emphasis added) In this passage, Schapiro first frames Cézanne’s style of painting, his “touches of color,” as making us aware of the artist’s decisions. Unlike purely mental decisions, however, Cézanne’s decisions have left remnants of themselves on the surface of his paintings, and in observing those decisions, we, the observers of Cézanne’s painting and the readers of Schapiro’s essay, confront the self.

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As Schapiro says, “the self is always present” in Cézanne’s paintings, a claim that he subsequently reinforces by describing Cézanne’s work as “a fusion of the self and nature,”34 suggesting that when we look at Cézanne’s paintings, we inevitably experience something of the artist as a person. Crucially, however, the reason Cézanne’s self is perceivable to us is that we can see in Cézanne’s “touches of color” the dynamic interaction between an individual and his or her world. As Schapiro says, Cézanne’s paintings reveal to us an individual “mastering its inner world by mastering something outside itself,” a description that posits that the self is emergent in an interaction with its environment. Fittingly, within Schapiro’s intellectual milieu this understanding of the self finds an early expression in pragmatist social psychology. It also—as we will see when concluding this section—parallels central tenets of Kleinian psychoanalysis. One of Dewey’s most prominent ideas, which helped make his career and which Schapiro would inevitably have known well, is the reflex arc concept in psychology.35 By the reflex arc, Dewey meant to recharacterize the traditional psychological dichotomy between stimulus and response. This distinction is pervasive in psychology and philosophy more generally and finds parallels in the ubiquitous divisions of subject and object, mind and world, and sensation and idea, which often define approaches to the self or the individual. On Dewey’s view, these divisions, or “dualisms” as he often called them, are unhelpful and inaccurate hypostatizations. And in his attempt to expose this problem, he borrows from James and uses the example of a child reaching for the flame of a candle.36 In traditional, hypostatized terms, the flame is understood as a stimulus, and the child’s reaching for it is understood as the response. The child’s subsequent feeling of pain at being burned is then a second stimulus, and the withdrawal of his or her hand is a second response. Dewey rejected this compartmentalized model for understanding the interaction between child and candle, individual and environment, mind and world. He believed the candle as stimulus is inseparable from the child’s entire life cycle, entire life of learning, and entire life of action that preceded the moment of seeing the candle. Those preceding actions shaped the desires and the very act of experiencing and wanting that led the child to reach for the candle. Thus Dewey described the child’s visual experience of the candle not as a “stimulus” but as a “seeing-for-reaching” and his or her subsequent visual experience of the candle after being burned as a “seeing-of-a-light-that-means-pain-when-contact-occurs.”37 These hyphenated descriptors function to break up the hard separation between an internal mind and an external world, and the interactive model that they propose is how

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Dewey imagined departing from a strict dualistic understanding of individuals and their environments. Schapiro’s claims about Cézanne’s paintings—that “the self is always present” in Cézanne’s work—can be evidently related to such antidualistic approaches. On this view, Cézanne is not just a human body and mind, he is also the interactions between that body, that mind, and an environment, and Cézanne’s paintings are records of that formative interaction. Because of this analytic parallel, we might even imagine Schapiro adopting Dewey’s hyphenated descriptors—descriptors that were popularized by James in his concept of “stream of consciousness”—and describing Cézanne’s painting as part of a practice of “mastering-his-inner-world-by-mastering-somethingoutside-of-himself.”38 If Schapiro’s abovementioned letter to Stokes confirms his interest in this Deweyan precedent, it is important to note that a relatable model of the subject was also defended by Klein, specifically in her theory of object relations. In her view, which had a deep impact on Stokes’s writing, the individual’s psyche develops in infancy through a process of testing desires against reality. This process results in the mental internalization of physical objects based on their ability to fulfill the infant’s impulsive cravings. In the most classic of cases, these “objects” are mental images of caretakers or of life-sustaining objects like the breast. The relationships between the infant and these objects that develop can be either fulfilling or not, “good” or “bad,” as Klein put it. Whatever the result, the internalized images of these objects play an active and powerful role both in the formation of the infant’s self and in their future social relations.39 Here too, therefore, we find an environmentally extended model of the self— though one bound much more closely to interpersonal relations than Dewey’s. We can thus say that Schapiro’s description of Cézanne’s painting technique also had real affinities with a powerful psychoanalytic model, one that enjoyed a good amount of prestige and popularity at the time. As Schapiro’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Cézanne developed through the 1950s and ’60s, similar models of the self remained especially important to him, although he continued to prefer a pragmatist genealogy when citing his sources.

From Leonardo to Cézanne’s Apples

As noted at the outset, Schapiro’s distance from classic Freudian claims, despite his interest in psychoanalysis, would find its fullest expression in “Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study” of 1956—an essay that likely responds as

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much to the prevalence of diluted Freudian interpretations around midcentury as to Freud’s original ideas.40 In this publication Schapiro uses straightforward philological and art-historical analysis to demonstrate the various faults with Freud’s study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Not only, Schapiro points out, was Freud mistaken in his translation of the Italian word nibbio—which Freud had translated as “vulture,” rather than “kite,” and which caused a cascade of misunderstandings within his interpretation because of the cultural connotations of vultures—but Freud’s arguments concerning the historical precedents and compositional originality of Leonardo’s various versions of The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne were simply incorrect. The previous year Schapiro had begun to develop a criticism of Freud along similar lines when he published the substantially shorter and less well-known “Two Slips of Leonardo and One of Freud.” Like the fuller 1956 essay, this shorter study focuses on the implications of Freud’s reliance on incorrect historical information, here his overly strict determination of the meaning of the factual errors in Leonardo’s account of his father’s death.41 In both instances, Schapiro’s critical assessments of Freud have much the same function as his criticisms of orthodox Marxism: they both analyze an established, though contested, theory that had been distorted by subsequent authors by way of a more thoroughgoing empirical investigation of its foundation. It would therefore seem that just as Schapiro’s ongoing interest in Marx rested on the early Marx’s naturalistic tendencies, so too did his ongoing interest in Freud rest on the positivism that underlay Freud’s early writings. To this effort, quite apart from any basis in clinical observations, Schapiro speaks from his perspective as an art historian to determine that Freudian theory “provides no bridge from the infantile experiences and the mechanisms of psychic development to the style of Leonardo’s art.”42 As K. R. Eissler puts it, Schapiro’s objections to Freud reflect a conflict between psychoanalysis and art history itself: the art historian reads the visible surface of the object, and the psychoanalyst reads its psychobiographical depth.43 Freud’s ultimate goal in analyzing Leonardo’s paintings is to understand the artist as a historical personage; Schapiro’s goal is to understand the directly observable visual configurations specific to Leonardo’s artistic practice. In his insistence that there must be a “bridge” between psychobiography and the “style” of art, Schapiro shows how his criticisms of psychoanalysis stem from his desire to more thoroughly ground the analysis of art in the empirical experience of it. This criticism of psychoanalysis is common enough, yet it is nonetheless interesting to note that a similar critique of the basic premises of Freudian

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theory is found in Dewey’s writing. In Human Nature and Conduct of 1922—a first edition of which is preserved among the so-called Schapiro books held at Columbia University44—Dewey criticizes psychoanalysis for its basis in “a separate psychic realm” and more poignantly for “the transformation of social results in psychic causes” (153). By this Dewey means that psychoanalysis creates a specious dualism between self and world in order to explain actions without clear causes. While Schapiro is not nearly as dismissive of the very possibility of the Freudian unconscious as Dewey, his own criticisms of Freudianism similarly problematize its exclusive reliance on “a separate psychic realm” and for ignoring social causes. For instance, in his later 1968 essay on Cézanne’s still lifes, Schapiro writes, “To rest with the explanation of the still-life as a displaced sexual interest is to miss the significance of stilllife in general as well as important meanings of the objects on the manifest plane. In the work of art the latter has a weight of its own and the choice of objects is no less bound to the artist’s consciously directed life than to an unconscious symbolism; it also has vital roots in social experience” (13). Like Dewey, Schapiro sees Freudian art criticism as failing to capture the multiple causal dimensions of artistic creation; conscious as well as social causes cannot be ruled out. This is not to say that Schapiro’s criticisms of Freudianism grew directly out of Dewey’s criticisms or, for that matter, that he could not have formulated this point on his own or by way of other writers. Gombrich, for instance, devised a similar critique of psychoanalysis, and Schapiro was demonstrably aware of Gombrich’s effort when writing his own.45 Nevertheless the parallel to Dewey is important to note because it helps connect Schapiro’s later positive psychoanalytic interpretation of Cézanne to his earlier negative critique of Freud. To further demonstrate this connection, Schapiro’s persistent dissatisfaction with Freud’s underlying theory of sublimation is key as it plays a role in both Schapiro’s 1956 critique of Freud and in his 1968 interpretation of Cézanne. In his original presentation of his 1956 essay at the William Alanson White Institute, Schapiro was particularly critical of the vague notion of energy that seemed to underlie Freud’s thesis concerning sublimation. The energy supposedly released from this psychic process of repression would not seem, Schapiro condescendingly remarked, to be describable by any of the laws of physics he had ever learned.46 Schapiro’s friend Ernest Nagel would make a similar critique of the loose use of metaphors within psychoanalytic theory several years later during a symposium on psychoanalysis and science at New York University. It stands to reason that the two men

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would have spoken about the topic, though Nagel’s criticisms were more thoroughly disabling of psychoanalysis as a whole than Schapiro’s.47 Quite apart from this analytic resonance, Schapiro revealed that an important source for his criticism of Freud was Harry Levey’s 1939 historical investigation of the notion of sublimation, an idea that had a long and uneven history both within and outside of Freudian thinking.48 Much like Levey, Schapiro was clearly dissatisfied with the presumed self-evident coherence, unity, and transparency of this central psychoanalytic concept, and his audience at the White Institute shared his suspicion. And yet, Schapiro insisted that his essay was not meant as a critique of the theoretical structure of Freud tout court.49 Schapiro seems to have instead envisioned his essay as a kind of test of Freud’s theory, though not in the same sense as clinical efforts like Otto Pötzl’s concerning the aspects of photographs that unwittingly made their way into subject’s dreams—experiments that are sometimes said to confirm the existence of Freud’s theory of the “preconscious” and of which Schapiro was aware.50 Rather, Schapiro’s effort was more an attempt to investigate how a fuller picture of Leonardo’s personality and life would put pressure on Freud’s claims, a kind of historical stress test. In this regard, there is a parallel between Schapiro’s criticisms of Freud and his response to Raphael’s dissatisfaction with his own essay on Courbet. As will be remembered from the chapter “1941: Science and the Dialectic,” Schapiro had written to Raphael that the interrelation between theory and fact was key to the general development of Marxist art history; he similarly suggested in his critique of Freud that a greater interaction between psychoanalytic theory and the known facts of Leonardo’s life can advance the state of psychoanalytic art criticism. Schapiro’s critical responses to both orthodox Marxist and Freudian theory were, in other words, meant as productive fillips rather than undermining invectives. This more positive aspect of Schapiro’s critique of Freud was, in fact, already built into his 1956 essay, though it is easily overlooked. In addition to noting Freud’s historical errors, the essay highlights Leonardo’s substitution of a lamb for St. John in the Paris version of The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne and posits that this decision can be read in relation to Freud’s claims concerning the expression of repressed homosexual desires within Leonardo’s art. The ambiguity of the Christ child’s “mounting and hugging [of] the lamb” is positioned as a much more plausible confirmation of Leonardo’s homosexuality than Freud’s own interpretation of the recurring female smile in Leonardo’s works, let alone Oskar Pfister’s later claims about the shape of a

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vulture being visible in the virgin’s robes.51When Schapiro followed up on his 1956 article later in life, he reinforced that he was by no means dismissive of Freud’s original thesis, suspecting that Freud had been aware of his own use of a mistranslation and that he may not have seen this mistake as disabling of his interpretation.52 Freud had, after all, apparently already formulated his interpretation of Leonardo before he even discovered the mistranslated passage concerning the nibbio.53 A fuller proof that Schapiro saw his own work as a development of— rather than an attack on—Freud’s ideas, however, is Schapiro’s widely read and celebrated essay “The Apples of Cézanne” of 1968. The text’s explicit focus on the sexual content of Cézanne’s depictions of apples is, of course, deeply Freudian, and Schapiro acknowledges it as such. As Schapiro himself puts it, “By connecting his favored theme [of apples] with the golden apple of myth [Cézanne] gave it a grander sense and alluded also to that dream of sexual fulfillment which Freud and others of his time too readily supposed was a general goal of the artist’s sublimating effort” (31). Even here, however, in Schapiro’s explicit acknowledgment of Freud, Schapiro qualifies Freudian theories as too strong, as too ready to suppose a blanket cause of art. Before making this critical nod to Freud, however, but after introducing the overall focus of his argument, Schapiro frames his interest in Cézanne’s apples using his own theory of still-life painting, whose direct and explicit connection to pragmatist ideas makes it worth quoting at length. Whereas Schapiro left Dewey uncited in his work on Van Gogh, in this instance he lays his pragmatist sources bare: Still-life, I have written elsewhere, consists of objects that, whether artificial or natural, are subordinate to man as elements of use, manipulation and enjoyment; these objects are smaller than ourselves, within arm’s reach, and owe their presence and place to a human action, a purpose. They convey man’s sense of his power over things in making or utilizing them; they are instruments as well as products of his skills, his thoughts and appetites. While favored by an art that celebrates the visual as such, they appeal to all the senses and especially to touch and taste. They are the themes par excellence of an empirical standpoint wherein our knowledge of proximate objects, and especially of the instrumental, is the model or ground of all knowledge. It is in this sense that the American philosopher, George H. Mead, has said: “The reality of what we see is what we can handle.” (19)

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By naming and citing Mead approvingly and directly in this passage, Schapiro further reveals that he mediated his psychoanalytic readings by way of pragmatist ideas, as he reiterated in his lectures.54 Mead’s proposition that “the reality of what we see is what we can handle” is a direct outgrowth of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, the often analyzed origin of pragmatism as a tradition of thought.55 As is well known, that maxim asked its readers, “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearing, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”56 While interpretations of this passage vary quite considerably, Peirce himself acknowledged that it was based on his reading of George Berkeley’s theory of vision, which, just like Mead’s proposition, linked the perception of reality to tactile qualities and bodily movements—linked reality, in other words, to “what we can handle.”57 Here the physical handling of reality—our imagined ability to literally pick up and grasp the objects depicted in still-life paintings—becomes integral to our psychological handling of those same objects. Whether or not we agree with Schapiro’s use of these pragmatist ideas to articulate a general theory of the still life, his notion can be understood to operate as a partial substitute for, and thus critique of, Freud’s theory of sublimation.58 Just as Freud’s claims about Leonardo rest on the validity of his theory of displaced sexual energy within the artist’s practice, so too does Schapiro’s psychobiographical claim about Cézanne’s apples rest on the validity of his adaptation of Mead’s assertion, “Reality is what we can handle.”59 If we do not accede that the power of still-life painting relies on the potential of the objects in still lifes to have immediate bodily or psychic impact on us, then Schapiro’s very claim that Cézanne’s apples are highly personal objects loses much of its weight. However, because Mead’s egocentric theory is based more on conscious experience than Freud’s, it more easily lends itself to testing and confirmation, as was key to the pragmatist tradition. This being said, Schapiro’s generalizing theory of still-life painting is far from a mere regurgitation of Mead’s social psychology. His interpretation of Cézanne’s apples obviously has an explicitly sexual dimension and merges the libidinal dimension of Freud’s psychoanalysis with the more platonically social theories of Mead. In order to do so, however, Schapiro read a single meaning into a single, albeit recurring, quality of Cézanne’s painting—his apples—and thereby ironically risked making the same mistake he had criticized in Freud: basing a theory too heavily on a single datum.60 As Schapiro no doubt knew, the hypothetical confirmation of his interpretation would

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have to be grounded in Cézanne’s own experience, and would therefore always lie beyond the historical horizon, beyond the realm of experimental confirmation. Faced with this fact, we can say that Schapiro’s choice to wed Mead and Freud, however imperfect, was also apt. It revealed Schapiro’s sensitivity to the inadequacies of both psychoanalysis and pragmatist social psychology for the history of art, and his ambition to move the discipline beyond both. Unfortunately, Schapiro’s critical engagement with Freud’s legacy and his twofold attempt to both critique and develop psychoanalytic propositions for the history of art has only partially been recognized. The explosion of interest in psychoanalysis that swept over art history in the 1980s and ’90s—an interest that was no doubt spurred on by Schapiro’s own earlier writings— often reacted against his 1956 essay by reducing it to its criticisms of Freud and failing to position it within the wider context of its milieu.61 If Schapiro’s approach to the inadequacies of Freudian theories was to attempt to test those theories against historical “facts”—rather than to attempt to develop their analytic structure toward something like Lacan’s model of the unconscious mind—this strategy does not reflect an animus toward the Freudian model itself so much as a deeply ingrained habit of thought.62 As this chapter has shown, that habit had much to do with the pragmatist philosophy that pervaded Schapiro’s milieu and in which he was steeped, though his very use of pragmatist propositions in conjunction with traditions like psychoanalysis resulted in arguments that were productively irreducible to both. In light of this exposition of Schapiro’s lifelong engagement with psychoanalysis, one where Schapiro’s dedication to pragmatist notions of testing and empirical confirmation again takes center stage, it is productive to consider one of the most famous and repeated anecdotes concerning Schapiro’s friendships with the practicing artists of era: his studio visit to Willem de Kooning in 1953 and the artist’s subsequent confidence in the finished state of his now-canonical painting Woman I (fig. 20). The actual conversation that took place between Schapiro and de Kooning during this studio visit has, unsurprisingly, been lost to history, and thus any attempt to interpret it will inevitably remain speculative. Nevertheless, the anecdote of this encounter continues to be repeated so often in scholarship about de Kooning’s paintings and concerns such a pivotal canvas within the history of modernism that it begs many questions: perhaps most generally, how could Schapiro’s studio visit have had such a decisive effect?63 Briefly considering the historical context of that studio visit

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Fig. 20 Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950–52. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 478.1953. Purchase. © 2018 Willem de Kooning / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

in relation to both de Kooning’s practice of painting and Schapiro’s practice of art history provides an answer, however tentative it must remain. The well-documented story, reported in the press before Woman I had even been exhibited, is that de Kooning had been working on the first painting of his now-celebrated Woman series for over a year and felt himself at an impasse.64 In many respects this fact was unsurprising, as de Kooning was notoriously indecisive and constantly plagued by doubt over whether or not his paintings were finished.65 By 1953, de Kooning had already been in New York for twenty years, and though he was known within inner circles of the art world, he had very little success as an artist before 1948 and was by all measures extremely poor, even destitute. At the moment of Schapiro’s studio visit, de Kooning’s reputation substantially rested on the series of black-andwhite abstract canvases he had exhibited at Charlie Egan’s gallery in April 1948, which had attracted the attention of Greenberg. After seeing these paintings, Greenberg immediately called de Kooning “one of the four or five most important painters in the country.”66 Greenberg based this judgment on de

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Kooning’s abandonment of representation, his painting’s emphasis on the flat picture plane, and his purported desire for a purity of optical effects. As these traits imply, de Kooning’s work supported Greenberg’s notorious theory of unadulterated, medium-specific art without subject matter, the ramifications of which he had been developing since 1939 and which has made him both the most recognized and most controversial American art critic of the twentieth century.67 With Greenberg’s outspoken support, de Kooning gained prominence in the New York art world; Josef Albers appointed him to teach that summer at the experimental and legendary Black Mountain College, and the Museum of Modern Art purchased one of his black-and-white paintings that autumn, the first and only sale from his initial solo show. Even though de Kooning was still not a commercial success, his reputation as a leading, publicly recognized member of the avant-garde had been quickly established. This context of de Kooning’s practice would seem to be key to understanding the power of Schapiro’s studio visit, as the artist’s very decision to revisit figural painting in his Woman series put him at odds with his influential champion. De Kooning himself even recalled in an interview that Greenberg came to his studio while he was working on the Woman paintings and had the audacity to tell him that he was no longer allowed to paint figuratively. De Kooning’s supposed reaction was to ask Greenberg to get out of his studio and to leave him alone.68 Such a story evidently smacks of art world gossip and exaggeration and, barring other evidence, would surely call for a healthy dose of skepticism. Although other artists reported similarly arrogant and presumptuous assertions by Greenberg during studio visits, events from the same period also speak to de Kooning’s positioning of Greenberg as a straw man.69 For instance, at a symposium at MoMA titled “What Abstract Art Means to Me” in November 1950, de Kooning explicitly defended what he termed an “inclusive” approach to artistic practice—one that was open to figuration and the representation of pictorial depth—and he criticized what he termed an “exclusive” approach, most specifically the assertion that certain visual forms should be avoided in contemporary painting.70 As Florence Rubenfeld notes, though de Kooning did not name Greenberg directly, he surely did not have to.71 Greenberg’s theory about the progression toward painterly flatness, though stereotyped to the point of caricature by de Kooning, was widely known and debated among practicing artists of the day. Greenberg himself, however, was more flexible and nuanced in his critical judgments than de Kooning positioned him as being. In 1953, Greenberg continued to list de Kooning as among America’s finest artists; at a panel on “The New

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Figurative Painting” in the mid-1950s, Hilton Kramer recalled Greenberg praising de Kooning’s series of Woman paintings; and by 1960 Greenberg had done much to clarify the rhetorical, rather than the literal, role that painterly flatness played in his writings.72 If such statements complicate our understanding of Greenberg’s thinking, other declarations by him only reinforce the autocratic, stereotyped image that has been passed down to posterity. In 1954, for example, Greenberg declared that all contemporary painting that was figural was “second-rate,” and the next year in his essay “American Type Painting,” he specifically pointed to de Kooning in this respect, demoting him within his avant-garde chronology from the “post-cubist” painter that he had been in 1948 to the “late cubist” painter that he had become in 1952. All of this is to say that de Kooning would have been cognizant of how much Greenberg’s support could help his career and of how much it was likely to change following his Woman paintings; de Kooning seems to have embraced—perhaps even courted—this opposition. Against this background, it is easy to imagine that Schapiro’s faith in the timeless importance of figuration in artistic production would have been much appreciated by de Kooning, especially considering Schapiro’s own towering reputation in the New York art world. As noted in the very first chapter, Schapiro was not only quite critical of Greenberg’s dogmatic formalism, but he was also—thanks to his reading of figures like Löwy—committed to the importance of figural art for the universalizing claims of modernism. It is only natural to presume that these commitments would have played a role in Schapiro’s discussion with de Kooning during his 1953 studio visit, a discussion that was almost certainly accompanied, as Rosalind Krauss suggests, by one of Schapiro’s exacting and lengthy visual descriptions.73 As noted at the end of the chapter named after 1941, these descriptions often made Schapiro’s judgments appear “confirmable by any layman,” a quality that surely would have been appealing to the uncertain de Kooning.74 In support of these speculations, it is interesting to notice that the qualities of de Kooning’s painting that Schapiro later highlighted are some of the very same qualities that he had already celebrated in his extensive descriptions of Romanesque sculpture. In his 1956 review of the exhibition Modern Art in the United States at Tate Gallery, Schapiro notes that in paintings like de Kooning’s Woman I, “There is an unpredictable play from point to point, although the density of details may be the same in the two halves. It . . . calls up ideas of the labyrinthine and entangled—an impulsiveness which is caught in its own movements and must reassert itself in ever-changing directions.

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Fig. 21 Abbey of Sainte-Marie, Souillac, detail of trumeau, twelfth century. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, New York.

All this takes it beyond the state of familiar ornament” (147). Though this description was written about abstract expressionist paintings, we can well imagine it applying to objects like the trumeau in Souillac (fig. 21). And when we turn to Schapiro’s actual description of that trumeau from 1939, we find that he points to qualities in it—such as the “frantic confusion of its struggling, devouring, intertwining” motifs and the fact that it is “inextricably involved”—that echo similar attributes to those that he highlighted in de Kooning’s painting. Factors like these would seem to be the best evidence for why Schapiro’s 1953 studio visit would have been so decisive—not to mention suggestive of why Schapiro’s art history was so important to a whole generation of New York painters. This interpretation is even tantalizingly suggested by de Kooning’s own reported description of Schapiro as “one of those who tells you that you should be doing what you’re doing, not like those who tell you not to do what you’re doing. Tell him to come again, tell him to come again!”75

1961 Debating Berenson with Berlin Two Concepts of Art-Historical Liberty

In 1961 Schapiro published what was widely understood to be an ad hominem and bellicose critique of the life and work of the late Bernard Berenson, one of the most prominent connoisseurs of the twentieth century, who had passed away in 1959. Schapiro’s essay appeared in the journal Encounter—a Cold War organ of the Anglo-American, anti-Stalinist left—and was provocatively titled “Mr. Berenson’s Values,” which rightfully highlights the essay’s harsh judgments concerning the moral and ethical implications of Berenson’s life and work. As it is hard to imagine two art historians who are more diametrically opposed than Schapiro and Berenson, the conclusions of “Mr. Berenson’s Values” are only fitting. The sociohistorical focus of Schapiro’s scholarship, his open engagement with and celebration of the art of his own time, and his numerous, blatantly Marxist essays concerning some of the most intractable political issues of his generation speak directly to his socialist beliefs and goals. In contrast, Berenson’s instrumentalization of his famous practice of connoisseurship for private gain, his strong criticisms of modern art, and his openly aristocratic and somewhat aloof lifestyle as preserved and

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monumentalized in his villa in the Florentine hillside embody what is easily taken as his underlying, if unarticulated, conservatism. This distinction is very real and well known, as it is based on long-standing, though hackneyed, accounts of the lives and practices of these two scholars. What I hope to show in this chapter is that the stereotyped oppositions that follow are also incomplete, not the least because Schapiro and Berenson can clearly be situated within an intellectual genealogy that goes well beyond their shared identities as Jewish immigrants to America who became art historians. As discussed in the initial chapter, Schapiro, especially in his early writing, was heavily indebted to Fry, and it is a well-documented fact that Fry himself owed a significant debt to Berenson.1 Moreover, because of Schapiro’s and Berenson’s respective educations in the pragmatist tradition of thought as undergraduates—Schapiro with Dewey at Columbia in the 1920s and Berenson with James at Harvard in the 1880s—Schapiro’s and Berenson’s otherwise divergent modes of scholarship can be said to have similar roots.2 The reconciliation of Schapiro the social historian and Berenson the connoisseur stands as a problem that Schapiro himself, not to mention most art historians after him, continuously and yet problematically failed to recognize. Because of this situation, in what follows I aim to articulate in detail exactly what the basis of the conflict between Schapiro and Berenson was and how we can understand their scholarship as nevertheless entangled. My strategy for pursuing these two goals is itself twofold. First, I thoroughly contextualize Schapiro’s 1961 critique of Berenson within the longer-term history of their relationship. This tactic will clarify the basis of Schapiro’s essay while at the same time introducing an unexpected response: the ebullient approbation of Berenson by Isaiah Berlin, the eminent philosopher of liberalism and friend to both Berenson and Schapiro.3 Whereas Schapiro claimed that Berenson had “contaminated his intellectual goals” in his aspiration for “a higher social milieu,” Berlin described Berenson as “rational, morally untroubled, and free.”4 While an earlier letter by Berlin suggests that he did have reservations about the connoisseur,5 the fact that he at one point thought of Berenson in such positive terms raises important questions, particularly in light of Berlin’s own canonical understanding of being “free,” which he had just recently articulated in “Two Concepts of Liberty” of 1958.6 In the second part of this chapter, I set up that essay’s renowned distinction between positive and negative freedom as an analytic framework through which to examine Schapiro’s and Berenson’s purportedly opposed practices as art historians. To do so I focus on what are likely their most ubiquitous practices of

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engaging with images: namely, Berenson’s immense collection of photographs of Italian Renaissance paintings, which was central to his method of attribution, and Schapiro’s practice of making drawings and paintings of his own. By analyzing the central place that these two image practices played in the art historians’ scholarship through the lens of Berlin’s essay, I hope to clarify the gulf between Schapiro and Berenson and to demonstrate its partiality. In conclusion, I briefly situate Berenson’s and Schapiro’s scholarly practices within the pragmatist tradition more generally, and I argue that the stereotypical political positions associated with their art-historical practices may in fact have more in common than has been recognized.

Schapiro’s and Berenson’s Values

Schapiro and Berenson first met on the afternoon of May 21, 1927, at I Tatti, Berenson’s villa outside of Florence.7 At that point in time, Schapiro was just twenty-two years old and was in the midst of a fifteen-month-long trip around Europe and the Mediterranean that was funded by a scholarship from the Carnegie Corporation to finish his Ph.D. Throughout the 1920s, the Carnegie Corporation supported the expansion of art-historical education in the United States beyond the handful of schools that initially established the discipline in the 1870s and ’80s.8 And in this respect, it is important to note that the scope of Columbia’s current department of art history and archaeology is far greater than it was when Schapiro earned his Ph.D. there in 1929. In fact, Schapiro was the very first recipient of a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia.9 This detail, combined with Schapiro’s academic accomplishments and his working-class background, likely accounted for his Carnegie scholarship, since that program strove to expand art history beyond its origins in America’s Gilded Age aristocracy. Perhaps more importantly, however, this context also testifies to Schapiro’s social and financial status at the time, which clearly shaped his meeting with the older connoisseur, who seemed to be Schapiro’s American art-historical opposite. Berenson was then sixty-one, had studied at Harvard under the very first professor of art history in the United States, Charles Eliot Norton, and had long been established as one of the world’s leading connoisseurs thanks to his numerous publications. By that point, Berenson was also very wealthy thanks to the substantial income he received from the art dealer Joseph Duveen, who paid Berenson both a yearly retainer as well as a percentage of the sale price of pictures that he attributed.10

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Fig. 22 Meyer Schapiro, caricature of Bernard Berenson, ca. 1940s, from Meyer Schapiro: His Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture (New York: Braziller, 2000). With kind permission by the estate of Meyer Schapiro.

Considering the differences between the two men, it is not entirely surprising that their initial encounter was strained. By his own admission, Berenson let out what he termed “a horrid outburst” upon meeting Schapiro.11 The cause was Berenson’s open suspicion that Schapiro’s Ph.D. adviser, Ernest DeWald, had plagiarized some of his own ideas, a suspicion that—however warranted it may have been—betrays an intellectual possessiveness and insecurity in Berenson that flared up on more than one occasion.12 And in case such a reaction did not stress their initial introduction enough, Berenson then supposedly “put Schapiro to task” by testing his ability to analyze objects in his art collection.13 Though Berenson approved of Schapiro’s answers and even invited him back to I Tatti on multiple occasions, one cannot help but wonder how this initial introduction might have shaped Schapiro’s memory. If nothing else, such a meeting clearly showcased Berenson’s own feelings of superiority, which Schapiro caricatured in one of his many drawings (fig. 22). Granted, Berenson’s and Schapiro’s widely divergent professional positions at the time did underwrite this feeling, yet the drawing also illustrates Berenson’s ostensible aristocratic outlook and the ambition to which Schapiro took such exception. As Schapiro was almost certainly aware, Berenson had also immigrated to the United States as a child with his working-class, Jewish family from modern-day Lithuania and had struggled to start his

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career. This shared background may even have motivated Schapiro to make his unannounced visit to I Tatti on his very first day in Florence in 1927. Whereas Berenson had faced discrimination at Harvard in the 1880s and had blundered through the trials and tribulations of the Dreyfus Affair, Schapiro had experienced firsthand the infamously anti-Semitic Immigration Act of 1924. Schapiro also suspected that he had been denied admission to Princeton because he was Jewish and had overcome the erstwhile quotas on Jewish students at Columbia. These comparable experiences were, nonetheless, not enough to bring Schapiro and Berenson together.14 In this regard it is interesting to note that Schapiro had a very different encounter with another distinguished connoisseur on the same trip. The day immediately after first meeting Berenson, Schapiro serendipitously met JeanPaul Richter while doing some research in the Laurentian Library.15 Richter was more senior than Berenson and as widely respected in academic circles; he also brokered the initial introduction between Berenson and his mentor, Giovanni Morelli, thus making Richter partially responsible for Berenson’s rise. Quite in contrast to Berenson, Richter accompanied Schapiro to the Medici palace, looked at works of art with him, and reminisced about the difficulties of his earlier travels to some of the places that Schapiro had recently visited. Schapiro, it would seem, shared more of the values of this elder German Lutheran than those of Berenson, Schapiro’s fellow Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant to America. Because of their early clash, it is interesting to note that Schapiro and Berenson each represent something of the other’s road not taken, a fact that Helen Epstein noted long ago.16 Later in life, Berenson lamented that he had not fully dedicated himself to scholarship—as Schapiro did—and Schapiro’s harsh criticism of what he took to be Berenson’s academic pretensions betrays his discomfort about the centrality of connoisseurship to his chosen profession. Even Schapiro’s own arguments concerning Freud’s analysis of Leonardo were unavoidably made in relation to how Berenson shaped both the field in general and the understanding of that artist in particular—if only due to Berenson’s historical precedence and influence.17 Additionally, and as mentioned at the outset, Schapiro’s and Berenson’s respective educations in the pragmatist tradition of thought—though occurring at different institutions and more than thirty years apart—were also fundamentally similar. This fact is not unimportant, as Berenson and Schapiro also continued to look to pragmatist ideas as sources of authority throughout their lives; late in life Berenson even once described his grand theory of tactile values as “William

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James’s idea,” and as will be discussed more fully in the following chapter, Schapiro once defended himself against Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive criticisms by pronouncing that he “was a student of John Dewey and [he] believed in the truth.”18 However opposed their writing and lives were in practice, this shared link to a pragmatist vein of thought does much to connect their scholarship and some of the values behind it. The extant correspondence between Schapiro and Berenson shows that they retained a cordial if merely passing relationship in the years that followed their rocky first encounter.19 However, this cordiality began to change with the publication of Berenson’s books of the late 1940s: specifically, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts and Sketch for a Self-Portrait. In 1949, Schapiro reviewed these books quite pointedly, and his judgments were clearly motivated by Berenson’s openly hostile comments on modern and nonclassical art, forms of representation of which Schapiro was an ardent, lifelong defender. As Schapiro lays bare in his review, in these books Berenson laments the expansion of aesthetic value and appreciation beyond the classical, naturalistic styles of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance for a variety of reasons. While Berenson had initially celebrated the affinity between the aesthetic effects of Cézanne’s paintings to those of the Florentine Renaissance, in these later books he now considered the modern impulse toward abstraction incompatible with his larger aesthetic theory. Going further, Berenson now also brashly saw the rise in taste for nonnaturalistic art as evidence for a decay in Western civilization. He even went so far as to associate that taste with the rise of totalitarian politics, a blatantly contradictory association that Schapiro clearly could not swallow. As Schapiro points out in his review, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin had all denounced modern abstract art as well as nonclassical artistic styles, facts that were apparent in the official art of their regimes. Moreover, as Schapiro continues, despite Berenson’s ostensibly conservative commitments to a classical ideal, his own theory of tactile values—not to mention his preference to merely “sketch” his life rather than to recount it objectively—was in fact deeply indebted to the very modernism that he repudiated. From these observations, Schapiro concludes his review by bemoaning “the stagnation of Berenson’s virtuoso thought,” “the spiritual shallowness of the culture-conscious social milieu in which he thrived,” and his insufficient awareness “of the depth of the human struggle toward self-mastery, freedom, and creativeness” (616). Beyond these obvious reasons for Schapiro’s critique, a more subtle and for my purposes particularly revealing aspect of his 1949 review is interesting

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to note. In discussing Berenson’s professed regret over his commercial pursuits and his failure to develop his early theoretical ideas, Schapiro points out that Berenson was not suited to the type of philosophical work to which he aspired as his “intelligence [was] at the service of his impressions” (616). By noting the hierarchical relationship between Berenson’s “impressions” and his “intelligence”—an aspect of his thinking that some of his own followers would later point out as well—Schapiro foreshadows his own later objections to Berenson’s comparison of himself to the famed seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, which he expresses in Sketch for a Self-Portrait in the course of a lamentation over his work in the commercial art world.20 As Schapiro might well have pointed out, part of what makes this comparison so evidently problematic is that Spinoza put forward an almost categorical argument for precisely why the opposite relation between “impressions” and “intelligence” should govern our lives—that is, why impressions should be at the service of human intelligence and not, as they were in Berenson’s life and writing, the other way around. Stated all too schematically, for Spinoza, if the striving that importantly defines humans as a species—what he termed the conatus—is allowed to pursue its desires unchecked by means of the ephemeral and contingent “impressions” of our individual experience, then humans become passive slaves to those impressions. If the conatus is checked by means of active, reasoned deliberation, however, humans can bring themselves more fully into harmony with the world around them, as that world—just like the eternal rules of logic that govern human reason—is governed by the eternal rules or laws of nature. Under Spinoza’s highly deterministic metaphysics, therefore, the active life of reason rather than Berenson’s more passive life of aesthetic impressions brings us closest to the natural laws of the environment that engulfs and sustains us, making reason and logic key to the achievement of harmony, inner peace, and a sense of freedom. Though Spinoza’s metaphysics is clearly open to many objections and has been discussed and debated at length over the centuries, his strong commitment to the life of reason and Berenson’s seeming opposition to it reveals why Schapiro was quite justified in describing the comparison between them as “grotesque.”21 As we will see shortly, this comparison is not without relevance for Berlin’s defense of Berenson; as Berlin knew well, an individual’s relation to reason was a central preoccupation of the tradition of political liberalism of which Berlin was an arch defender and of which Spinoza was an important early voice. In his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, however, Berenson did not mean to compare his underlying metaphysics to those of Spinoza, and there is even

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reason to believe that he would have understood why such a comparison would have been problematic.22 Rather, in making the comparison Berenson simply meant to relate his practice in the picture trade to Spinoza’s practice of making lenses, both vocations being necessary means of financial support that did not represent the two men’s true ambitions. Such a comparison is simple enough—and might, as Berlin put it, best be understood as “a very characteristic jeu d’espirt [on Berenson’s part] and no more”23—yet it also washes over several important practical differences between the two men. First, whereas Berenson monetized his academic gifts as an art historian in order to make a living, Spinoza supported himself through the entirely secondary occupation of lens grinding, and therefore his academic work as a philosopher and his occupation were quite far apart. Second and perhaps more importantly, the amount of income that Berenson made through his dealings with Duveen far outstripped that of Spinoza’s rather humble occupation, a fact that Schapiro and others have rightly pointed to as an important ground for not being able to sympathize with Berenson’s stated regret over his unfulfilled academic ambition. From fairly early after working with Duveen, Berenson would have easily had the means to dedicate himself to his stated philosophical aspirations for many years to come. That he did not do so, therefore, highlights what many suspect to have been his true desire: not to develop his ideas in the spirit of scholarship but to be an aristocrat. However we take Berenson’s comparison of himself to Spinoza, it is hard not to suspect that it also had something to do with Berenson’s fraught relationship to his Jewish heritage. Spinoza, of course, was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam at the young age of twenty-three, a fact that relates to Berenson’s official renunciation of his Judaic roots as an undergraduate.24 If it goes unmentioned in Schapiro’s essay, Berenson was clearly attentive to Spinoza’s legacy because of their shared Jewish heritage. In the posthumous book One Year’s Reading for Fun of 1960, Berenson emphatically points to the irony of the Nazis continuing to publish Spinoza’s writings despite their bans on other Jewish authors.25 Spinoza, it would seem, was so central to the Western tradition of thought that even the Nazis could excuse his Jewishness. That Berenson would make such an observation was especially fitting. His own religious conversions—first to Episcopalianism as an undergraduate and then to Roman Catholicism later in life—combined with his aristocratic lifestyle and his research on a topic central to Christian culture surely parallel his desire for a similarly exceptional integration into his adopted milieu. In Schapiro’s eyes, however, Berenson’s attempts at integration through

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religious conversion were more an expression of his social aspirations than of any real principled beliefs. This point is difficult to firmly establish, though it surely makes Berenson’s comparison of himself with Spinoza all the more problematic. Spinoza’s distance from Judaism was a forced excommunication—likely caused by the obviously heretical content of his books—and not a choice. As Schapiro put it, Spinoza’s separation from Judaism was “an act of courageous conviction”; Berenson’s, in contrast, was “a short-lived conversion that helped to accommodate him to a higher social milieu.”26 As a warrant for his suspicions, Schapiro points to several of Berenson’s comments about his fellow Jews that reveal how Berenson positioned himself as an outsider to Jewish culture. In an early essay, for instance, Berenson called for the study of Jewish literature so that “we shall begin to understand the puzzling character of the Jews; begin to understand, I say, for comprehend them we never shall. Their character and their interests are too vitally opposed to ours to permit the existence of that intelligent sympathy between us and them which is necessary for comprehension.”27 It is unclear exactly how we are to understand this statement. On the one hand, because we know that Berenson was Jewish by birth, there is certainly a sense of self-distancing from an “uncouth ghetto world”—as Schapiro put it—that can be read into these lines.28 Schapiro himself recognized the shame that many American Jews felt in the early twentieth century, and in his correspondence he underlined its historical importance.29 Parallel to this form of historical experience, there is a tone of distaste in Berenson’s characterization of Jewish culture as incomprehensible that surely raises ethical red flags, which some of his contemporaries—and even his wife—pointed out.30 On the other hand, because Berenson was officially an Episcopalian at the time he wrote these words and because the venue for the statement was a journal of Christian theology, we might also more charitably and pallidly understand them as a statement about the incommensurability of values across religious groups. Whatever their actual intentions, other statements by Berenson that Ernest Samuels first published in 1979 are more damning. In a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Berenson openly mocked Jewish religious rituals and even complained of the barbarism of Jewish culture in general—and this despite both his heritage and the fact that he had studied Semitic languages as an undergraduate.31 Although Berlin obviously did not have access to Samuels’s 1979 biography when he defended Berenson against Schapiro in 1961, his vindication should be foregrounded against the facts about Berenson as they are known today, especially considering the moral direction of Schapiro’s critique. Like

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several other writers who responded to Schapiro’s article, Berlin had planned to send his letter to Encounter so that his positive opinion of Berenson as well as his unease with Schapiro’s strong criticisms would be on record. In his letter, Berlin reports that he had spoken with Berenson on a half dozen occasions during his later years and, in the face of Schapiro’s “indignant” and “profoundly unjust” criticisms, felt obliged to publish his positive impression of the connoisseur. Berlin notes Berenson’s “powerful intellectual personality,” his “sharp and arresting” conversation, his “breadth and precision of knowledge,” and his “acute ironical and deeply civilized intelligence.”32 As if such praise were not enough, Berlin then compared the effect of Berenson’s conversation to that of Boris Pasternak, John Maynard Keynes, and Freud, thereby ratifying Berenson’s virtuoso status, a quality that—the reader will remember—Schapiro himself had once recognized in Berenson’s early publications. If Berlin was sure to note that he disagreed sharply with Berenson’s highly critical relationship to his Jewish roots, he also pointed out that Berenson’s attitude was a revolt against his very difficult childhood as well as against the nationalistic feelings that his Jewish heritage could inspire in others. Through such comments, Berenson’s problematic relationship to his past is at least rendered understandable, though certainly not defensible. In the face of such problems, however, and as noted at the outset, Berlin culminates his defense of Berenson by describing the connoisseur as morally and intellectually independent, “rational, morally untroubled, and free.”33 Berlin’s then-recent and extensively developed statements about freedom in general surely raise the question as to what he meant by characterizing Berenson in such a positive light, even if Schapiro’s heartfelt reply to Berlin’s letter did cause the latter to withhold submitting his defense of Berenson for publication. In 1958, upon assuming the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, Berlin delivered “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in which he discussed at length the difference between what he termed the positive and the negative concepts of freedom. This distinction, unsurprisingly, has a long and complex history in Western political thought, yet Berlin’s articulation was particularly apt during the Cold War and, as we will see, sheds light on Schapiro’s criticisms of Berenson. Stated succinctly, the positive concept of liberty is most prominently associated with Marx and the equation of freedom with the active power of self-realization and self-determination. Under this understanding, freedom concerns the presence of possibilities for individual action, which are fundamentally internal to an individual. If one does not possess the capacity

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to develop to one’s full potential, for instance, if this capacity is somehow withheld because of social or economic conditions, then one is not free. The negative concept of liberty, in contrast, is most heavily allied with forms of libertarianism and the equation of freedom with an independence from the coercive wills of others. Under this conception, freedom is largely defined as the absence of external interference from one’s life and in this sense is largely a passive state of affairs within which one lives. So long as one is not occluded by other individuals or by some active force, so long as physical barriers and tangible obstacles are absent from one’s life, one has liberty. This distinction is not perfect, and many have criticized the division it draws.34 Yet it is fitting in relation to Schapiro’s criticisms of Berenson, as Schapiro’s Marxist leanings clearly made him more committed to the former, whereas Berenson’s haute bourgeois lifestyle implicitly aligns him with the latter. And from a general perspective, this characterization does much to clarify the distance between the two men. Berenson’s private villa in the Florentine hillside, for instance, can easily be read as a means of removing himself from the coercive wills of others and thus as an expression of his adherence to a negative conception of liberty. In contrast, Schapiro’s embeddedness in the New York art world and his evident dedication as a public intellectual and educator to the development of self-mastery on a truly social scale expresses a positive conception of freedom. Turning to Berenson’s and Schapiro’s respective practices of art history in some detail, however, and to their aforementioned, characteristic image practices in particular, reveals how these basic distinctions between their respective modes of art-historical scholarship only partially hold.

Schapiro’s and Berenson’s Image Practices

However uncertain and unelaborated it may have been in most of Schapiro’s published writings, Schapiro’s practice of drawing and painting undoubtedly informed his sociohistorical scholarship. On a quite general level, Schapiro’s practice as an artist reinforced his understanding of how the act of visual perception worked within and was recorded by the production of artworks. As he tersely put it in 1960, “Through drawing one develops one’s power of seeing.”35 In this particular instance, Schapiro asserted the idea that drawing was a kind of perceptual or even “epistemological tool”—to borrow the recent phrase of Jérémie Koering—and did so as a reaction against the early thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had once claimed that the act of painting

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presupposes knowledge of the object or objects being depicted.36 Schapiro, in contrast, had long held that the act of seeing is an active and incomplete skill that could be improved and refined and that the practices of drawing and painting were real and effective means toward that refinement, and his writings contain multiple ideas related to a nascent theory of perception that underwrites such beliefs. For instance, in a paper from 1966 titled “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content,” Schapiro stated: “We strive to see [works of art] as completely as possible and in a unifying way, though seeing is selective and limited. Critical seeing, aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole. It takes into account other’s seeing; it is a collective and cooperative seeing and welcomes comparison of different perceptions and judgments” (49). Schapiro’s commitment to an understanding of human vision as active and incomplete is here plainly stated, and he links this understanding to some of his most cherished scholarly values. The active and incomplete nature of seeing was, for him, more than just a disinterested statement of fact about our visual experience of the world. Rather, he also notes the cooperative and collective dimension to seeing that this fact entails: that seeing is at its best when it is “critical” and when it invites the judgments of others in an ongoing process of reflection. For Schapiro, the scientific ideal of a cooperative community that compares and contrasts its observations and findings in order to arrive at some truth is revealed to be embedded within his fundamental understanding of perception itself. Incidentally, this belief is likely what made Schapiro recognize that his approach to art history was fundamentally similar to the Marxist-inflected phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the latter having also advocated the primacy of a holistically informed and critically attuned act of perception.37 As previously suggested, this model of vision and its relation to Schapiro’s scholarly goals was connected to his training as an artist and likely also accounts for his sympathy for the work of Eugène Fromentin. Fromentin’s writing, as Schapiro points out, was deeply informed by his training as a painter.38 Schapiro’s parents enrolled him in art classes when he was still a child; one of these classes was with the renowned Ashcan School painter John Sloan. The most formidable influence on Schapiro’s practice of drawing and painting, however, seems to have come during his time as an undergraduate at Columbia from 1920 to 1924. There he took courses at Columbia’s Teachers College with Charles Martin, a now largely forgotten student of Maurice Denis. Schapiro spoke about this experience:

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Martin asked the students to present at each weekly meeting a carefully finished charcoal on a theme that interested us. . . . We set out our drawings on the edge of the blackboard for him to scrutinize, and after long looking he selected the best and grouped them in an order of quality. He commented on every work with great seriousness and invited our own judgements. In each he pointed to particular features that gave the work its special quality, and he spoke with a warm appreciation of what was distinctively good in the conception, the forms and tones, and the execution. He sometimes changed his judgment in the course of comment, finding beauties in drawings he had at first placed in a lower category. I learned from him to see works as individual things and to attend to the fine differences as well as the large, to the qualities emerging in scrutiny as well as to the immediate impact.39 These lines reveal how Schapiro thought about the two activities of analyzing and evaluating works of art as interdependent, temporarily extended, and collective. Fromentin had made similar points in his writing, and Schapiro notes passages that clearly echo both his account of his education under Martin and his own notion of critical seeing. For instance, in describing Fromentin’s description of Rubens’s Descent from the Cross, Schapiro states, “Where Fromentin feels doubts, he returns to the object, scrutinizes it more fully, strives to detach his view from old habits and opinions and struggles with judgment painfully, until he has reached a point of rest” (fig. 23).40 While it would be an exaggeration to claim that Schapiro learned about the importance of these ideas from Martin and Fromentin alone—in his lectures on the theories and methods of art history, for instance, Schapiro also credits Dewey as a source for his familiarity with the active, selective nature of perception— the above passages clearly show that Martin’s classes and Fromentin’s work at the very least reinforced these ideas in his mind.41 The most visible and evident way that these commitments manifest themselves in Schapiro’s art-historical scholarship is through what he terms his “analytic drawings,” several of which diagram the very work by Rubens that Schapiro himself used to dramatize the specificity of Fromentin’s approach (e.g., fig. 24). Inspired by the writings of Willard Huntington Wright and Roger Fry, Schapiro often analyzed works of art by diagramming the internal relationships between their forms. He described this practice in an interview with Helen Epstein in 1983, stating that as an undergraduate, “I made analytical drawings of buildings, sculptures, and paintings that interested

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Fig. 23 Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross, 1612–14. Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

me and made notes on line patterns and the distribution of light and dark. I practiced a kind of schematic formal analysis.”42 Although Schapiro rarely published these drawings, the diagrams found in his 1939 essay “The Sculptures of Souillac” show that the practice could play a central role in his thinking (e.g., figs. 25 and 26). In that analysis, he demonstrates how the discordant style of a sculptural relief at the Abbey Church of Souillac is not—as previous scholars had claimed—incoherent but rather a fundamental part of how the religious iconography of the depicted scene is represented and thus intimately connected with the relief’s larger sociohistorical function and intention. By making such connections by way of analytic drawings, he further reveals how an active and almost experimental visual engagement with works of art can fundamentally transform our understanding of them. In contrast to Schapiro’s practice of drawing, Berenson’s heavy reliance on photographs in his practice of connoisseurship proves interesting. Although Berenson obviously examined works of art in person frequently and, if uncertain, would withhold an attribution until he had personally examined a work, he actually preferred to base his attributions on photographs for a variety of reasons. First and perhaps most obviously, because artists’ oeuvres

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Fig. 24 Meyer Schapiro, analytic diagram of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross, undated. With kind permission by the estate of Meyer Schapiro. Photo: Columbia University Libraries.

were often distributed in multiple, widely distant collections, photographs made the “patient comparison of a given work with all other works by the same master” possible.43 Second, photographs prolonged Berenson’s ability to observe artworks by allowing him to stay in a single place and focus his energy on examining a painting and its supposed relations in detail over an extended period of time. He could even do so in a place of great comfort, for instance his favorite arm chair or even his bed. Third, unlike in the presence of the original, photographs occluded the aesthetic enjoyment that Berenson quite naturally experienced in front of original artworks, thus making his judgments more sober and restrained. He dramatized this last point by once stating: “I am not ashamed to confess that I have more often gone astray when I have seen the work of art by itself and alone, than when I have known its reproductions only. Nowadays I hesitate to come to a conclusion about a work of art without submitting it to the leisurely scrutiny of photographs. The more photographs of the same object, the better. Each contributes something of its own, even prints from the same negative that should be identical.”44 What is especially noteworthy about this description is how it illustrates Berenson’s ostensibly hypersensitive nature. It would seem that original works of art had such a strong effect on Berenson that he became suspicious of his own

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Fig. 25 Meyer Schapiro, diagram of the relief of Theophilus, from “The Sculptures of Souillac,” in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, edited by Wilhelm R. W. Koehler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939). Copyright © 1939 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Fig. 26 Abbey of Sainte-Marie, Souillac, relief of Theophilus, twelfth century. Photo: Belle Vue / Alamy Stock Photo.

judgments, as if he himself were a kind of finely calibrated scientific instrument that was only effective in highly constrained conditions. However we choose to understand such a statement—and it is only natural that some will be incredulous of its implications—it does further testify to the notion that Berenson’s intellect was at the service of his impressions and that his impressions were so strong that they could easily dominate his thinking. Under such a model of visual engagement with art objects, Berenson is passive two times over: first to his impressions and second to the photographs that he desperately needs to carry out his attributional task. Since these photographs were taken by others and are records of their—at least to a limited extent—subjective impressions, Berenson’s reliance on such images reveals a passivity on his part that is very much opposed to the necessarily active nature of Schapiro’s drawing practice. To a certain extent, then, Berenson’s passive use of photographs and Schapiro’s active creation of drawings might even be understood as natural opposites.

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Schapiro seems to have also thought about the relation between connoisseurship in general and his sociohistorical scholarship in similarly polarizing terms, often likening the work of a connoisseur to that of a computer or a machine.45 Notwithstanding Schapiro’s sensitivity to the central import of attributions to the discipline—he was even once directly caught up in the controversy surrounding a potentially forged self-portrait by Van Gogh—by likening the work of connoisseurship to that of a computer, Schapiro also casts connoisseurship as more passive than his own mode of scholarship.46 If a computer or a machine could make attributions, then connoisseurship is reduced to a kind of automatic task with no will of its own. Such a description also expressly undermines its authority. If mere computers might one day do the work of connoisseurs, connoisseurship in general is placed below the higher forms of complex and nuanced analysis that Schapiro practiced. Moreover, if connoisseurship could indeed be practiced by a computer, that practice is positioned as a form of almost slavish computation. While the possibility of machines that one day might attribute paintings is surely still open, and the ability of computers to categorize images through sophisticated algorithms improves every year, Schapiro’s thought experiment—or perhaps, metaphor—easily reinforces the distinction between the active nature of Schapiro’s analytic drawings, and their place in his sociohistorical scholarship, and the passive nature of Berenson’s use of photographs and its place in his practice of connoisseurship. However, as Hayden Maginnis persuasively argues, part of what made Berenson’s practice of attribution innovative was its fundamentally active nature.47 As is well known, Berenson’s approach built on and refined that of Morelli, who introduced a focused study of specific details within paintings and employed the comparison of such details across artists’ oeuvres as a means of attributing works. Morelli’s approach was heavily indebted to the classificatory work of the natural sciences, and its effect was to give important direction and specificity to the visual analysis of artworks. Whereas previous connoisseurs had often based their attributions on the overall impression that a painting produced—what Morelli termed the Totaleindruck of the Berlin school—Morelli implicitly recognized that such an approach was at odds with recent research into how vision works: namely, that visual perception is in important respects not based on static, instantaneous wholes but rather on scattered, incomplete details that are created by the rapid and continuous saccades of the eye.48 Because of this physiological fact, Morelli’s famous diagrams of the depicted hands and ears that most characteristically mark the works of specific Renaissance artists can be understood as giving important direction and focus to the necessarily active

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process that is seeing itself, thus providing an important foundation upon which more accurate visual classifications of those artists’ oeuvres can be built. And of course, since Schapiro’s practice of analytic drawing and his art-historical scholarship in general was also heavily based on an active relationship between the viewer and the object, the distance between Schapiro’s and Berenson’s art-historical practices is not nearly as categorical as is often claimed. Keeping this unexpected affinity in mind, it is interesting to reconsider the most evident gulf between Schapiro’s and Berenson’s scholarship with which this chapter began: the Marxist-inflected, sociohistorical approach of Schapiro and its alignment with a positive concept of liberty as the opposite of the market-inflected connoisseurship of Berenson and its alignment with a negative concept of the same. Though this distinction is real—and art historians today are surely justified in being unsympathetic to many of Berenson’s values—it also undermines Berenson’s scholarly contribution while simultaneously portraying Schapiro’s own writing as purely disinterested. As various scholars have noted, the kinship between Schapiro’s art-historical approach and modern styles of painting—a consanguinity best demonstrated through the style of Schapiro’s own artistic practice—quite clearly displays the vested interest that Schapiro had in the value of this style of artistic production. Forasmuch as this interest is not inherently problematic, the evident parallels that Serge Guilbaut and others have drawn between Schapiro’s outspoken support of American modernism and Cold War liberalism can surely make it so.49 This is not to say that Schapiro is at fault for such a commonality; he is not. But his critique of Berenson paints the relation between his connoisseurship and the values that should guide art history in unnecessarily apodictic terms. A more measured and more openhanded assessment of Berenson’s practice of connoisseurship reveals not only that he did contribute to art-historical thought—as his long historical shadow suggests—but also that his connoisseurial practice actually shares an important premise with Schapiro’s own sociohistorical scholarship. In closing, it is fitting to note that Schapiro’s and Berenson’s shared commitment to an active model of visual perception speaks directly to ethical and political issues that are very much a part of the pragmatist tradition of thought in which they were trained. As discussed in the previous chapter, pragmatism has its roots in the so-called pragmatic maxim, which placed action at the center of its definition of truth by claiming that the truth of a given belief should be judged by its effects or consequences.50 While the political implications of such a position are surely debatable, several prominent

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scholars, including Hilary Putnam, have connected it to the fundamental tenets of democracy. On this reading, since the actions that follow from pragmatic beliefs are almost always consequential for more than the individual believer, pragmatic truth becomes entwined with social ramifications. Equating truth with its consequences, in other words, becomes an analytic ground for a politics where an individual’s beliefs are tested against their effects in and on a social group. The experimentalist bent of this approach to belief is what connects pragmatism to democracy, because its definition of belief indicates how it ought to be formulated.51 Pragmatism’s community of inquirers, so the analogy would claim, are much like voting citizens, in that both test beliefs against their communal effects until they reach consensus. While it may be more evident to us today how Schapiro’s sociohistorical scholarship—rather than Berenson’s connoisseurship—aligns with such democratic ideals, Berenson’s evident embrace of an active model of visual perception can be related to it. The specific details of individual artists’ styles that Berenson’s model of connoisseurial perception helps to identify are, after all, still an important basis of the democratically produced art-historical consensus concerning the delimitation of many artists’ oeuvres. This is not to say that an active model of visual perception is by itself a guarantee for democratic practice, let alone an exoneration of Berenson’s questionable dealings; prominent Italian proto-fascist intellectuals like Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini were also attracted to pragmatist ideas, and these interests did not make their politics palatable.52 Nevertheless, if we isolate this aspect of Berenson’s work and consider its powerful legacy, perhaps we could in some qualified way agree with Berlin’s assertion in the face of Schapiro’s critique. Berenson’s commitment to an active approach to visual perception is what Schapiro overlooked and what Berlin indirectly identified. To his credit, Schapiro may have even once recognized this uncomfortable fact: he began his drafted reply to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s published response to “Mr. Berenson’s Values” by denying that he intended his essay as a “total negation” of Berenson’s accomplishments.53 Such an acknowledgment, as this chapter has argued, would seem to be the beginning of a partial rapprochement between Schapiro and Berenson that stems not from a disregard of their evident differences but rather from the easily overlooked recognition that both men had some overlapping values all along.

1968 Heidegger and Goldstein Van Gogh’s Shoes and the Liabilities of Ekphrasis

In 1968, Meyer Schapiro published what would become one of his most discussed essays: “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh.” The paper was originally buried in an edited volume commemorating the neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965)—a figure who, though important in his own field, was largely removed from art-historical concerns—and it consisted of barely more than five full pages of text. As such, one could easily be excused for not taking this self-proclaimed note as Schapiro’s most significant piece of scholarship, and it remained little known for at least ten years after its publication. In 1977, however, a shining and still-rising star of continental philosophy—Jacques Derrida—unearthed Schapiro’s fillip as part of his influential deconstructive project and thereby turned the article into a watershed text for a whole generation of humanistic scholarship.1 The number of writers who subsequently waded into the debate that ensued—a debate that revolved around the seemingly irresolvable, if not obscure or even obtuse, question of whose shoes were depicted in a painting by Vincent van Gogh—was truly overwhelming. Did it matter, as Schapiro insisted it did, that Heidegger likely erred in his description of

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the shoes as belonging to a peasant woman? Was Schapiro’s historical proclamation that the painting depicted Van Gogh’s own shoes apt, irrelevant, or, as some claimed, naïve? À la Derrida, a shibboleth-like response to these questions soon became the recognition of an unexpected resonance between Schapiro’s and Heidegger’s respective interpretations that spoke to the very heart of humanistic inquiry. As Joseph Koerner justly summarizes, opposed though Schapiro’s and Heidegger’s arguments may seem, both “are founded in a groundless metaphysics of presence. Both see living subjects where there are only objects, and it is this mystification, this desire, that Derrida famously [sought] to deconstruct.”2 The interest that this Derridean critique of Schapiro created was highly productive, being a part, as it was, of a generational shift among art historians toward a more speculative and metaphysically attuned scholarly attitude. Such a result was also, however, deeply ironic, as Schapiro himself had been advocating and practicing a more theoretically aware form of art history for decades and was personally responsible for mentoring scholars who would soon become some of the high priests of art-historical theory. Moreover, the consequent popularity of the Derridean project among art historians combined with the metonymic function that the Schapiro-Heidegger debate could take on within period discussions of disciplinary crisis, also had the effect of washing over the historical origins of Schapiro’s own original critique. This chapter is about recapturing those origins. It suggests how a better understanding of them changes the stakes of the perceived import of Schapiro’s analysis. Here I ask two questions: why did Schapiro criticize Heidegger in the first place, and how do those motives reflect timeless art-historical commitments? Such questions, naturally, only take on value in retrospect, and thus at the end of this chapter, I will necessarily return to Derrida’s critique. In making that step last rather than first, however, I willfully delay interpreting the analytic stakes of Schapiro’s debate with Heidegger in order to open up a dimension of Schapiro’s original critique that has somewhat incongruously escaped scholarly attention: its relation to the innovative thought of the man to whom it was originally dedicated, Kurt Goldstein. The fact that Schapiro originally published his critique of Heidegger in a volume dedicated to Goldstein is often repeated. Derrida himself, in fact, originally made something of the connection, yet he also reduced it to an expression of shared identity and of shared politics, a point to which I shall return. He failed to take seriously the import of Goldstein’s research for Schapiro, playfully— if somewhat backhandedly—dubbing Goldstein “a man of aphasia.”3 How

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Schapiro’s claims about Heidegger and Van Gogh, therefore, speak to Goldstein’s own work have gone almost completely unexplored.4 In pursuing this goal, this chapter is composed of two main parts and a final envoi. First, I recount Schapiro’s long-term friendship with Goldstein in relation both to Schapiro’s own writing on Van Gogh and to the uneasy and uneven connections to existentialist thought that Schapiro and Goldstein share. I reveal that Schapiro’s friendship with Goldstein importantly shaped not only his 1968 critique of Heidegger’s Van Gogh interpretation but even Schapiro’s first dedicated essay on Van Gogh, from 1946. The broader story that connects these two moments of Schapiro’s bibliography—and one that all too easily omits Goldstein’s work—concerns Schapiro’s growing postwar focus on the relation between language and pictures. That focus would lead to his pioneering semiotic essays of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which I largely set aside for the moment so as to be able to consider them more fully in the final chapter. As part of this semiotic work and as part of his already mentioned reaction against the early writing of Wittgenstein, Schapiro came to believe that pictures and their propositional descriptions were fundamentally different in kind and not reducible to the same denominator.5 As he rhetorically put it in his course on the theories and methods of art history in 1975, “The question then is: a proposition can be affirmed or denied. [But] can you deny a picture as a proposition?”6 Though differences between verbal and visual representation have long been noted, Schapiro’s particular adherence to their irreducibility made the prolix description of Van Gogh’s painting that lay at the center of Heidegger’s essay anathema to Schapiro’s firstorder assumptions. As Schapiro himself noted, his criticisms of Heidegger had as much if not more to do with his general understanding of the limits and liabilities of ekphrasis as with Heidegger’s specific description of Van Gogh’s painting, to say nothing of Heidegger’s ontology of art.7 In the second half of this chapter, I investigate Schapiro’s understanding of these limits, chiefly as they follow from his 1968 criticisms of Heidegger. I then conclude by reframing Schapiro’s response to Derrida’s 1978 intervention, expressly by way of Schapiro’s late and final answer to Heidegger, Derrida, and their potential sympathizers of 1994.

Schapiro and Goldstein

According to his own later recollections, Schapiro first met Goldstein when the latter gave a presentation at the Linguistic Circle of New York in the mid-1940s.8 That “circle” had been founded in 1943 by a group of linguists

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associated with the École libre des hautes études at the New School for Social Research—the French arm of Alvin Johnson’s so-called universityin-exile—and it included such luminaries as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson.9 As a scholar at the top of his field with deep philosophical interests, much like Schapiro, Goldstein fit right in with such a crowd. Prior to fleeing Europe in 1934 and arriving in New York in 1935, Goldstein had been a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin—then undoubtedly the center of the German academy—and before that at Frankfurt, where he had held the rank of full professor since 1923 and had directed the university’s Neurological Institute.10 Moreover, in the year immediately before arriving in the United States, Goldstein published what is now widely considered to be his magnum opus, his book Der Aufbau des Organismus, translated into English the following year as The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Goldstein elaborated what he alternatively called a holistic or biological approach to the nervous system, and he did so based on years of clinical work. Whereas the earlier neurological research of the associationist school had been largely occupied with isolating various functional centers in the brain—for instance, the specific areas of the cerebral cortex that govern speech—Goldstein emphasized the interconnectedness, malleability, and adaptability of the human mind. As part of this approach, Goldstein positioned disease as a disturbance in the equilibrium that all organisms naturally seek in relation to their environments, and he framed his research on pathology as revealing general holistic processes that all humans undergo, specifically the striving for what he termed self-actualization (Selbstverwirklichung) and the threat of disintegration (Abbau), the latter being a negation of the Aufbau in the book’s original title. Though Goldstein was certainly not alone in defending and exploring similar positions—as discussed in the first chapter, holistic approaches were widespread among his contemporaries, and Goldstein himself enjoyed close ties to the Gestalt school—by the time of his presentation in New York in the 1940s, isolating and localizing approaches within neurological research had assumed a new form of dominance, especially in the American academy. Now going under the name of behaviorism and most heavily associated with the exacting experiments of the psychologist B. F. Skinner, Goldstein’s views were soon under fire.11 Much to the benefit of more recent research in neurology, however, Goldstein did not acquiesce and continued to defend his holistic approach up until the end of his life in 1965. As Oliver Sacks notes, Gerald Edelman’s

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Nobel Prize–winning research on the evolutionary tendencies of antibodies developed out of Goldstein’s theories.12 The specific talk that brought Schapiro and Goldstein together occurred on November 24, 1945, was titled “On Naming and Pseudonaming: From Experiences in Psychopathology,” and very much followed from Goldstein’s earlier research.13 That research had significantly revolved around Goldstein’s clinical work with war veterans whose brain injuries had left them with amnesic aphasia, a condition marked by the striking symptom of the inability to name everyday objects. Goldstein recounted that this inability was not caused by general damage to speech capacities or by a permanent loss of specific words within a patient’s vocabulary. When asked to name a given object these patients utter circumlocutions that describe the object precisely, calling an umbrella, for instance, “a thing for the rain,” and sometimes even using the very word they are searching for in their indirect definition of it. As Goldstein pointed out in his talk, during the heyday of associationist psychology this condition was understood as the result of various functional brain centers being unable to work together; the part of the brain that processes “thing ideas,” in this associationist reading, was abnormally disassociated from the brain area that processes “word images.” Against this interpretation, Goldstein theorized that amnesic aphasia was the product of a more holistic disturbance in the human organism. Namely, he believed it was but an example of the more common human condition of being unable to freely adopt one of two primary attitudes toward everyday experience, which Goldstein dubbed the abstract and the concrete. The former was marked by the capacity to categorize the various qualities of experience in more general terms, to sort experiences in terms of a range of differences and similarities. The latter was characterized by the tendency to hold fast to a specific quality of a specific experience and to allow sense impressions of that quality to dominate thought. Based on this general distinction, Goldstein concluded that the reason patients with amnesic aphasia have difficulty naming everyday objects is because the names for those objects are themselves abstract categories, and these patients’ injuries have left them with an inability to adopt fluidly the very abstract attitude from which those categories emerge. An important correlate of this explanation is the theory of meaning that follows from it. Since the use of all language would necessarily have to fall somewhere on Goldstein’s attitudinal spectrum, the precise meaning of any given utterance or written statement only occurs based on its practical relation to the abstract or concrete attitude that motivated it.

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Schapiro’s reaction to the 1945 presentation in which Goldstein expounded these views is not known. Soon thereafter, however, Goldstein did attend a presentation by Schapiro at Columbia, helping to solidify their friendship. Schapiro’s presentation was on the painting of Van Gogh, a fact that is especially appropriate, as Schapiro’s publications on this artist at the time bear a remarkable number of connections to Goldstein’s research. For instance, Schapiro’s use of Van Gogh’s psychologically abnormal painting to conceptualize the psychology of modern painting in general as well as his positioning of Van Gogh’s artistic practice as part of the artist’s “defense against disintegration” directly parallel Goldstein’s broader research program.14 An even more telling tie between Schapiro’s art history and Goldstein’s neurology, however, concerns Schapiro’s discussion of Van Gogh’s markedly concrete attitude toward the objects in his environment. Schapiro notes that Van Gogh “avowed in his letters a permanent attachment to the object” and that his “loading of pigment is in part a reflex of this attitude, a drastic effort to preserve in the image of things their tangible matter and to create something equally solid and concrete on the canvas.”15Schapiro’s description here of Van Gogh’s attachment to the tangible, solid, and concrete qualities of his experience quite clearly parallels Goldstein’s claims about the concrete attitude. Just as Goldstein had noted that this attitude manifests itself in the use of words as “not much more than one property of the object itself,” so too did Schapiro distinctly mention that “when Van Gogh describes his paintings, he names the objects and their local colors as inseparable substances and properties.”16 Color words are indeed a particularly revealing example of the concrete use of language. Goldstein noted that his amnesic aphasic patients often used highly specific color names—an object, for instance, was never simply green or red but always grass-green or strawberry-red—and Schapiro pointed out similar tendencies in Van Gogh’s letters, such as his rather idiosyncratic description of an “intense malachite green.”17 In such descriptions, the further specification of a common color word suggests the speaker’s concrete attitude as the word’s extra-specificity further associates it with a physical quality of a specific object. To note these parallels or affinities between Schapiro’s and Goldstein’s work is not to reduce one to the other. As I have already argued in the chapter named after 1956, Schapiro’s interpretation of Van Gogh also drew on Dewey’s psychological aesthetics, was inflected by Marxist leanings, and was undoubtedly shaped by trends in postwar American psychoanalysis. Moreover, unlike Goldstein, Schapiro was not concerned with the condition of

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amnesic aphasia, though Schapiro was unsurprisingly interested in various medical explanations of Van Gogh’s paintings.18 Nevertheless, the fact that Schapiro’s interpretation of Van Gogh does clearly rely on Goldstein’s notion of a concrete attitude is quite important for understanding Schapiro’s criticism of Heidegger; those criticisms take on a specific valence in light of the more explicitly general beliefs that follow from Goldstein’s research. Before turning to those criticisms and their relation to Goldstein’s work, however, a further parallel between Schapiro and Goldstein is important to unpack: their relation to the existentialist thought that was so widespread among their generation. Like many of their contemporaries, both Goldstein and Schapiro were versed in existentialist ideas and were even prone to quote existentialist philosophers in their lectures.19 This fact is revealing of Schapiro’s and Goldstein’s shared attention within their respective disciplines to the broader themes that were made popular by the midcentury vogue of existentialism. A telling example is the concept of anxiety. In The Organism, Goldstein’s discussion and definition of anxiety as the perception of a threat without an object quite directly follows the more developed discussions of anxiety by Kierkegaard and Jaspers, as Goldstein himself acknowledges.20 And in his posthumously published lectures on impressionism, Schapiro’s ratification of the parallel between Van Gogh’s paintings and the late nineteenth-century belief that anxiety was one of the “principal characteristics of modern man” also speaks to this same standard existentialist theme (316). Such general parallels reveal that Schapiro’s own work was not nearly as opposed to existentialist thought as his criticisms of Heidegger could otherwise make one believe. The extent to which Schapiro truly embraced existentialist ideas, however, is difficult to fully adjudicate, as it is with many of the New York intellectuals.21 On the one hand, when Schapiro lectured on the abstract expressionists at Columbia, he explicitly positioned their work in relation to existentialism— specifically by way of the commonalities between their paintings and those of the surrealist André Masson. Masson’s book The Anatomy of My Universe betrayed his reading of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and Schapiro himself translated it in 1939.22 On the other hand, while seeking to understand what he terms the “conversions” of Pollock and de Kooning to their styles of 1947– 49 in the very same lecture, Schapiro asserts that “one should turn to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.”23 Thus it would seem that James’s pragmatist psychology was as much if not more of a touchstone in Schapiro’s thinking about these painters than existentialist philosophy. Marginal notes

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in Schapiro’s copy of William Barrett’s Irrational Man—one of the standard introductions to existentialist thought in English of the time—reinforce this point and show that Schapiro thought about existentialism itself through Dewey’s pragmatist social psychology. Next to a passage in Barrett’s book that positions Heidegger’s existential ontology as a critique of a Cartesian understanding of subjectivity, Schapiro wrote “cf. Dewey and Mead,” an interpretation that foreshadows pragmatist interpretations of Heidegger put forward by more recent scholars.24 Schapiro’s off and on engagement with existentialist ideas was much like Goldstein’s. For instance, in a 1931 essay entitled “The Significance of the Mind-Body Problem for Medical Practice,” Goldstein was highly critical of his generation’s tendency “towards the irrational and the mystical,” and though he did not name names, existential philosophy’s focus on those very aspects of human experience surely would have brought some of its arguments under Goldstein’s fire.25 This position was the counterpart to Goldstein’s above-summarized criticisms of “atomistic” or “associationist” hypotheses within neurology, the two poles marking out the negative extremes between which Goldstein sought to navigate. In a similar vein, Schapiro sought a middle road. In his course lectures, Schapiro heuristically recounted Rudolf Carnap’s oft-quoted criticisms of Heidegger’s supposedly nonsensical sentences—most prominently the assertion that “Das Nichts nichtet” (The nothing nothings)—so as to foreground the danger of irrationality within philosophical discussions for his students.26 At the same time, Schapiro was also critical of the categorical nature of Carnap’s claims concerning the meaninglessness of metaphysics and insisted that Carnap was not immune to his own criticisms.27 Both Schapiro’s and Goldstein’s writings, therefore, were shaped by their belief in what might be called the Scylla of intuitive discussions of existence on the one hand and the Charybdis of purely positivist, empirical approaches on the other. To plot the course between these two methodological dangers, both Goldstein and Schapiro embraced existentialist themes but did so through the empirical mandates of their respective fields. Whereas Goldstein supplemented his discussions of anxiety—however existentialist they may be—with extensive clinical work, Schapiro analyzed the theme through historical evidence and as an art-historical hypothesis. An important correlate of this mediating position was Goldstein’s and Schapiro’s shared commitment to the inseparability of scientific fact from human values, which quite evidently distances their work from more hyperbolically positivist forms of inquiry. Goldstein himself had explicitly infused

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his idea of an abstract attitude with such values, seeing in it the human capacity to think beyond the immediate moment and toward better possible worlds. Such ameliorative possibilities were part of the problem-solving that Goldstein saw as so characteristic of the human organism at its best and which were essential for the self-actualization that he portrayed as the key to happiness.28 Toward the end of his life, Goldstein saw his allegiance to this position as deeply reminiscent of Goethe’s critique of the pure disinterestedness of Newtonian science and framed it in relation to the dangers of the atomic age. Goldstein believed, “We have experienced this danger [of isolating science from human values], and researchers who have contributed significantly to the development of atomic theory see the danger, and have warned [us]. The fear that the man of today feels toward the enormous success of a science, that seems more suited to destroying the world than to helping humanity achieve a better life, is consistent with the Goethean critique.”29 Goldstein here calls for a recognition of the values inherent in scientific fact. Much of Goldstein’s practice as a physician and researcher, of course, had been dedicated to improving the lives of his patients, thus it is unsurprising that his larger approach to science was similarly directed toward assuring its moral ends. Though Schapiro was not as explicit as Goldstein in his belief in the necessity of a moral foundation for science, he did hint at a similar reading. In a 1950 contribution to a special issue of Partisan Review on the topic of “Religion and the Intellectuals,” Schapiro even described “reason” as “man’s parcel of divinity,” interpreting the potentially positive morality inherent within human reason as close to the moral potential within the abstract attitude that Goldstein championed (335). Though Schapiro’s actual defense of this position in the above essay is somewhat equivocal, elsewhere—and as already discussed in the first two chapters—he was quite explicit in his belief in the less extreme but certainly related position that facts and values were intertwined. In an undated typescript, he wrote: It may . . . be asked, to what extent is there knowledge of qualities without an act of valuation? This is important, because the act of valuation is so notoriously private that the attribution of quality associated with it may well be rationalization. This is apparent in works of art, of which the most diverse characters have been predicated with the same emotional instancy. An archaic statue is simply a rigid object to one person, a rigorous form to another. These imply valuations; and the analysis of these two perceptions must

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take into account the fact that the statement of quality is here posterior to a value judgment. . . . The notion that quality is unique and inherent in the object assumes that there is such a thing as quality apart from the perceiver; and that the latter has the means of grasping it directly. It seems more likely to me that the character of a thing is known to us only in relation to ourselves, and that the assumption of a pervasive quality restricts the nature of an object to those aspects in which we participate because of our own interests. (emphasis added)30 Like Goldstein, Schapiro was convinced that seemingly disinterested facts— however “scientific” they may be—bring values with them, and he extends this belief to the straightforward task of the description of artworks. At Goldstein’s funeral, Schapiro underlined the neurologist’s commitment to a similar position by interweaving his account of Goldstein’s guiding principles of the abstract attitude and self-actualization with his description of the positive values inherent within Goldstein’s research.31Though this commitment to the entwined nature of facts and values is certainly not unique in the great currents of twentieth-century intellectual history, for the purposes of this chapter, the presence of such convictions in both Schapiro’s and Goldstein’s thought cannot go unstated. Indeed, Schapiro’s 1968 critique of Heidegger, though very much grounded in Schapiro’s burgeoning understanding of nonnormative differences between texts and pictures, is importantly made from a similar position. Moreover, when combined with an understanding of the aforementioned parallels between Goldstein’s neurology and Schapiro’s art history, as well as with the important detail that it was Goldstein who first brought Heidegger’s passing interpretation of Van Gogh to Schapiro’s attention, this aspect of Schapiro’s 1968 critique of Heidegger makes its place within a Festschrift for Goldstein appropriate. In order to fully understand the critique, however, it is important to read its arguments carefully and in the context of Schapiro’s other scholarship, and thus I now turn to a close reading of “The Still-Life as Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh.”

Schapiro and Description

For the purposes of clarity, it is helpful to begin my discussion of Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s comments on Van Gogh by quoting the same infamous and quite lengthy passage from Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of

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Art” that Schapiro reproduced and analyzed in his own 1968 critique. Schapiro cursorily, though accurately, introduced the passage as part of Heidegger’s broader interpretation of “the nature of art as a disclosure of truth” and as an effort by Heidegger “to ‘grasp the equipmental being of equipment.’”32 He then cited Heidegger’s claim that [as] long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of equipment in truth is. In Van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong, only an undefined space. There are not even clods from the soil of the field or the path through it sticking to them, which might at least hint at their employment. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet. From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stands forth. In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the dampness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness of the field-path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and the shivering at the surrounding menace of death. The equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-in-itself.33 As is well known, Schapiro pallidly reacted to this pathos-laden passage by attempting to identify the painting by Van Gogh to which it referred. Schapiro seems to have wanted to drag Heidegger by the heels out of his thicket of woolgathering abstractions so as to confront him with the dead-asmutton facts of art’s history. To do so, Schapiro wrote to Heidegger directly and learned that the painting in question was one he had seen in an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930 and that it was almost surely the painting subsequently known in the standard catalogue raisonné of Van Gogh’s oeuvre simply as

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Fig. 27 Vincent van Gogh, Old Shoes, 1886. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, s0011V1962. Photo: Album / Art Resource, New York.

“Old Shoes,” dated 1886 (fig. 27).34 Looking back on Schapiro’s fact-finding effort of 1968, it is all too easy to take for granted today’s widespread agreement that this specific painting is the referent of Heidegger’s description; indeed, even Derrida’s quite pointed deconstruction of Schapiro’s critique—not to mention the legion of others that followed—relies on this humble fact. On the one hand, therefore, Schapiro’s commonsense reaction to this passage is not only understandable but has even proven necessary. Heidegger’s description is, after all, quite specific about certain qualities of Van Gogh’s painting— its decontextualized background and the dark openings and worn soles of the shoes—and the explicit description of the otherwise unidentified painting is even preceded by “well known” (bekannt), a quality that can patently only apply to a real painting. On the other hand, Schapiro’s very approach to the painting’s description clearly misses a fundamental part of Heidegger’s argument, a fact reflected

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most evidently by Schapiro’s all-too-brief discussion of the full philosophical apparatus of which Heidegger’s description is but a part. As many commentators have noted, much of Heidegger’s argumentation in this passage follows quite closely from his generation-defining criticisms of an established epistemological paradigm of Western thought: namely, the distance created by the ubiquitous dichotomization of mind and body, subject and object—which are well clarified through the everyday example of a pair of shoes.35 Much like those criticisms, in the above passage Heidegger positions the experience of looking at a depiction of a simple pair of shoes as a kind of necessary heuristic for achieving a deeper understanding of the nature of shoes themselves. He does so by positioning the experience of the depicted shoes as eschewing the very binary whose destruction played such a prominent role in his other writing. In the painting, the shoes are neither shoes in the abstract, general sense—gear that serves to clothe the feet, as Heidegger calls them—nor our own personal shoes that we simply wear without thinking about them. Instead they are rather a kind of interstitial form of shoes, the experience of which is able to provide insight into the nature of the more general type of thing that shoes are: namely, a piece of equipment. A less dichotomized understanding of equipment is in turn essential, on Heidegger’s view, to a more accurate understanding of humanity’s condition and of Heidegger’s quite specific understanding of what he termed the unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit) of truth. As even this rudimentary summary suggests, had Schapiro tried to do some justice to the full philosophical complexity and weight of Heidegger’s project and situated his criticisms of Heidegger’s description of Van Gogh’s painting within that larger totality, Schapiro might have foreclosed at least some of the criticisms that his note subsequently engendered. Be this as it may, is it fair to insist that Schapiro needed to take on Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole? If Heidegger’s many publications add up to an all or nothing proposition and if that philosophical system was the object of Schapiro’s critique, then he should have done so. But was Schapiro’s critique actually directed at Heideggerian philosophy writ large? Halfway through his initial five-page assessment, Schapiro hinted that his intent was not a largescale attack by rhetorically asking if “Heidegger’s mistake [was] simply that he chose a wrong example?”36 Such a question opens up the possibility that some other work of art by some other artist might very well fulfill Heidegger’s original description or even validate the broader contentions that follow from it. Though Schapiro went on to insist that no other painting by Van Gogh could be applicable to Heidegger’s description, the point still holds that it

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was only as a description of Van Gogh’s work that Schapiro truly took exception to Heidegger’s text. If broader questions follow from this focus, they are surely as concerned with the limits of the description of works of visual art in general as with the specific propositions of Heideggerian philosophy. To his great disadvantage, Schapiro did not make this point particularly clear in his original 1968 essay; during subsequent lectures, however, he did. In his 1975 course on the theories and methods of art history, Schapiro first read the full quotation of Heidegger cited above and contextualized his critique of it, and then he quite plainly stated, “Now the question is how valid is this description.”37 Such a sweeping general question obviously does pertain to Heidegger’s larger project, meaning that reframing Schapiro’s critique through the question of the description of works of art does not excuse his willful blindness to Heidegger’s larger claims. When considered in the context of Schapiro’s wider scholarly production, however, as well as in the context of the critique’s original place of publication, it becomes apparent that Schapiro did, in fact, have a theory of description that was in stark conflict with Heidegger’s approach and that presumably must have at least partially motivated his 1968 critique. As suggested at the outset, that theory has to do with Schapiro’s understanding of the limited propositional quality of images and his commitment to the irreducibility of verbal and visual representation. Though these positions are motivating assumptions of Schapiro’s published semiotic writings from the period, he directly and most explicitly elaborated their significance for his critique of Heidegger in the abovementioned 1975 course. Therein, Schapiro’s discussion of Heidegger’s description of Van Gogh’s painting was immediately followed by his discussion of the propositional quality of images. To do so, Schapiro broached the possibility of the negation of images, negation being a defining quality of propositional sentences as such. To clarify the point, Schapiro referred to the examples of medieval depictions of Pentecost that reflect familiar theological disputes about the origin of the Holy Spirit, specifically whether or not God the Father alone (the Byzantine view) or God the Father and Jesus, his son (the Western view), were the origin or cause of this third part of the Christian trinity.38 To reflect this dispute, some medieval images depict the dove or the rays of light that traditionally signify the Holy Spirit either as originating directly from the hand of God alone or as originating from a source that includes depictions of God the Father and Christ, his son (e.g., figs. 28 and 29). Yet, as Schapiro continued, the propositional quality of these pictures only makes them quasi-propositional because, unlike linguistic propositions, pictures cannot be broken down into a subject and predicate

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Fig. 28 Pentecost, Reichenau Lectionary, ca. 1055. Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Codex lat. fol. 78 A2, fol. 47v. Photo © bpk-Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

and thereby analyzed in terms of their logical syntax. Elaborating this point further, Schapiro concluded: A picture is not a proposition in a strict logical sense, but a way of presenting the subject of a proposition. If a proposition states: X is one-eyed and you picture X in a portrait or in a caricature as one-eyed, then you are illustrating the proposition. There is then a point at which an image or a representation may correspond to the meaning or content of a proposition, but it itself is not a proposition, since a proposition is a combination of words with a particular logical form, which in connecting subject and predicate and their qualities separates substance from attributes.39 In Schapiro’s description here of how pictures are different from propositions— specifically in their simultaneous display of substance and attributes—we hear a clear echo of his earlier Goldsteinian description of Van Gogh’s painting. For Schapiro, the reader will remember, Van Gogh treated “objects and their local colors as inseparable substances and properties,” which no doubt made his mind markedly suited to a kind of imagistic thought. Here Schapiro expresses a more general account of images that may have grown out of his friendship with Nelson Goodman, especially out of Goodman’s contemporaneous claims

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Fig. 29 Pentecost, Worcester Psalter, ca. 1225. Magdalen College, Oxford, MS Lat 100, fol. 134r. Photo courtesy of the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford.

about denotation and exemplification in relation to what he termed the density of pictures.40 Though Schapiro rejected Goodman’s radical conventionalist theory of images, Goodman argued in his 1968 book Languages of Art that pictures were like half-propositions, albeit the predicate and not the half that Schapiro mentioned in his above assertion that pictures can merely illustrate a proposition’s subject.41 Straightforward though such ideas are, Schapiro’s adherence to them proves important for his criticisms of Heidegger, as they raise questions about the use of Van Gogh’s painting in relation to Heidegger’s unavoidably propositional arguments. Considering the fuller context in which Heidegger references that painting proves useful here. In the course of Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”—first delivered as a series of lectures in 1935 and 1936 and first published in 1950—he comes to the example of a Van Gogh painting in an admittedly indirect way, describing it as a visual representation (bildliche Darstellung) that can facilitate (erleichtern) the illustration (Veranschaulichung) of the direct description (unmittelbare Beschreibung) of a pair of peasant shoes (ein Paar Bauernschuhe).42 In this sense, as has been widely noted, Van Gogh’s painting itself is not even Heidegger’s main interest in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” It only serves his argument as a kind of stopover on the way to his ultimate goal: a deeper understanding of shoes, specifically of shoes as equipment. To achieve this

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end, Heidegger deploys a variety of his now-celebrated linguistic somersaults, describing the work of art by means of hyphenated phrases like “das Sichins-Werk-Setzen” (the setting itself to work) and playing nouns and verbs off one another, claiming that “Das Werk hält das Offene der Welt offen” (The work holds open the Open of the world).43 Much of Heidegger’s thought is only possible through this innovative use of language; indeed, language itself is precisely the medium in which and through which Heidegger carries out his own philosophical work. A hard-won effect of this linguistic burden is to enable what can be thought of as a kind of linguistic showing (Zeigen), a process that Heidegger elsewhere explicitly opposed to linguistic signing (Zeichen) and through which the meaning of his prose becomes more tied to the gradual, internal unfolding of a specific text itself than to the seemingly necessary dictionary definitions beyond or outside it.44 This practice is also what makes Heidegger’s use of a painting like Van Gogh’s only appropriate. The philosophical showing that Heidegger’s peculiar use of language enables is quite literally akin to how pictures represent their content to us. Van Gogh’s painting, after all, shows us a pair of shoes. Real though such a parallel is, it also raises the question of the extent to which the relationship is reciprocal. Heidegger’s thought was suited to a Van Gogh painting, but was a Van Gogh painting suited to a Heideggerian description? As Hagi Kenaan has pointed out, an evident point of inequality between the two emerges in Heidegger’s own note that Van Gogh’s painting merely “suffices” (genügt) for the “lessons” (Nachhilfe) it can reveal.45 Such statements testify to Heidegger’s seemingly inevitable reduction of Van Gogh’s work to his own description of it and to the philosopher’s commitment to the first-order importance of language. Because of this situation, however much Heidegger may have honestly believed that it “would be the worst self-deception to think that our description, as a subjective action, had first imagined everything thus and then projected it into the painting,” Van Gogh’s painting was necessarily—was always already—of secondary concern to Heidegger’s broader ambitions.46 This point becomes most obvious when Heidegger does not even specify—let alone illustrate—the specific Van Gogh painting that he mentions, a fact that by itself may well have motivated Schapiro’s initial reaction. In this sense, even though Heidegger did have justifiable reasons for using Van Gogh’s painting the way he did, his allegiance to the truth of that painting can only extend to the limits of his linguistic description of it and does not fully acknowledge the commonplace fact that the very project of “truthfully” describing a painting would ultimately also entail completely

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and exhaustively describing it, which is an unrealizable project.47 Influential and defensible though Heidegger’s larger arguments continue to be, therefore, by elaborating his theory by way of Van Gogh’s painting, he collapsed the visual into the verbal and thereby raised some of the very same questions concerning the propositional quality of pictures that Schapiro discussed in his lectures. On the most basic level, of course, Schapiro was not opposed to the notion of a picture having propositional qualities or functioning within a linguistic argument. While he voiced ongoing doubts about the extent to which paintings could truly express philosophical claims, it would be an overstatement to suggest that it was Heidegger’s mere appeal to Van Gogh that bothered Schapiro.48 Schapiro’s example of the opposed medieval depictions of representations of the Holy Spirit show quite clearly that he himself was interested in the propositional function that images could assume and conceded their ability to do so in specific cases. Rather, Schapiro’s objection to Heidegger seems more specifically to rest on some questions raised by what we might think of as the Heideggerian reduction of the visual to the verbal. On the one hand, Heidegger seems to have wanted to elevate paintings like Van Gogh’s by providing them with a philosophical function that is above and beyond what might otherwise be seen as their passive place in human affairs—their mere hanging on a gallery or museum wall, for instance. This philosophical function is the true work that, on Heidegger’s view, the artwork performs. On the other hand, in pursuing this goal Heidegger also completely disregards the quite specific function that Van Gogh’s painting had in the life of the man who produced it, as if that original function were somehow ersatz and as if the painting were unwittingly made for the philosopher’s own ends. Thereby, Heidegger’s account of Van Gogh becomes questionable not in terms of the validity of the larger system of which it is but a part but rather in terms of the justice it does to Van Gogh as a person whose practice of painting was, for Schapiro, inevitably irreconcilable with Heidegger’s philosophy on at least one fundamental point: the irreducibility of pictures to words. As Schapiro is at pains to point out in his various writings about the artist, as a truly dedicated painter, Van Gogh importantly—if not primarily— engaged with his world through the images he produced. His paintings are the record of that engagement and to understand them outside of that individual context is to ignore the vital role that they played in Van Gogh’s own life. Following Goldstein and as outlined above, Schapiro believed that Van Gogh’s painting was part of his defense against the disintegrating pressures

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of his own experience and an extension of his concrete attitude, which was undoubtedly suited to the practice of late nineteenth-century French painting, its pseudorepresentational norms, and the simultaneous presentation of substance and attributes that it facilitated. In this regard, Van Gogh’s practice was deeply connected to his entire world and very much a part of his honest and natural pursuit of what Goldstein called self-actualization and what we might more colloquially call happiness. To approach Van Gogh’s life and art in this way was to take the admittedly idiosyncratic example of Van Gogh as revealing of the potential of visual art in modern experience more generally, an approach to the artist that can well be taken to follow Goldstein’s use of his clinical findings on the rare condition of amnesic aphasia as illuminating the much larger topic of the place of natural language in human thought itself. Under this inductive model, the interpretive violence that Heidegger wrought on Van Gogh the historical individual was severe as it also cast doubt on the very possibility of art objects having a similarly self-actualizing function in the future. Clichéd though Van Gogh’s dramatic life and ultimate suicide may have become, Schapiro seems to be saying that the artist’s life also importantly reveals how images can take on an absolutely vital role in human experience writ large, and how images cannot always be replaced by linguistic accounts of them. For all of its claims about Heidegger’s historical missteps, therefore, Schapiro’s critique importantly amounts to a defense of a form of life that is reliant on images and that speaks quite directly to what many have recognized as his deep sympathy with and for practicing artists.49 Here Schapiro is speaking for people who cannot speak for themselves, one of the most tested and true tasks of the art historian. As such, despite insisting on close attention to the facts of Van Gogh’s life, Schapiro’s essay is fundamentally ethical in nature, and its cursory engagement with Heidegger might be more accurately understood as a tacit retort to the philosopher’s silence concerning Van Gogh himself than as a naïve assault on his broader philosophy. Interestingly, when Derrida analyzed Schapiro’s note on Heidegger, he too perceived an ethical dimension in Schapiro’s critique.50 Observing the evident disapproving tone in Schapiro’s description of “the heavy pathos of the primordial and the earthy” in Heidegger, Derrida recognized the obvious fact that Heidegger’s onetime affiliation with the Nazi Party might have made Schapiro suspicious of Heideggerian language, particularly in an essay dedicated to Goldstein, who had fled the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage and

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left-leaning politics.51 Not having all the facts concerning Schapiro’s and Goldstein’s friendship at his disposal, however, and not fully diving into the substance of Goldstein’s own scholarship, Derrida did not deconstruct the veiled sententious tone of Schapiro’s essay as completely as he could have, even if his initial intuition was perceptive. More problematic was what some perceived to be Derrida’s overly antagonistic attitude toward the cursory nature of Schapiro’s engagement with Heidegger.52 Combined with Derrida’s darling status within the Western academy, this aspect of Derrida’s critique culminated in what Jonathan Crary remembered as the surprisingly disrespectful treatment of Schapiro at his own university.53 On October 7, 1977, Derrida was invited to present his own deconstructive take on Van Gogh’s Shoes at Columbia, and he did so, according to Schapiro’s own later recollections of the event, without even caring to understand Schapiro’s own position.54 Schapiro’s unsurprising response was to be blatantly incredulous about Derrida’s assertion that the painting in question could not even be said to represent a pair of shoes, and he is reported to have abruptly countered the perceptible skepticism built into the open-ended questioning of Derrida’s polylogue by proclaiming that “[he was] a student of John Dewey and [he believed] in the truth.”55 Such was the atmosphere in the discipline when Schapiro entered a long period of semiretirement and started the process of preparing the various volumes of his selected papers for publication, a process to which he dedicated the last twenty years of his life. Toward the very end of that period in 1994, Schapiro returned to his critique of Heidegger by publishing the supplementary essay “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh.” In that paper, Schapiro neither mentioned Derrida by name nor even alluded to Derrida’s then highly prestigious mode of argument, a willful blindness that simply ignores the often ad hominem quality of his 1977 intervention. In this senescent moment, Schapiro rather chose to fortify his original claims by presenting additional evidence for his initial reading of Van Gogh’s painting and by noting that marginalia in one of Heidegger’s personal copies of “The Origin of the Work of Art” could be taken to suggest that the philosopher himself equivocated on his own position.56 Schapiro’s very decision to double down on his own original reading suggests precisely the type of stubborn scholarly attachment to the artist’s unprovable intentions that Derrida had criticized and therefore would seem to reinforce the validity of his point. In republishing his own original 1968 criticisms of Heidegger in the same 1994 volume, however, Schapiro also changed his original proclamation that Van Gogh’s

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paintings “are clearly pictures of the artist’s own shoes” to the much more reasonable assertion that those paintings “more likely” represent that subject.57 Derrida himself had repeatedly called out Schapiro’s overstated language, including this particular passage, meaning that in 1994 Schapiro did tacitly recognize the wave of poststructuralist criticism that was sweeping over the discipline.58 By making these slight rhetorical changes, however, Schapiro can also be understood to have simultaneously—and quite appropriately—stayed true to his original dedication of his critique to Goldstein and to the education that he had so proudly proclaimed to Derrida’s face. Indeed, two years before Derrida’s fateful intervention, in the same 1975 lecture course where he further explicated his criticisms of Heidegger, Schapiro also acknowledged his general debt to Dewey’s book The Quest for Certainty and its unrelenting commitment to a perpetually open form of inquiry, championing scientific probability and possibility over dogmatic certitude.59 Much in the spirit of this principle, Goldstein’s research on amnesic aphasia and natural language had also embraced and stood up for the possible—the neurologically possible—and Schapiro’s criticisms of Heidegger had been significantly directed against the foreclosing of the functional possibilities of art that his theory entailed. It was not, therefore, as W. J. T. Mitchell suggested in 1995, some conservative quiescence toward grander theories of art that motivated Schapiro’s critique but rather just the opposite, namely, that Heidegger’s ontology of art was so all-encompassing that it ended up being problematically exclusionary of an importantly possible function of the practice of painting for real painters.60 Thus we can conclude by asking if Schapiro’s late qualifications of his criticisms of Heidegger actually amount to a concession to Derrida and his followers or if they represent Schapiro’s recognition of what his initial position concerning Van Gogh’s painting had actually been all along.

1973 Words and Pictures A Color Field Critique of Structuralist Semiotics

In 1973 Schapiro published what would prove to be the culmination of his semiotic research as an art historian: Words and Pictures: On the Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text. At its core, the book focuses on twelfthcentury illustrations of a single passage from the Old Testament: Exodus 17:9– 13, the story of Moses battling the Amalekites. By way of this focus, Words and Pictures leverages the differences and similarities between various images of this biblical story in order to uncover more general insights about the relations between texts and the images that illustrate them. English-language art history would have to wait some years—until, perhaps, the appearance of the Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism series in the late 1980s—before similar, book-length publications would become widespread in the discipline;1 however, the appearance of Words and Pictures in 1973 fittingly exemplifies the explosion of research in semiotics—most widely defined as the abstract study of signs and symbols—during this period. As is well known, though semiotics had ancient origins, its systematic formulations only came fully into focus with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. The theories of these

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men were rediscovered after the Second World War and inspired reams of research by the early 1970s that extended well beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Accordingly and unsurprisingly, considering Schapiro’s intellectual network and reputation, the story of the formulation of Words and Pictures is marked by several prominent confrontations between Schapiro and some of the giants of postwar semiotic research, including a face-to-face encounter with the founder of structuralist anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Specifically, in June 1952 Schapiro debated the applicability of mathematics to the study of visual art with Lévi-Strauss at the International Symposium on Anthropology in New York, a topic that bore directly on the limits and potential of analyzing images through Lévi-Strauss’s theories, which were informed by semiotics.2 Indeed, the abstract relations that mathematics so powerfully describe were the very “structures” that gave Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism its name. While this exchange preceded Schapiro’s first published and explicitly semiotic research by more than fifteen years, it foregrounds and helps explicate that later work. Schapiro developed the subsequent essay, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs” of 1969, directly out of his debate with Lévi-Strauss, repeating the central claim of the earlier publication and even using the same heuristic diagram to do so.3 Moreover, the particular blending of semiotic arguments that Schapiro articulated in his debate with Lévi-Strauss looked forward to his 1973 book, most specifically in Schapiro’s insistence on the importance of accounting for a particular embodied standpoint in any semiotic understanding of visual art. Though Schapiro’s lectures on semiotics show that he did not reject the lessons of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist approach completely, he was prone to criticize semiotic models of visual art like Lévi-Strauss’s that were heavily adapted from structural linguistics—such as those of the early Roland Barthes or of Roman Jakobson.4 Furthermore, Schapiro’s course lectures reveal that he sometimes simply avoided structuralist approaches when introducing semiotic research to his students and opted instead to introduce semiotics primarily through its alternative pragmatist history—that is, by way of the intellectual genealogy that reached back through Charles W. Morris to Peirce himself. Schapiro’s Word and Pictures reflects a similar preference in that the book focuses on the embodied “pragmatics” central to Peirce’s triadic semiotic framework and is much more concerned with the use of signs by different historical agents than with the prototypical focus of structuralist approaches: the abstract relations between individual signs in their systematic contexts.

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For the purpose of untangling the historical context that led to Schapiro’s semiotic publications, this chapter begins by identifying the origins of Schapiro’s semiotic thinking in his iconographic essays from the 1940s, since iconography is, after all, the traditional art-historical domain of the study of symbols. These essays are at once typical of the eruption of art-historical research into iconography around midcentury and yet also quite distinct in their presuppositions. As discussed in the previous chapter, in the 1940s Schapiro attended seminars of the “Linguistic Circle of New York,” and thus it should come as no surprise that his iconographic arguments from this period betray his engagement with some of the classic ideas of semiotics as a field. The original intellectual context from which Schapiro’s later thinking on semiotics emerged, however, was also marked by his close friendships with practicing artists. Some of Schapiro’s central claims about signs have important correlates with the artistic production of the period, especially with the protocolor field painting of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, not to mention with the minimalist sculpture of Schapiro’s one-time student Donald Judd. This multifaceted background proves central to understanding Schapiro’s 1952 confrontation with Lévi-Strauss, as well as Schapiro’s abovementioned 1969 essay and his 1973 book. After contextualizing how Schapiro’s semiotic thinking culminated in Words and Pictures, I conclude this chapter—and this book as a whole—with an evaluative discussion of the reception and legacy of Schapiro’s semiotic writing.

From Schapiro’s Iconography to His Critique of Lévi-Strauss

Even though Schapiro later expressed his dissatisfaction with “classical and standard definitions” of signs and even though he once sarcastically joked that the words “semiotics” and “semiology” should be banned, his iconographic essays from the 1940s were almost surely informed by the vogue for semiotics that grew up around him.5 Schapiro’s essays from this moment tackle a wide range of subjects and include some of his most widely read pieces of scholarship, such as “Cain’s Jawbone That Did the First Murder” of 1942, “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross” of 1944, and “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece” of 1945. Taken chronologically, this group of essays can be understood as part of the wave of art-historical research into iconography that followed from Erwin Panofsky’s paradigm-changing publications—most notably Studies in Iconology of 1939—yet Schapiro’s

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approach to iconography was undoubtedly distinctive. Unlike the direct associations between images and texts that often mark Panofsky’s arguments—and that have subsequently been repeatedly used to criticize Panofsky’s work as logocentric—Schapiro’s iconographic essays frequently position the images they analyze not so much as illustrative or derivative of texts but rather as active interpretations themselves.6 In this assertion, we hear a clear echo of Schapiro’s previously discussed commitment to the irreducibility of pictures to words. Schapiro’s very interest in Cain’s jawbone derives from the fact that the Bible left the murder weapon in the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel unspecified and thus actually called forth artistic license in depictions of it. Additionally, Schapiro’s interest in the Mérode Altarpiece stems from the fact that the unusual mousetraps depicted in that painting seem to function interpretively, specifically as metaphors that connect Joseph’s vocation as a carpenter to Augustine’s assertion that Christ was the devil’s snare. The notion that works of art themselves are not just visualizations of textual traditions but rather active interpretive interventions on those traditions reveals an affinity with Peircean semiotics. It also helps clarify why Hubert Damisch would later recognize Schapiro’s 1943 essay “The Image of the Disappearing Christ” as foreshadowing his own more explicitly semiotic study of 1972, A Theory of /Cloud/, though seeing these parallels requires a brief exposition of some of the very same “classic and standard definitions” of signs with which Schapiro was displeased.7 The most basic and ubiquitous semiotic distinction finds a classic statement in Saussure’s system—notably between the concept or signified and the sound-image or signifier. Yet precedents for this distinction stretch back to the ancients and find another important iteration in the seventeenth-century Port Royal writers Antoine Arnaud, Claude Lancelot, and Pierre Nicole, for whom “the sign includes two ideas, one of the thing which represents, the other of the thing represented.”8 Much in line with this rationalist tradition, the dyad of Saussure’s system was not between a physical object and its mental correlate; rather, it was cognitive on both sides. As Saussure states, “[The signifier] is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes in our senses.”9 In Saussure’s model the signifier or sound-image is not independent of its conceptual correlate; the two are deeply bound together. In clarifying this point, Saussure wrote that “Thought is the front and the sound the back [of a piece of paper]; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time.”10 A primary motivation for insisting on this

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strong connection is to isolate the sign in a synchronic moment of signification and thereby to bracket off its potentially unruly historical mutations. Just because Saussure’s approach was in this important sense historically limited in scope, however, does not mean that he denied or was oblivious to the obvious fact that languages and other semiotic systems change over time. For Saussure the primary difficulty with the historical “mutability” of language was that “the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community.”11 This recognition is the warrant for Saussure’s equally well-known distinction between langue and parole—language as an abstract structure versus speaking or the use of that structure—as well as for his proto-structuralist commitment to separating language itself from its users and to transforming language into an abstract entity that could be studied on its own. Taken together, this concatenation of ideas would prove to be fundamental to the tradition of research that grew out of Saussure’s precedent, a tradition that is still often labeled semiology, itself a transliteration of Saussure’s original sémiologie. In contrast to this dyadic, synchronic approach, Peirce put forward a threefold model of semiotics that was more diachronically attuned. In one of his most widely cited and best-known expositions of his theory, he stated: “A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I sometimes called the ground of the representamen.”12 The sign or representamen for Peirce is roughly equivalent to what Saussure called a “signifier.” It is the vehicle or mental representation that is used to stand for something else. The object for Peirce is what the representamen stands for and thus is roughly equivalent to Saussure’s signified. The third part of Peirce’s theory, the interpretant, is what the individual engaged in the process of semiosis uses to join the representamen and object; the interpretant is, in effect, a sign of a sign—it is a mental representation of the relation between the sign and its object and accordingly leads us to a deeper or, as Peirce says, “more developed” understanding of the object itself. It is this last point of Peirce’s basic framework that relates to Schapiro’s iconographic essays. Schapiro’s interest in images as active interpretations of religious texts positions images as roughly akin to Peircean “interpretants”: signs of signs.

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Schapiro likely first encountered Peirce’s semiotics as an undergraduate. In addition to his coursework with Dewey—which bears mentioning in this context, as Dewey himself was both an early historian of pragmatism and an early interpreter of Peirce’s semiotics13—Schapiro’s transcript reveals that he took a course in the history of philosophy and a course in philosophical methodology, the latter of which specifically dealt with “Pragmaticism,” the epithet that Peirce gave to his specific version of semiotic-based pragmatism.14 It is difficult to definitively date the beginning of Schapiro’s interest in semiotics; however, thanks to his planned contribution to the Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences in 1941, we do know that Schapiro was invited to participate as a principal contributor in a conference on “Communication and the Theory of Signs” at the University of Chicago.15While Schapiro never finished his book for the series, his involvement was undoubtedly productive for his own later work, including his semiotic scholarship. Some of Schapiro’s lectures for his course on the theories and methods of art history, in fact, even share the title he had provisionally given to his book for the Encyclopedia: “The Interpretation and Judgment of Art.” In light of this relation, one might predict that those lectures not only address the possibility of Peircean semiotics for the study of art but that they also do so through the terms of Charles W. Morris, the man most responsible for the development of semiotics at midcentury in the United States, who had invited Schapiro to speak on semiotics in Chicago in 1941. Often forgotten today, Morris was a student of George Herbert Mead, with strong pragmatist leanings, who openly framed his work as a development of Peirce’s. While Morris was more thoroughly behavioristic in his approach to semiotics, extending the process of semiosis to animal behavior as well as to human cognition, he agreed with Peirce on the fundamental idea that “something is a sign only because it is interpreted as a sign of something by some interpreter. . . . Semiotic, then, is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.”16 Unlike Saussure, Morris followed Peirce in defining semiotics not as the study of signs as special objects or systems of thought but rather with the study of semiosis as a ubiquitous act that pervades lived experience. Morris, like Peirce, put the interpreter at the center of his semiotics. Consequently, when Morris discussed works of art as signs in his essay “Esthetics and the Theory of Signs” of 1939, he recognized his efforts as agreeing “in all essentials with the formulation given by John Dewey in Art as Experience.”17 Indeed, as Morris himself noted, by distinguishing between the art product

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and the work of art, Dewey too can be said to have embraced Peirce’s semiotic because Dewey’s aesthetics, just like Peirce’s theory, place individual action rather than individual objects at the center of his theory of art.18 Keeping this background in mind is key for understanding the debate between Lévi-Strauss and Schapiro in 1952, because their disagreement can well be understood to pivot on differences between structuralist or semiological and pragmatist or Peircean approaches. Whereas Schapiro seems to have primarily developed his earliest semiotic thinking by way of Morris, Dewey, and Peirce, Lévi-Strauss developed his structuralist approach out of his belated confrontation with Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. While that course had been published from student notes in 1916, its influence had largely been contained to its own field; in the 1920s and ’30s, it acted as an important cornerstone in the work of the Prague school of linguistics and for the school’s most eminent representative, Roman Jakobson. After the vast intellectual migration that proceeded from the Nazis’ ascension to power, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss ended up as colleagues at the New School of Social Research, and it was there that structural anthropology was born, as François Dosse and many others have noted.19 Even a cursory reading of Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking book The Elementary Structures of Kinship of 1949 reveals, among other influences, the characteristic features of Saussure’s system: synchronic analysis and dyadic, or differential, structures of meaning. Because of this analytic similarity, it comes as no surprise that Lévi-Strauss both attended what he termed Jakobson’s “dazzling” classes in New York and was encouraged to write his pioneering and prototypical structuralist argument by Jakobson himself.20 In line with these commitments, in the debate with Schapiro, LéviStrauss’s basic proposition was that mathematics should be applicable to styles of visual art because “the human mind is working unconsciously along similar lines to nature’s.”21 And since one would not doubt that mathematics can be used to describe the morphology of a natural phenomenon like a crystal—i.e., a crystal’s form in terms of its geometry—it stands to reason that it must be possible to describe the style of visual art in mathematical relationships: that is, independently of visual art’s relation to individuals, social institutions, technology, or any external factor. Mathematics, in other words, promises to describe visual art hermetically, purely in its own terms. While Lévi-Strauss agreed with Schapiro that doing so poses many difficulties because works of visual art are often much more complex than the basic structures of nature, in typical Saussurian fashion, he insisted that “the relationship between two art forms” could be mathematicized. Lévi-Strauss continued:

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Even if it were not possible to define in mathematical terms what a [complex phenomenon like a] tree is, it would remain possible to define the kind of transformation making it possible to pass from, let us say, an oaklike tree form to a firlike tree form because the redundancy of the system (as linguists would say)—that is, what makes a tree—can be left out and replaced by another and much simpler question, namely, that of the difference between two kinds of trees. When I tried to use mathematical devices to study kinship systems [in The Elementary Structures of Kinship], some mathematicians objected that this was impossible, since there is no mathematical way to define what marriage is. This was settled when a mathematician (Professor Weil, of Chicago) remarked that the question was irrelevant, since not marriage but relationships between marriage forms was the object of the study (emphasis in original).22 Lévi-Strauss’s example of a tree in this quote is the same heuristic example found in Saussure’s General Course in Linguistics, and in Lévi-Strauss’s reuse of it we see just how important the prototypical marks of structuralist semiotics or semiology are to his approach.23 In his view, relational differentiation is an almost infinitely powerful tool, one that Lévi-Strauss deploys to see through the fleeting vagaries of empirical experience in order to reveal the enduring and more permanent organizational forms that lay behind individual objects. It is in this context that Lévi-Strauss’s later comment—“Symbols are more real than what they symbolize”24—should be understood. For Lévi-Strauss symbols are more real precisely because they are abstracted from experience and are the enduring and permanent qualities that multiple experiences share. The potential realness of these structures is precisely what led his followers to attempt to “confederate the human sciences around the study of the sign.”25 In his response to Lévi-Strauss’s position, Schapiro claims that the major obstacle to a mathematic approach to visual art is the difficulty of accounting for the subtle, complex, and yet commonplace dynamics of an individual’s perceptual experience in mathematical terms, specifically to describe the embodied experience of looking at a work of art from an individual’s viewpoint. To clarify his reservation, Schapiro raises the example of looking at a simple linear diagram of an unevenly divided rectangle, upside down (fig. 30). Noncommutative algebra and sophisticated forms of topology aside, in the basic mathematical terms that Lévi-Strauss’s used in his arguments, this object would be identical to its right-side up counterpart, yet our actual visual experiences of the two iterations of the same diagram are fundamentally

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Fig. 30 Meyer Schapiro, diagram from An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, edited by Sol Tax et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). With kind permission by the estate of Meyer Schapiro. © 1953 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

different. Schapiro’s argument and diagrams here can be related to many sources, for instance his reading of Morris’s reworking of Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics, Wertheimer’s Gestalt psychology and its uptake by members of the so-called New Vienna School of Art History, Mead’s behaviorist development of Dewey’s social psychology, and, of course, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, each of which, it should be noted, Schapiro was versed in at the time and each of which emphasized the importance of embodied accounts of experience.26 If these sources speak to the breadth of Schapiro’s intellectual curiosity, so too do his friendships with the proto-color field painters of his generation, perhaps most evidently Rothko and Newman, who were making their canonical contributions to modern painting at the exact moment of this debate (e.g., figs. 31 and 32).27 Not only do Schapiro’s diagrams themselves strongly resemble Rothko’s famous over-under compositions, but Newman’s own zip paintings are often described as gaining their power from how their giant scale makes their viewers particularly aware of the embodied conditions of visual perception.28 The fact that humans primarily live in a horizontally accessible world and yet themselves stand vertical and upright is a fundamental basis both for Schapiro’s argument about the “non-commutability” of his illustrations and for the format and design of Newman’s and Rothko’s canvases. This

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Fig. 31 Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1951. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986.43.157. © 2018 Mark Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

fact helps give some specificity to Schapiro’s claim that abstract painting is a “communion with the work of another human being,” to Rothko’s belief that his large canvases are “intimate and human,” and to Newman’s hope that his paintings give “man a sense of place” while also eliciting a “connection to others.”29 When understood in conjunction with the parallel between Schapiro’s diagrammatic argument about the visual perception of artworks and the style and scale of Rothko’s and Newman’s paintings, these statements begin to reveal how abstract paintings like these can indeed be related to the embodied commitments of pragmatist semiotics, though it seems just as appropriate to understand these canvases as having reinforced Schapiro’s own pragmatist inclinations as the other way around. Here it is also interesting to note that around this same time Donald Judd first studied with Schapiro at Columbia, initially as an undergraduate philosophy student from 1949 to 1953 and then later as a graduate art history student from 1957 to 1963. Much like Newman’s and Rothko’s paintings, Judd’s own minimalist sculptures are heavily associated with an explicit attention to the embodied conditions of visual perception.30 Moreover, many of Judd’s sculptures share the basic rectangular geometry of Newman’s and

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Fig. 32 Barnett Newman, Dionysius, 1949. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988.57.2. Gift of Annalee Newman, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. © 2019 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: National Gallery of Art.

Rothko’s canvases and of Schapiro’s illustrations, leading one to understandably wonder if Schapiro’s diagrammatic argument about the importance of the embodied conditions of visually perceiving a work of art could have reinforced Judd’s minimalist style and the phenomenological valences that have often been identified in it. Connections like these can also help us understand the uneven reception of structuralist arguments in twentieth-century art historiography.31Schapiro’s diagrams and their evident connections to the art being produced around them dramatize the apparent incompatibility not necessarily between art history itself and structuralism but rather between the art being produced during the high-water mark of structuralism—that is, abstract expressionism, color field painting, and minimalism—and the basic premises of structuralist claims. In the original 1952 debate for which Schapiro drew these simple rectangular figures, he made the relation between his position and the complexities of human perception especially clear. As if conducting an experiment with

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Fig. 33 Meyer Schapiro, diagram from An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, edited by Sol Tax et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). With kind permission by the estate of Meyer Schapiro. © 1953 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

his fellow symposium members, Schapiro subsequently added two dots to his diagram and noted how such dots create a certain tension or pull in the diagram (fig. 33). His obvious point is that that experiential quality— the tension that the addition of two simple dots creates in the experience of the diagram—is very real but nonetheless very subject- or viewer-dependent. One could understandably doubt, for instance, if such a quality would even be communicable or translatable to someone who could not see. And just in case there was any additional doubt that this perceptual quality of our experience was unconducive to mathematicization, Schapiro then continued his diagrammatic experiment by turning those two dots into eyes. Certainly, as Schapiro suggests, the meaning and expressiveness of looking at depicted eyes in cultural objects is something that is so entangled with the complexities and ambiguities of the complete human visual system that translating it into any other communicative system—mathematic or linguistic or otherwise—would not produce something exactly equivalent. As an explanation of why this disjunction is the case, Schapiro offers a brief aside on the difference between the function and meaning of a line in plane geometry versus a line in visual art: “For a mathematician proving

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a theory, it does not matter whether he draws [a line] in red chalk or white chalk. It does not matter whether his triangle is big or small or to the right or left of the blackboard. But for an artist the precise thickness or thinness of a line and the colors and the position with respect to others—these are really constituent factors.”32 Here again, Schapiro notes that mathematics is done without a specific vantage point. In the language of information theory that was prevalent at the time—and that he himself sometimes adopted—Schapiro believed that there were no redundancies in works of visual art; they were all message and no noise. At a general level this criticism also reflects Schapiro’s aversion to what he later termed the scale or scope of Jakobson’s structuralist interpretations: namely, that structuralism was based on an atomistic approach to meaning, a critique of Jakobson that has clear parallels to the previously discussed holistic tendencies in Schapiro’s writing.33 Because of its atomistic approach, structuralism necessarily breaks images down into what are ostensibly their smallest parts, into the imagistic equivalents of phonemes and morphemes. A frequently evoked problem with such an approach is that the smallest constitutive parts of images are not as clearly definable as those of a sentence. While one can clearly point to a single letter or isolate an individual, simple sound as a minimum unit of linguistic representation, making similar distinctions within visual representation is more difficult, as the boundaries between the parts of visual representations are, in general, more fluid.34 Schapiro frequently reiterated this idea—chiefly by way of the thought experiment of an artist and a mathematician at a chalkboard—throughout his life, so often, in fact, that it clearly stood very close to his beliefs and patently reveals a blind spot in his thought.35 The systems of art and conceptual art being produced in Schapiro’s later career, for instance, can easily be understood to contradict such an assertion.36 This being said, the fact that structural, mathematic approaches to visual art are not typically sensitive to specifically visual dynamics is evident in their very name. “Structure” is a term that does not apply to what is directly observable; Lévi-Strauss himself even admitted at the same 1952 conference that a structure is something that transcends individual empirical observations. Schapiro’s whole point, of course, is that visual art objects are themselves meant to be seen, are constructed with and for the dynamics and ambiguities of visual perception itself; studying them apart from such dynamics abstracts away their very distinctiveness. As the reader will remember from the chapter “1936: Reviewing Kunstwissenschaft,” however, at points in his life Schapiro himself attempted to describe the style of visual art by way of algebraic notation, thereby revealing a conflict

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in his thinking that was likely encouraged by his friendships with prominent structuralist writers. The year following his debate with Lévi-Strauss, for instance, Jakobson sent Schapiro a copy of Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s Principles of Phonology, a metalinguistic model that broke language down into individual sounds.37 Trubetzkoy’s book proved to be one of the most rigorous and influential works of structuralist linguistics, and Schapiro’s later description of his search for the nonmimetic qualities of visual art as comparable to a search for the phonemes and morphemes of language quite patently reveals that he wavered in his critique of structuralist approaches.38 Given this tension, a second encounter between Schapiro and Lévi-Strauss—this time occurring in their correspondence—proves helpful to further parse the difference between their semiotic presuppositions. In 1963, Lévi-Strauss wrote to Schapiro to inquire about the possible existence of an image that Lévi-Strauss’s theories had predicted: an image of “animals jumping into a cauldron set on a burning fire.”39 Schapiro did not know of such an image, and Lévi-Strauss admitted that its absence from the historical record could prove the “limits of deductive anthropology.”40 Such a confession is revealing, as it plainly highlights the fact that Lévi-Strauss engaged with—and indeed was primarily interested in— images as the symptoms or end products of much more foundational human practices. In contrast, Schapiro’s interest in the generalizing power of semiotics and mathematics was more modest, being primarily concerned with developing more powerful language for describing images themselves.

From “Field and Vehicle” to Words and Pictures

As initially suggested, Schapiro’s first published essay to deal explicitly with the applicability of semiotics to visual art developed out of his confrontation with Lévi-Strauss in 1952, despite the fact that the essay did not appear in print until 1969, some seventeen years after the International Symposium on Anthropology. In the intervening years, no doubt partially because of LéviStrauss’s success, scholarship in the semiological tradition had been exploding, and visual art was certainly not outside of its seemingly endless purview. Two years before in 1967, for instance, Christian Metz had published a collection of articles under the title Film Language—A Semiotics of Cinema, which built primarily on the earlier work of Barthes and Greimas and put forward exactly what its title suggests. Additionally, in the very same year in which Schapiro’s “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art” appeared, Jean-Louis

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Schefer published Scénographie d’un tableau, which may well be the first booklength semiological study of a single painting: Paris Bordone’s Game of Chess. Despite this new scholarly company, Schapiro’s 1969 essay remained focused on the difficulties of any semiotic understanding of visual art that abstracted from specific vantage points, echoing his criticism of Lévi-Strauss at the 1952 symposium. In making this argument in 1969, however, rather than framing it in relation to the limits of a mathematic study of visual art, Schapiro investigated and qualified the purported “arbitrariness” of various conventional tropes of image-making. On Schapiro’s view, approaching art objects as if they were truly arbitrary frames the meaning of those objects as if it were a product of the works’ internal relations and their relative place in an abstract system, rather than as if it were tied to the natural conditions of human perception. Accordingly, even though the history of visual art is chock-full of various nonmimetic and thus at least partially conventional aspects of image-making—for instance, various grounds, frames, and exaggerated scales—those conventions cannot be said to be fully arbitrary, as they are still expressive regardless of whether or not we are knowledgeable of the convention of which they are a part. The notion that signs are arbitrary and that their meaning is the product of their relative place in a system of signs is one of the grounding claims of Saussure’s General Course in Linguistics. That claim is part and parcel of Saussure’s dyadic and synchronic approach. If signifiers were not arbitrary and contained some aspects that were naturally meaningful to their users, then the very proposition that one could study language apart from its users—that is, apart from the source of signifiers’ naturally meaningful qualities—would be problematic. Since Schapiro’s 1969 essay is largely a qualification of the understanding of some of the most ubiquitous signs in visual art as arbitrary, it is clear that the essay is a further extension of his earlier criticism of structuralism and its attempt to objectify visual art by severing it from its users.41 Moreover, because of the above-noted expansion of semiological research on visual art that was ongoing in 1969—an expansion that exposed fissures in the semiological approach and was already snowballing into what is today called poststructuralism—Schapiro’s analysis would have surely drawn increased interest. In this respect, the Peircean background to Schapiro’s critique was especially appropriate; French scholars at the time—most famously Derrida— were also using Peirce for similar ends.42 In case the analytic similarity between Schapiro’s 1969 essay and his 1952 debate is not evident enough, the continuity between them is further solidified by Schapiro’s use of the same heuristic diagram in both texts: an unevenly

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divided rectangle and its opposite (fig. 30). In the 1969 essay, these diagrams reappear and their “non-commutative” nature is again highlighted, reinforcing just how central Schapiro’s proto-color field critique of structuralism remained for him throughout his life. To make his point this second time, Schapiro notes the obvious but nevertheless poignant fact that if an architect were to base the design of a façade on one of these diagrams, the result would be radically different than the result of having chosen the other. In the context of Schapiro’s argument, this simple point is meant to highlight that there are certain grounding or a priori principles of our visual experience of elementary forms that are naturally acquired and hence cannot be considered arbitrary. He points out, “The qualities of upper and lower are probably connected with our posture and relation to gravity and perhaps reinforced by our visual experience of earth and sky.”43 He continues, “We live more in the horizontal dimension than the vertical . . . the felt space of everyday experience is anisotropic.”44 Similar points could have been made about the power of Newman’s and Rothko’s paintings as well as about Judd’s sculptures; their abstract anisotropic forms acquire meaning quite independently of their place in an arbitrary system of relations. It should be acknowledged that Schapiro was potentially unaware of how his semiotic arguments complemented the artworks of Newman, Rothko, and Judd, yet his lectures on semiotics reveal that he was patently conscious of his evidently Peircean inclination. Though Words and Pictures was not published until 1973, it had far earlier origins, much like his 1969 semiotic essay. Schapiro remarked in the acknowledgments to Words and Pictures that the book developed from a lecture he gave to the seminar on hermeneutics at Columbia University in April 1960 and that he presented the substance of it at a symposium held at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, in November 1969. While both of those drafts were undoubtedly folded into the published form of the text, lectures that Schapiro gave as part of his course on the theories and methods of art history in 1963 are in fact more revealing of its presuppositions. For whereas the published and extant typescripts of the publicly presented forms of the text leave the theoretical sources of Schapiro’s thought implicit and undiscussed, his course lectures do not. In those lectures, he quite naturally used the content of his nascent book on semiotics to illustrate the applicability of semiotics to art’s history. Before delving into the specific illustrations that he used, he gave the following summary of semiotics as a field:

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[The] branch of science called semiotics (the term is used already by Locke who appreciated the importance of signs) . . . was developed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, friend of William James. [Peirce was a] pioneer in mathematical logic who wrote fundamental studies of the nature of signs and communication; he tried to do so in a scientific way. [A] book by Charles Morris which summarizes [Peirce’s] theory, [Foundations of the Theory of Signs of 1938] remarks on art as a semiotic system. In semiotics there is a branch called semantics which deals with the relationship of signs to objects, that is designations and denotations, and there is a part which deals with the rules governing the grouping or syntax, or syntactics, and there’s finally a branch which deals with the relationships of the signs to the uses of the signs, this is called pragmatics. These three constitute the major fields of semiotics.45 In addition to the explicit naming of Peirce and Morris in the quote—the latter of whom was the likely source of the term sign “vehicle” in the title of Schapiro’s 1969 essay—what seems especially important to note about this heuristic summary of semiotics is that Schapiro leaves Saussure out of his discussion altogether.46 Schapiro’s earlier exchanges with high structuralists like Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s self-evidently shows that he was familiar with their alternative approach. And while a more thorough definition of semiotics may have been warranted for publication or even for professional presentation, for the purposes of his course, defining semiotics via Peirce and Morris no doubt helped him frame and explicate his subsequent examples. In fact, as Schapiro’s students would learn, the images that he used to illustrate his Peircean definition of semiotics were the same illustrations that he would publish in Words and Pictures some ten years later. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, those examples were each depictions of a single passage from the Old Testament: Exodus 17:9–13, the story of Moses battling the Amalekites. In introducing the images, Schapiro followed the King James translation of the passage: 9. And Moses said to Joshua: Choose out men for us and go out to fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand. 10. So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and fought with Amalek; and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.

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11. And when Moses held up his hands, Israel prevailed; and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. 12. But Moses’ hands were heavy. So they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat on it. And Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands on both sides. And his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. 13. And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.47 Schapiro notes in the beginning of Words and Pictures that his interest in this passage stems from the fact that in “a great part of visual art . . . the painter and sculptor had the task of translating the word . . . into a visual image.”48 Yet even though artworks often depict the exact same passage of the exact same text, as images they will almost undoubtedly be radically different. These differences arise in no small part because of the makers of images and those images’ audiences, a focus that approaches the semiotics of visual art as a process of active semiosis, a process wherein signs of signs, or Peircean interpretants, are the motors of difference. In focusing his study of the semiotics of visual art in this way, Schapiro directs his attention squarely to what he had introduced to his students as the branch of semiotics called pragmatics: how signs are used. This branch is precisely the dimension of semiotics that structuralists like Saussure sought to excise from their study. Indeed, the whole point of the various images that Schapiro addresses in Words and Pictures is their difference from each other despite their shared referent. Each of Schapiro’s examples in Words and Pictures comes from a different thirteenth-century western European illuminated manuscript, a shared synchronic and cultural context that makes the variances between them all the less likely to reflect stylistic conventions and all the more likely to reflect the intended content of their depicted scenes. This fact is not unimportant, as Schapiro’s claims about these images hinge on them having content in excess of the Exodus passage that they each illustrate. To make his arguments, Schapiro first highlights the cruciform pose of Moses in an image of the passage from the so-called Bible moralisée in Oxford (fig. 34). That pose foreshadows Jesus’s crucifixion and thus tacitly transforms this Old Testament story into a prophecy of Christ. The positioning of Moses’s hands in front of his chest in a second image of the passage from a manuscript in the British Library (fig. 35) serves as a stark contrast to the first example. In this illumination, Moses no longer prefigures Christ, and thus Exodus 17:9–13 is no longer conscripted into a Christian narrative. Moreover, because the original caption was written

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Fig. 34 Moses, Aaron, and Hur, Oxford Moralized Bible, thirteenth century. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodl. 270b, fol. 51v. Photo: Bodleian Libraries.

in Hebrew, it was surely made for a Jewish viewer who would obviously not have had interest in a Christian interpretation of the passage. To provide an additional contrast to these examples, Schapiro points to a third illustration of the passage where Moses is portrayed in profile while the battle with the Amalekites rages beside him (fig. 36). This variation casts Moses as a historical figure involved in real-world events instead of as a theological symbol, a depiction that amounts to a third interpretation of the Exodus passage. Taken

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Fig. 35 Moses, Aaron, and Hur, North French Hebrew Miscellany, thirteenth century. British Library, Add. MS 11639, fol. 525v. Photo © The British Library Board.

together, the differences between these images clearly reveal the active nature of visual representation within signification and thereby reinforce the importance of accounting for the pragmatic dynamics of visual representation in any semiotic account of visual art. Naturally, to begin to understand Schapiro’s semiotic writings is also to begin to confront the relationship between semiotics and art history more generally. In this regard, the reviews that Schapiro’s Words and Pictures garnered are revealing. Forasmuch as the reviews were, on the whole, very positive, they expressed the wish that Schapiro had grounded his analysis in a more

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Fig. 36 Moses at battle, St. Louis Psalter, thirteenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 10525, fol. 34r. Photo: BnF.

general and thorough discussion of signs themselves. One review complained, “What is lacking is any systematic definition of semiotics or a methodological discussion of its possible applications to the history of art.”49 Another noted that even though “theoreticians . . . will be excited by the problems [Schapiro] poses . . . they may also feel that these theoretical matters are insufficiently examined.”50 By framing Schapiro’s semiotic writing in the context of his confrontation with Lévi-Strauss, part of what I have endeavored to reveal in this chapter is the theoretical framework behind Schapiro’s semiotic arguments. In that my own project is even necessary, however, the criticisms of these reviewers are warranted. Despite Schapiro’s public silence on his theoretical sources, a reviewer in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism was particularly discerning in his

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reading of Words and Pictures, as he saw through Schapiro’s implicit approach. He noted: “Schapiro has not fully mined his rich vein of ore. If Schapiro had ventured in his analysis into the pragmatics of pictures, many reductions, unanalyzed and careless assumptions, might have been avoided and clarified. Pictures as ‘picture acts’ are not just simply translations, pictorial titles, illustrations, or even interpretations. I suggest that the uses of visual aids extend far beyond our understanding of their uses. I suggest that it is our simplistic understanding of such uses that leads us in part to denigrate pictorial art.”51 The reviewer’s point here is that even though Schapiro frames his study in relation to the uses of pictures, he does not fully “venture into” what Morris named the pragmatic domain of signs. Much in keeping with this observation, Schapiro had in a previous draft subtitled Words and Pictures “The Perspectives of the Viewer and the Reader,” thereby underscoring just how central the users of pictures were to his argument.52 In Schapiro’s focus on those perspectives, he described and unpacked the images he analyzed more in relation to their original use (their pragmatics), than in relation to the larger whole of which they were a part (their syntactics) or in relation to what they denote (their semantics). Words and Pictures is an exercise in investigating how the meaning of depictions are bound to their users: that is why each depiction is of the same passage in the Bible (the same semantic content) and why the depictions are isolated from the larger codices and iconographic programs of which they are but parts (their syntactic relations). By focusing his investigation on the pragmatic domain of pictures, Schapiro was able to highlight and isolate the active role that interpreters play in the meaning of images. Yet it is easy to see why the reviewer thought Schapiro’s pragmatic approach was underdeveloped. Schapiro only explicitly framed his project in relation to pragmatics in his unpublished lectures and never engaged with or entered into the sizable literature on interpretive use beyond Morris—from J. L. Austin to John Searle to Paul Grice in the analytic tradition, to Hans Robert Jauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the continental tradition of reception aesthetics—that was growing up around him. Nevertheless, though some sensed that Schapiro’s semiotics was underdeveloped in its theoretical implications, it was a great inspiration for others. By the 1990s in particular, a moment when, as noted at the end of the previous chapter, Schapiro’s writing was being criticized in the United States for being atheoretical, some of France’s most innovative art historians routinely cited Schapiro’s semiotic writing as foundational for their own scholarship. Through references, translations, and even stand-alone essays about his ideas, writers like Yve-Alain Bois, Hubert Damisch, and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn have

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revealed that their work has long developed in relation to Schapiro’s thought. Lebensztejn translated Schapiro’s “Field and Vehicle in Image Signs” in a special 1973 issue of Critique—a text that he subsequently credited with revitalizing French art history as a whole.53 Damisch, who published specifically on Schapiro’s semiotic essays as early as 1978, dedicated his magnum opus— The Origin of Perspective—to Schapiro.54 Bois, who had brokered the original confrontation between Schapiro and Derrida, approvingly cited Schapiro in his own widely read collection of essays, Painting as Model.55 Examples like these reveal how linguistic boundaries between national traditions of scholarship can obscure the intricacies of intellectual history, all the more so for those who are living through it. After all, this same moment was marked by the widespread importation of French theories—especially those with a Lacanian, Derridean, or De Manian bent—to the art-historical, English-speaking world through edited volumes of translated essays, like Norman Bryson’s Calligram. In hindsight, it is ironic that some of the French art historians associated with this development—specifically Lebensztejn, Damisch, and Bois—expressed great admiration for Schapiro while at the same time achieving success in the United States as representatives of theoretical positions that certain circles of the Anglo-American academy took to be opposed to Schapiro’s model of thought. Taking a broader view, this apparent contradiction was likely baked into the amalgamation of intellectual genealogies that gave rise to semiotic art history more generally. It was really only in the early 1970s that semiotics as a mode of interpretation came to widespread attention across the humanities. When it did, it more often signified a departure from the structuralist or semiological model of Saussure than a true, historically accurate continuation of Peirce’s work. Within art history, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson’s widely cited Art Bulletin essay, “Semiotics and Art History” of 1991, is representative of this approach. That essay primarily divides the traditions of semiotics—as I have here—into Saussurean and Peircean strains. In so doing, however, Peirce’s semiotics is positioned as a form of skeptical antirealism that anticipates the deconstructivist work that Bal and Bryson, following Derrida, champion, which was widespread at the time. As previous sections of this chapter have shown, of course, Peirce himself was quite the opposite of a skeptic; he was, in fact, an ardent and distinguished defender of natural science, the very mode of inquiry whose optimistic and unshakeable search for truth writ large can easily be taken as opposed to Bal and Bryson’s own goals.

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The seemingly impossible complexity of Peirce’s theories would seem to be at least partially responsible for this unlikely appropriation. By positing the existence of some 59,049 different types of signs, Peirce almost demanded that his writing be taken up in piecemeal, ad hoc fashion. For better or worse, as James Elkins noted in 2003, this quality is one of the characteristic features of semiotic art history in general. Art historians tend to evoke the rudimentary terms of Saussure and Peirce—whether the dyad of signifier and signified or the triad of icon, index, symbol—independently of the larger projects of which those terms are but a part. Of course, as Peircean terms like the index have proven unequivocally powerful for whole schools of art-historical thought, such an approach is surely not only enticing but also defensible. Now-standard essays, like Rosalind Krauss’s interpretation of art in the 1970s by way of the notion of “the index” or Annette Michelson’s classic account of Robert Morris by way of Peircean “thirdness,” reveal that isolated semiotic terms can be used to animate and breathe life into the visual objects that compose art history and that can all too easily come across as bewilderingly mute if not intractably dead to viewers and readers in the present. This success of semiotic art history, however, also had its consequences, one of which, I would like to suggest, was that the complexities, contradictions, and deeper-level affinities between traditions of semiotic thought often went unrecognized, both in the understanding of Schapiro’s work and in its reception. What is especially telling about Schapiro’s scholarship in relation to art history’s engagement with semiotics, however, is that even though his theoretical position is admittedly underdeveloped, he is less prone to rely on key semiotic terms in order to make his point and does not put forward his claims for the primary purpose of elucidating a particular art object. Schapiro’s semiotic art history ranges widely, so widely in fact that it might even be said to be more of a contribution to semiotics proper than to art history traditionally conceived. Whereas many of the most familiar examples of semiotic art history draw on theories of signification to understand specific works—for instance, Louis Marin’s take on Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds of 1980 or Georges Didi-Huberman’s interpretation of the Turin shroud of 1984— Schapiro’s semiotic writing is much more general. This is why the titles of his essays refer to “problems of the semiotics of visual art” and “the literal and symbolic in the illustration of a text.” To state the obvious but nonetheless important point, these essays have the goal not of explicating specific works of art as signs—although they do so along the way—but rather of making much more ambitious, general points about how images, as images, function

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as signs. In this sense, even though Schapiro’s semiotic art history is theoretically underdeveloped, it more fully embraces semiotics itself. Such a focus, assuredly, also reflects the wide-ranging character of Schapiro’s mind, a point upon which it is only fitting for this book to end.

Epilogue

The goal of the preceding eight chapters has been to open up a perspective onto Meyer Schapiro’s thought as a whole that recasts our understanding of his intellectual contribution in a number of ways. On the most basic, uncontroversial level, I hope to have revealed the integration of Schapiro’s work as an art historian with the general culture of his time and thereby to have shown how art historiography is but a single layer of a larger cultural stratigraphy that encompasses the intellectual work of many fields and includes artistic production itself. On a more specific level, I hope to have exposed the incompleteness of the multiple but always partial art-historical recuperations of Schapiro’s work for the purposes of championing its underlying principles for new cases, whether these be recuperations that laud Schapiro’s formalism, his Marxism, his exploration of psychoanalysis, his semiotic essays, or even his engagement with practicing artists. Though each of these aspects of Schapiro’s work is obviously important to understanding his historical impact and legacy, to treat these moments of his career individually also brings with it the risk of overlooking what unites them. One of my recurring arguments has been that Schapiro’s persistent engagement with pragmatist ideas is an evident thread that runs throughout his writing, and the preceding chapters have documented, analyzed, and evaluated how that thread is woven into the very fabric of his thought over the long term. Based on this analysis and understood through the classic metaphors of Isaiah Berlin, Schapiro can be described as a hedgehog in fox’s clothing, an intellectual whose seemingly divergent and ever-shifting pursuits are nonetheless part of a single, albeit ramified, habit of thought. On the one hand, Schapiro’s connection to

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pragmatism is appropriate considering his reputation as America’s first truly great art historian and his relationship with Dewey, fittingly rebellious though it was. Dewey was likely the most influential American philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, and the tradition that he carried on is one of the longest and most complex—if contradictory—in American intellectual life. On the other hand, Schapiro’s engagement with pragmatism remains highly relevant to contemporary pursuits. Figures like Richard Rorty, Louis Menand, and Richard Shusterman have reinvigorated interest in pragmatism for our contemporary moment, and art history itself has long had a relation to pragmatist thinking that is not going away—whether through controversial figures like Bernard Berenson, classic authors like Edgar Wind, or more recent writers like Molly Nesbit. My hope is that emphasizing Schapiro’s relation to this intellectual tradition will encourage scholars today to want to understand why he thought the way he thought, and why he perhaps even waivered in his commitment to the modes of analysis that he helped normalize, including pragmatism itself. Most importantly, I hope that we can read Schapiro’s writing anew. One of the immediate results of reframing Schapiro’s work through his fraught but recurring relation to pragmatism is a new description of art history’s relation to some of the philosophical questions that most shaped the discipline during Schapiro’s life, not to mention the twentieth century as a whole. These questions have been dramatized through the thematic debates that structure the body of this book, and they include questions about form, historical knowledge, dialectical thinking, the unconscious, and the differences between verbal and visual representation. As the reader will recall, Schapiro’s answers to these questions were more ad hoc than systematic, and in this regard they parallel the fact that he never developed his own theory of art, pragmatist or otherwise. Though this lack of a truly unified approach leaves Schapiro’s writing open to much criticism—and has even led some to see his scholarship as simply not theoretical at all—his piecemeal approach to theoretical questions is representative of the majority of art historians of his generation and still today.1 For better or worse, art history’s hermeneutic task has long brought empiricist commitments with it; its focus on visual art leads its practitioners to defend the supposedly commonsense knowledge that is gained through sensual—and in particular visual—experience and to put forth interpretations that explain the visual particularities of individual art objects based on the specific historical circumstances that produced them. This combination of self-evident allegiances courts forms of nominalism,

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under which general theories about what art is or how art functions tout court are easily swept aside as overly ambitious and as losing sight of the distinctiveness of the actual objects that make up art’s variable history. Of course, there are numerous schools of art historiography that have long tried to move beyond the field’s attachment to these principles if for no other reason than to understand art history apart from the discipline’s seemingly endless and sometimes quite plodding documentary work; these alternatives will never go away, nor should they. But the fact remains that the empiricist shadow that accompanies the hermeneutic practice of art historiography lurks as an important, powerful, and abiding presence on the discipline’s intellectual landscape. For Schapiro, this state of affairs called forth a scholarly stance that sought to be adaptable and nondogmatic enough to make sense of the full range of art making throughout human history and across the globe while at the same time bold enough not to shy away from the more general, philosophical questions that the very diversity of artistic production makes unavoidable. Schapiro’s unusual dual specialization in medieval and modern art was undoubtedly instrumental to his ability to see this broad disciplinary dynamic. Furthermore, his relation to the pragmatist tradition, it seems to me, helped motivate his searching engagement with the diverse modes of argument and general topics of inquiry that he sought out and that made him a pioneer. The result was that Schapiro approached general theoretical paradigms as open, rather than as closed, systems of analysis, and he sought to leverage his deep and broad knowledge of art’s history to further develop the very systems of thought that pervaded the culture of his time. This being said, Schapiro’s underlying assumptions were not self-consciously developed enough to fully counterbalance his failure to develop his own unique, comprehensive approach. And his lasting allegiance to the modernist analysis of form reveals his inability to follow through on his embrace of antidogmatism completely. These two failings, however, are important lessons for the present. An equally important lesson is Schapiro’s very willingness to confront, adapt, and discard general theoretical paradigms on their own terms and not to conclude from the resultant treadmill of exegesis that the search for general art-historical theories was an empty Sisyphean task. It is easy to overlook the fact that many of Schapiro’s most influential essays—whether his early writing in the Marxist Quarterly, his assessment of Freud in the Journal of the History of Ideass, or his late essay for Semiotica—came from an art-historical perspective but appeared outside the discipline’s confines and were directed explicitly at a non-art-historical audience. This fact is noteworthy and stands

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as an important reminder. As the world becomes increasingly connected and as art-historical knowledge becomes more developed and specialized, the tension between addressing general questions on the one hand and writing for a discipline-specific audience on the other promises to become an ever greater challenge. Faced with this situation, many art historians have already been— and will likely continue to be—tempted to retreat to the safety of arguments that rest on radical historical particularization, extreme contextualism, and absolute cultural relativity. Such positions can seem like the safest and most defensible, especially considering their ties to the nominalistic habits that follow from art history’s distinguished tradition of documentation. Since, however, the general lessons that can be taken away from the history of art will surely always be a source of its lasting value, and since art’s history undoubtedly does speak to general truths, the safety of the particular, contextual, and relative arguments of art historiography are ultimately a mirage. In this regard we can take courage from Schapiro’s example of having achieved the recognition he did by persistently confronting some of the most pressing issues and debates of his time from the perspective of an art historian. If his tenacity in this undertaking can make his writing seem disjointed and inconsistent, in his very willingness to explore the range of specific topics and general theories that he did, Schapiro was a paladin of one of the central positions of the pragmatist tradition with which he continuously engaged. The impressive breadth of Schapiro’s career, in other words, is a steadfast, Peircean reminder that “it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough.”2 If nothing else, the critical debates around which this book has been organized remind us of just that. Dare to question, yes. But also dare to know.

Notes

Introduction

1. Schapiro believed, and subsequent scholars have agreed, that the bright, broad bands of solid red, orange, yellow, and blue that stretch across the background of the manuscript known as the Morgan Beatus find a clear parallel in Léger’s use of similarly large, colored swaths in his later paintings. For a discussion of this parallel, see Willmoth 1987. For a published account of Schapiro’s meeting with Léger, see Epstein 1983, 61–62. Schapiro himself also recorded the details of this event in the typescript “Léger—Oct. 19, 1935.” See MSC, box 236, folder 13, series IV.3. The Morgan Beatus was one of Schapiro’s favorite artworks, and he took other artists to see it as well, notably Roberto Matta and André Masson. 2. A fuller list of these anecdotes is recounted in Hess 1978. Schapiro himself also confirmed many of these stories in various interviews he gave toward the end of his career. For instance, see Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997. 3. O’Hara 1950, 512; Kimmelman 1994. 4. Crow 1996. 5. Craven 2003. 6. Isaacson 2001; Matthews 1994.

7. Chomsky 2004, 95. 8. White 2010, 37. 9. Phillips 2004, 69. 10. See Schapiro’s typed response to questions about his approach; MSC, box 653, folder 6, series I.2. 11. Zerner 1974. 12. Russell 1996. 13. Sandler 2004, 197. I am indebted to Stephen Bann for this reference. 14. Broyard 1997, 56–60. I would like to thank Robert Harrist for introducing me to this passage. 15. An initial description of the typescripts of Schapiro’s lecturers is appropriate, as they are one of the most common types of document found in his archive, and I cite them repeatedly in this book. These documents are usually transcriptions of recordings of Schapiro’s oral presentations—either to a group of his peers for a professional presentation or to students during courses that he taught. Though the dates of the original presentations are often used to date their transcriptions, because the resultant typescripts are based on recordings, the exact contexts surrounding their creations are not always known. Importantly, Schapiro himself extensively edited these typescripts, usually by hand and often on multiple occasions. Sometimes he did so to correct errors in the

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transcriptions of the original recordings and sometimes to revise his own original language. While the original recordings and transcriptions usually have dates, the corrections to them usually do not. 16. Essays that primarily concern visual art, specifically Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” only appeared with the third edition of the book. See Hollinger and Capper 2001. Hollinger himself notes that while discussions of novels are common in courses on American intellectual history, discussions of visual art are not. Accordingly, Hollinger acknowledges that within his course book Greenberg’s and Sontags’s essays have been received with indifference (2012). 17. For an exploration of these relations, see Davis 2011. 18. Dvořák 1924. 19. For interested readers, here at the beginning I flag the three scholars who have likely contributed the most to the extensive bibliography of literature about Schapiro and point out some general differences between my work and theirs. The writings of these scholars come up throughout the chapters that follow, and I am indebted to each of them. The first is Andrew Hemingway, whose two lengthy articles about Schapiro pay particular attention to his early Marxist years. Hemingway has also done much to identify and recognize Schapiro’s debt to Dewey, yet he does not explore Schapiro’s pragmatist leanings as deeply as I do here. Despite this difference, my book is more indebted to Hemingway’s work than to any other scholarship on Schapiro. Second is Cynthia Persinger, whose 2008 dissertation, “The Politics of Style: Meyer Schapiro and the Crisis

of Meaning in Art History,” analyzes Schapiro’s career in relation to wellknown twentieth-century problematics about race. I agree with Persinger about Schapiro’s early concern about racialized art-historical explanation and cite her in later chapters. My book, however, attempts a more pluralistic approach to Schapiro’s thought. Third is Kerstin Thomas. Thomas’s essays largely focus on what I would call analytically fecund ideas in Schapiro’s writings. To do so, she often positions Schapiro’s essays as precursors to more recent developments, for instance, object-oriented ontology or the school of British art writers who took up the lessons of Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis. I see my work as more thoroughly historicizing than Thomas’s as I endeavor to understand the ideas behind Schapiro’s writing in more complete historical contexts. In addition to these scholars, I should mention Molly Nesbit’s essay-length book The Pragmatism in the History of Art, which discusses Schapiro in relation to what she calls pragmatism. I attempt to go beyond Nesbit’s analysis of Schapiro by being more historically comprehensive in my discussion of Schapiro and more historically grounded in my discussion of pragmatism.

1929

1. Large sections of the thesis would be published in the Art Bulletin two years later. See Schapiro (1931a) 1977 and Schapiro (1931b) 1977. Due to a purely bureaucratic matter, Columbia would not officially confer the degree until 1935. The delay was the product of the university’s absurdly high filing

194  /  Notes to Pages 15–25

requirement of depositing fifty paper copies with the university’s library. During the height of the Great Depression, this was no doubt especially burdensome. The original receipt for the deposit of the required number of copies is preserved in MSC, box 108, folder 12, series I.7. 2. Schapiro (1931a) 1977, 131. 3. For a discussion of Schapiro’s formalism, see Williams 2003. 4. Schapiro 2009, 47. 5. Schapiro 1926; MSC, box 655, folder 1, series I.7. 6. Jackson Lears 1981. For Schapiro’s late essay on Porter, delivered at Columbia in 1983, see MSC, box 217, folder 9, series III.3.6. 7. Epstein 1983, 78. In an interview in 1986, Schapiro recalled this course being taught by Ernest DeWald; see Soutter 1986, 126 n. 7. 8. Epstein 1983, 78. 9. Schapiro (1931a) 1977, 140–53. 10. Schapiro 1925, 170. 11. Ibid., 171. 12. For an early edited transcription of “The Value of Modern Art,” see MSC, box 198, folder 24, series III.3. This essay was also posthumously published in Schapiro’s Selected Papers (Schapiro 1999q). For the parallel in Schapiro’s course lectures, see MSC, box 185, folder 6, series III.2. 13. On Schapiro’s relation to Greenberg, see Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997, 162. 14. Epstein 1983, 74, 78. 15. For a discussion of Fry’s writing and what is arguably its legacy, see Rose 2019. 16. An example of Schapiro’s later use of the term “sensibility” can be found in MSC, box 192, folder 9, series III.2.

17. Epstein 1983, 78. For Fry’s attention to the content of works of art within his writing, see Fry 1920, 145–53. 18. For a discussion of Fry’s various appeals to emotional responses to works of art, see Rubin 2013, 31–64. 19. For instance, Aristotle, Poetics 8. 20. For a history of Gestalt psychology, see Ash 1995. 21. Schapiro (1931a) 1977, 140–41, 150. 22. Ibid., 151. 23. MSC, box 235, folder 43, series IV.3. 24. For informative statements by Fry about the relation between vision and art, see Fry 1939. For Schapiro’s statements, see Epstein 1983, 84–85. 25. Dewey (1925) 1983, esp. 266–94. 26. I would like to thank Andrew Hemingway for suggesting this parallel. 27. MSC, box 344, folder 10, series V.5. 28. These citations come throughout Schapiro’s ongoing courses on the theories and methods of art history. Of these authors, Schapiro likely had the most extensive relationship with Rudolf Arnheim, with whom he corresponded from 1940 to the mid-1960s. Arnheim admired Schapiro’s writing—especially his essay on Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (1946)—and the two met on numerous occasions, even once formally debating their ideas on symbolism in visual art at the American Society for Aesthetics’s annual conference in 1952. 29. For Schapiro’s paper on Wertheimer’s principle of good continuation, see MSC, box 236, folder 1, series IV.3. 30. Schapiro recounted this anecdote in his course lectures at Columbia on multiple occasions throughout his career. For an example from 1967, see MSC, box 185, folder 10, series III.2. For

Notes to Pages 25–38  /  195

an example from 1975, see MSC, box 192, folder 13, series III.2. 31. For instance, see the discussion of Jackson Pollock in Arnheim 1957, 18–31. 32. Ringer 1969, esp. 375–77. 33. Wertheimer (1923) 1958. 34. Schapiro makes this point in his paper on Wertheimer’s principle of good continuation (MSC, box 236, folder 1, series IV.3). Though Schapiro did not present the ideas in this paper until 1970, its origins are clearly much earlier. Arnheim thanks Schapiro for discussing his criticisms of Wertheimer’s principle of good continuation in Art and Visual Perception in 1956 (Arnheim 1956, 380). 35. Schapiro 1940b, 478. 36. See the typescript of one of Schapiro’s 1975 lectures for his course on the theories and methods of art history; MSC, box 192, folder 13, series III.2. 37. Dewey (1934) 1987, esp. chapter 4, “The Act of Expression.” 38. For a discussion of the interest in Neoplatonism among scholars associated with the Warburg Institute, see O’Donnell 2018b. 39. MSC, box 129, folder 24, series II. 40. Ibid. 41. Gombrich 1949. 42. For an overview of these ideas and their controversies, see Wood 2009. 43. Davis 2018. 44. MSC, box 184, folder 9, series III.2. 45. Though Schapiro never seems to have published this criticism of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, he repeatedly made it during his ongoing courses on the theories and methods of art history. For instance, MSC, box 184, folder 8, series III.2.1; MSC, box 191, folder 9, series III.2.1; and MSC, box 191, folder 7, series III.2.1. The criticism

itself also has clear precedent in Schapiro’s reaction to Gombrich’s well-known essay “Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” documented in a letter to Gombrich of August 8, 1951 (Correspondence, EGP). 46. Gombrich (1960) 2000, xxv. 47. Schapiro 2006, 74. 48. Schapiro (1953d) 1994, 52. 49. Gombrich 1968. 50. Gombrich (1956) 1966, 71.

1936

1. Schapiro’s review has continued to play an important role in the reception of New Viennese art history, and its impact has been undoubtedly furthered by its republication within Wood 2000, 453–85. For interpretations of New Viennese scholarship that rely on Schapiro’s review, see Wood’s introduction to the above volume as well as Blaha 2009; see also Levy 2015. 2. Schapiro 1936c, 258, 260. 3. The phrase “crisis of historicism” is most heavily associated with Ernst Troeltsch (1925). 4. The origin of this debate was the 1959 Rede Lectures at Cambridge University. (Snow [1959] 1998). The most widely discussed response to these lectures was made by F. R. Leavis (1962). An important early American response to this debate (and one with which Schapiro was no doubt familiar) was Lionel Trilling’s (1962). 5. Schapiro’s correspondence with Sedlmayr has been extensively analyzed by Evonne Levy (2010). 6. Much of this correspondence has been analyzed by Cynthia Persinger (2010). 7. Pächt 1999, 67–68.

196  /  Notes to Pages 38–45

8. The solicitation of this review is documented in a letter from Hans Sedlmayr to Meyer Schapiro, September 24, 1931 (MSC, box 166, folder 13, series II). 9. For a standard treatment of these debates and discussions, see Iggers 1968. 10. Baltrušaitis (1931) 1986, especially 5. 11. Focillon (1938) 1980. 12. The letters between Schapiro and Focillon concerning this incident were reproduced by Walter Cahn (2002). The original French is “éreintement sauvage.” 13. Focillon likely also presented a version of this book at Columbia in 1934; he suggests his intention to do so in a letter to Schapiro dated April 18, 1934 (MSC, box 127, folder 3, series II). For an analysis of Baltrušaitis’s work in relation to Focillon’s, see Žukauskienė 2014. 14. Focillon (1934) 1992, 149. The original French reads: “L’étude la plus attentive du milieu le plus homogène, le faisceau de circonstances le plus étroitement serré ne nous donnent pas le dessin des tours de Laon.” 15. For a recent analysis of Focillon’s Bergsonian commitments, see Grant 2017. 16. See Schapiro’s response to Focillon in the letters reproduced in Cahn 2002. 17. This was even noted at the time. See Schlosser (1934) 2009. Though vitalism and Lebensphilosophie should not be conflated, they have long been analyzed together. For instance, Gorsen 1966; Schnädelbach 1984, 139–60. 18. Sedlmayr (1931) 2000, 137–38. 19. For instance, see Harrington 1996; Ash 1995. 20. Eduard Spranger and Erich Rothacker were especially influential in popularizing Dilthey’s writings in the

1920s. See Iggers 1968, 175. Dilthey’s very use of the term Verstehen, of course, is made in relation to earlier uses by figures like Hegel and Kant. 21. Dilthey 1927, 278. The original German reads: “Die erste Bedingung für die Möglichkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft liegt darin, daß ich selbst ein geschichtliches Wesen bin, daß der, welcher die Geschichte erforscht, derselbe ist, der die Geschichte macht.” 22. Bohde 2008; see also Dittman 1967, 140–41. 23. Sedlmayr (1931) 2000, 135. The original German reads: “‘zeigen’ . . . was dieses ‘Verstehen’ eigentlich ist.” 24. Ibid., 138–40. The original German reads: “rekonstruieren: nicht ‘blind,’ weil sie aus Nachrichten weiß oder aus physischen Merkmalen schließt, daß an diesem Ding noch ein so und so aussehender Teil zu ergänzen ist, der jetzt fehlt, sondern weil sie aus der verstandenen inneren Gesetzlichkeit dieses Gebildes die Notwendigkeit einer ganz bestimmten Ergänzung und das Fehlen dieses Teiles unmittelbar einsieht” (emphasis in original). 25. For instance, see the various forms of “Verstehen” that are championed in Sedlmayr 1957. 26. Schapiro 1936c, 258. 27. One of the few analyses of Schapiro’s career to touch on this complex relation is Hemingway 1994. The affinities between Schapiro’s work and that of the logical positivists—not to mention his abovenoted criticisms of Sedlmayr’s appropriation of Dilthey—also speak to the distance between Schapiro’s early Marxist art history and that of other prominent Marxist art historians of his generation, such as Arnold Hauser. As Hemingway points out, Hauser was

Notes to Pages 45–51  /  197

especially indebted to Dilthey’s writing, and this affinity may be partially responsible for Schapiro’s uneven relationship with Hauser (Hemingway 2014). 28. One of the key instances is the work of Edgar Zilsel, with whom Schapiro also corresponded. For a broad discussion of the political background to logical positivism, see Reisch 2005. 29. Dewey (1935) 1987. 30. For the classic statement of this position, see Neurath (1931) 1983. 31. For Schapiro’s involvement with this project, see MSC, box 236, folder 27, series IV.3. Schapiro’s falling out with Neurath is documented in the letters between them from 1945 (MSC, box 152, folder 5, series II). 32. See the typescript named “Encyl. —Nov. 1948,” in MSC, box 187, folder 2, series III.2. 33. For instance, see MacNeish 1970. 34. For an example of such statements, see MSC, box 184, folder 11, series III.2.1. 35. The writing on the Two Cultures debate is unsurprisingly enormous. For a helpful overview and bibliography, see Ortolando 2008. 36. Schapiro (1999k), 159–60. 37. Schapiro’s correspondence with Edgar Wind documents the fact that Schapiro’s essay on “Legends of the Invention of Flying” was already begun in 1937 (MSC, box 176, folder 16, series II). 38. MSC, box 198, folder 9, series III.3. 39. Sedlmayr (1934) 2000, 325. 40. Ibid., 325. 41. Ibid., 335. 42. For a historical contextualization of the legacy of Windelband’s work in this period, see Bambach 1995. For an

analytic and historical treatment of this divide, see Mandelbaum 1977. 43. Sedlmayr (1931) 2000, 154–55. 44. Sedlmayr stated the re-creative goal of his scholarship in similar terms. See ibid., 144. 45. These particulars are even captured in the translated excerpts of Novotny’s book. See Novotny (1938) 2000. 46. Bodhe 2008. In addition to Sedlmayr’s own Gutachten of Novotny’s book, a key essay is Novotny 1932. 47. Sedlmayr (1948) 2007, 129–34. 48. Novotny’s work is indebted to that of John Rewald, with whom Novotny was in contact and whose photographs of the sites that Cézanne painted were used in his own study. 49. Novotny’s underlining of the inductive nature of his and Schapiro’s approaches is documented in the letter from Novotny to Schapiro dated February 19, 1932 (MSC, box 153, folder 2, series II). For Schapiro’s later recognition of Novotny’s impact on his own writing, see the acknowledgements within Schapiro 1952d. 50. This disagreement is documented in the letter from Novotny to Schapiro dated July 15, 1969 (MSC, box 153, folder 2, series II). 51. It is interesting to note that despite Novotny’s later criticisms of Schapiro’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Cézanne, Novotny approved of Schapiro’s use of Mead’s pragmatist social psychology as an underlying approach to understanding Cézanne’s personality. I discuss Schapiro’s use of Mead more fully in “1956: Pragmatic Psychoanalysis and the Confirmation of Woman I,, in this volume.” 52. Schapiro 1936c, 258.

198  /  Notes to Pages 52–61

53. Plummer 1978, 171. 54. See Nagel 1961. 55. Sedlmayr (1934) 2000, 323. 56. A typescript dated March 1947 suggests that Schapiro had at least partially developed his interpretation of Bruegel in relation to “Legends about the Invention of Flying” soon after his initial lecture on Bruegel at the New School in 1946 (MSC, box 198, folder 11, series III.3.2). For the full extant typescript of the 1971 version of the talk, see MSC, box 213, folder 16, series III.3. 57. For an example of Schapiro’s more utopian version of art history, see Schapiro 1933b. 58. MSC, box 246, folder 13, series IV.4. 59. On his ninetieth birthday, Schapiro stated “without hesitation” that the failures of socialism were the greatest disappointment of his life. See Solomon 1994.

1941

1. Schapiro 1943a. 2. Schapiro’s position at Columbia University made protecting himself against political retaliation prudent. Columbia had previously fired Schapiro’s colleague and former student Jerome Klein because of his politics. See Mather 1934. I would like to thank Andrew Hemingway for sharing his knowledge of Jerome Klein with me. 3. For a helpful overview of these developments, see Jordan 1967. 4. Epstein 1983. 5. See Hemingway 2006, 128. 6. See Soutter 1986, 59 n. 89. 7. For Schapiro’s claim about his dissertation containing a Marxist

section, see Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997, 164. For an analysis of the development of Schapiro’s writing from his dissertation to his explicitly Marxist essays of the late 1930s, see Soutter 1986. 8. For a denial of the Marxism of Schapiro’s dissertation, see Williams 2003. For alterative explanations of the Marxist undertones of Schapiro’s dissertation, see Seidel 2006; Persinger 2007, 38–41. 9. For Schapiro’s discussion of the sculptures of Silos in his dissertation, see Schapiro 1929b, 245–47. For Schapiro’s later explanation of these facts in Marxist terms, see Schapiro (1939d) 1977. 10. In section E of part II of his dissertation, Schapiro expresses the idea of a conflict between the clergy who dictate Romanesque style and “the individual powers and fancies of the recently born Romanesque sculptors” (Schapiro 1929b, 270). 11. Hemingway 2006, 133. For a Marxist analysis of Schapiro’s writing on Romanesque art, see Werckmeister 1994. See also Werckmeister 1979. 12. The most extensive and nuanced discussions of Schapiro’s Marxist commitments are Hemingway 1994 and 2006. 13. See Hemingway 2002. For Schapiro’s contemporaneous defense of non-Communist art, see Schapiro 1932a. 14. These beliefs are also why Schapiro is sometimes referred to as a Trotskyist, though he denied ever being a true follower of Trotsky. For a consideration of the evidence for these claims, see Hemingway 1994, 23. 15. Ibid., 20–22. 16. For a now-classic recounting and evaluation of these events, see Conquest (1968) 2008.

Notes to Pages 62–66  /  199

17. The letter is preserved in box 1 of the separate collection of the Columbia University Libraries named: Meyer Schapiro, Letters and Manuscripts of Whittaker Chambers and James Thomas Farrell, 1923–1991. Schapiro retrospectively dated the letter Feb/ March(?) 1937. 18. Chambers 1952, 34–44. 19. For a useful overview and assessment of these interpretations, see Hemingway 1994. For the interpretations themselves, see Guilbaut 1983, esp. 24–26; Crow 1983, 224–35; Clark 1990, esp. 223–24. 20. Lukacs (1923) 1971, 315. Schapiro’s familiarity with Lukacs’s classic text is demonstrated in his correspondence with Adorno. See Adorno and Benjamin 2001, 270. 21. “The Social Bases of Art” was reprinted in 1972 in the “On Art and Society” supplement to the journal Women and Art, 14–15, 19. I would like to thank Andrew Hemingway for this reference. The essay was then reprinted again in Shapiro 1973, 118–27. An example of a scholar within Schapiro’s peer group who long refused to reprint his early Marxist writings is Sidney Hook. 22. For a more detailed discussion of some of these ambiguities, especially in relation to Schapiro’s writing in the postwar period, see O’Donnell 2016a. 23. Schapiro (1941d) 1978, 56. 24. Ibid., 65. 25. MSC, box 160, folder 5, series II. The full, original French paragraph from which this citation is taken reads: “Bien entendu, j’imagine que vous avez voulu isoler le problème idéologique du folklore pour en évoquer une image vivante et détaillée (à la Meissonnier). Mais je n’ai jamais pu partager l’opinion

de certains théoriciens suivant lesquels l’histoire ne peut donner que l’individuel. En outre l’isolation si complète d’un seul facteur menace à falsifier ou à supprimer les vrais problèmes et aussi les vraies causes des faits. Même si votre explication de l’idéologie du primitive etc. est juste, elle n’est pas complète. En donnant une raison matérialiste, vous avez oublié la dialectique. Il y a des raisons qui proviennent de l’histoire de l’idéologie même, c’est-à-dire de la théorie de la connaissance etc. Nous en causerons, j’espère.” 26. MSC, box 160, folder 5, series II. “[J]e me suis demandée, pendant plusieurs jour et nuit, si l’on peut traiter votre sujet comme vous l’avez fait, si l’on veut le traiter d’une manière scientifique. C’est cette question méthodologique qui est à la base de ma lettre, mais j’avoue que, de ce point de vue, des problèmes additionnels et essentiels me semblent inévitables. Pour parler plus concrètement: Supposons que vous voulez écrire une étude sur la crise mondiale de 1929. Est-ce possible de le faire sans avoir une théorie générale des crises capitalistes? Suffit-il, du point de vue scientifique, de donner une description (ou plutôt narration) détaillée du phénomène? Peut-on essayer de trouver les causes sans comparaison avec toutes les autres crises et sans avoir analysé le fonctionnement du capitalisme tout entier? Je conviens que vous pouvez refuser de faire science en vous excusant de l’état actuel de l’histoire de l’art. Dans ce cas, tout ce que j’ai dit et tout ce que je vais dire, est caduc pour vous.” 27. See Jay 1984. 28. Hemingway 1994, 28 n. 85.

200  /  Notes to Pages 66–75

29. Undated draft of a letter from Schapiro to Raphael, MSC, box 160, folder 5, series II. 30. Schapiro’s writing on psychoanalytic theories is representative of this dimension to his thought. Whereas he was critical of Freud’s interpretations of works of art, Schapiro later applied psychoanalytic theories himself. For a further discussion of this aspect of his writing, see “1956: Pragmatic Psychoanalysis and the Confirmation of Woman I,” in this volume. 31. A translation of Plekhanov’s book was published in New York in 1936. For Schapiro’s review, see MSC, box 660, folder 1, series IV.3. 32. Quoted in Hemingway 2006, 249 n. 72. For Schapiro’s translation of Raphael, see Raphael 1937. 33. Jay 1984, 131–32. For an exploration of some of these affinities, see Craven 1994. 34. Thompson, Raines, and Schapiro 1994, 11. 35. Adorno and Benjamin 2001, 252. 36. Horkheimer (1937) 1999. 37. Eastman 1933. Hook later accepted this characterization of his work, although he thought it applied better to his book of 1933 (Hook 1987, 139). 38. MSC, box 236, folder 36, series IV.3. 39. JFP, box 208, folder 2, section I. 40. On Dewey’s rejection of Marxism on the grounds of its violence, see Dewey 1934. On Schapiro’s discussion with White about Dewey, see MSC, box 176, folder 9, series II. For Dewey’s problematic record on supporting American wars, see Westbrook 1991, 195–228. 41. MSC, box 235, folder 38, series IV.3.

42. This course description is preserved in the bound edition of the 1923–24 Columbia College course bulletin in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. I am indebted to Jocelyn Wilk for helping me locate the course catalog and to Daniel Esterman for Schapiro’s transcript. 43. Schapiro (1937b) 1978, 196. 44. Later in life Dewey wished that he had put more emphasis on “culture” than on “experience.” See Dewey (1925) 1983, 361. 45. Jay 2005, 261–311 and 312–60. 46. Schapiro’s correspondence with Chambers, which was used in the trial, is grouped with Schapiro’s extensive correspondence with James Farrell as an independent collection in the Columbia University Libraries. 47. Schapiro 1967b. A telling fact about the surrounding controversy is that William F. Buckley Jr., a figurehead of American conservativism, sent Schapiro a letter of appreciation for his review. 48. Schapiro 1999q, 157. 49. Here I quote a transcription of this lecture from 1950, rather than the posthumously published version, because the latter was revised (MSC, box 198, folder 24, series III.3). For the revised version of this statement, see Schapiro 1999q, 150–51. 50. Schapiro 1997, 224–25. 51. For Schapiro’s discussion of these qualities, see Schapiro 1999q. 52. Ibid., 145. 53. One version of Schapiro’s interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica was posthumously published (2000d). In addition to this lecture, there is also an extensively revised and never completed interpretation simply titled “Pablo Picasso’s Guernica” in Schapiro’s archive

Notes to Pages 75–92  /  201

(MSC, box 246, folders 1–22, series IV.4). The origins of Schapiro’s interpretation of Guernica can be found in his MoMA lecture of November 30, 1939, titled “The Art of Pablo Picasso,” a dated typescript of which is preserved in MSC, box 197, folder 24, series III.3. 54. Schapiro 2000d, 155. 55. Ibid., 177. 56. Schapiro was likely familiar with the debate about Guernica between Jerome Seckler, Rockwell Kent, and others that was published in New Masses in March, April, and May of 1945. See also Clark 1941; Kemenov 1947. 57. See Schapiro’s unpublished and heavily revised essay simply titled “Pablo Picasso’s Guernica” (MSC, box 247, folder 3, series IV.4, 63). 58. Quoted in Hemingway 1994, 28 n. 85. 59. Raphael 1968, 158. 60. Ibid., 158. It deserves to be noted that Raphael had been writing about Picasso since before the First World War and that Schapiro would have likely spoken extensively with him about Picasso’s work more generally. See Raphael 1913. 61. Raphael 1968, 187. 62. Raphael (1933) 1980, 143. 63. See Schapiro’s unpublished essay “Pablo Picasso’s Guernica” (MSC, box 246, folder 6, series IV.4, 20). 64. Raphael 1968, 144. 65. Ibid., 177. 66. Schapiro 1940b, 478. 67. For instance, Schapiro engages with C. I. Lewis’s theory of value in the essay “Judgment and the Grounds of Value in Art” (MSC, box 237, folder 51, series IV.3). 68. Davenport 1948, 59. 69. See Schapiro 1987.

1947

1. Schapiro persistently made this point throughout his career. For an early example, see Schapiro 1936a. For an extended discussion and analysis of this aspect of Schapiro’s writing, see Persinger 2007. 2. ACP, box 47, folder 6. 3. Coomaraswamy 1929. 4. Two of the classic statements of this debate are Strzygowski 1901 and Riegl (1901) 2000. For Schapiro’s M.A. thesis—titled “The Sculptures of Moissac”—see MSC, box 655, folder 1, series I.5. 5. Coomaraswamy 1932; ACP, box 47, folder 6. 6. Lipsey 1977, esp. 161–75. 7. For Coomaraswamy’s own discussion of this fact, see Coomaraswamy 1907, v–ix. For an extended analysis of Morris’s impact of Coomaraswamy, see Lipsey 1977, 258–64. 8. Coomaraswamy 1932, 211. 9. For Coomaraswamy’s acknowledgment of this consistency, see Coomaraswamy 1946, 5; Gilbert 1948, 157–59. 10. ACP, box 47, folder 6. 11. Ibid. 12. MSC, box 120, folder 6, series II. 13. ACP, box 47, folder 6. 14. For a useful compendium of Schapiro’s early essays under the pseudonym John Kwait, see Shapiro 1973. 15. MSC, box 120, folder 6, series II. 16. Ibid. 17. Schapiro 1941c, 85. 18. Coomaraswamy and Schapiro 1941, 173. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Schapiro (1947b) 1977, 1–2.

202  /  Notes to Pages 92–102

22. MSC, box 120, folder 6, series II. 23. Schapiro 1999h, 240. 24. Gombrich (1969) 1979; Schapiro 1999l; Gethmann-Siefert 1995; Brandom 1994, 2000. For an overview of the revised scholarship on Hegel’s aesthetics, see Gaiger 2011. 25. For Schapiro’s correspondence with Nagel about this essay in particular, see MSC, box 236, folder 21, series IV.3. 26. Schapiro 1999h, 232. 27. Ibid., 245. 28. Schapiro (1937b) 1978, esp. 200–201. 29. Schapiro 1999h, 247. 30. See Greif 2015. 31. For a recent attempt to recapture this type of modest approach to art as form, see Rose 2019. 32. Schapiro’s commitment to this position was likely reinforced by his undergraduate coursework with the anthropologist Franz Boas; Boas’s book Primitive Art of 1922, a copy of which Schapiro owned and annotated, is premised on this very position. For an example of Schapiro’s advocacy of a Boasian position on so-called “primitive art,” see Schapiro 1999q. 33. Motherwell 1992, 44. 34. Craven, Motherwell, and Schapiro 1996, 25–32. 35. Compare Schapiro 1956a and Motherwell 1980. 36. Motherwell (1960) 1990, 111. 37. For an extended discussion of this development, see Kroiz 2012, esp. chapter 3. 38. Norman 1973, 48. 39. On Coomaraswamy’s self-fashioning, see Ray 2015. 40. MSC, box 213, folder 12, series III.3, 32. 41. Ibid., 35.

1956

1. For a revealing contextualizing of Freud’s ideas within Cold War America, including within the humanities, see Burnham 2012. 2. C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe both saw the growth of psychoanalytic and existentialist explanations within the intellectual production of the 1940s and ’50s as evidence for a displacement of prior attachment to radical leftist politics. Schapiro’s writing certainly fits this pattern, though the extent to which it does is still debatable, especially because he never fully disavowed his earlier political commitments. See Mills 1944; Howe 1947. 3. In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Schapiro worked on two additional essays on Freud, “Freud’s Gradiva” (MSC, box 255, folder 1, series IV.4) and “Freud’s Forgetting of Signorelli” (MSC, box 261, folder 1, series IV.4). The Gradiva essay remains unpublished. The Signorelli essay, however, has recently been edited by Jérémie Koering and published along with some of Schapiro’s extensive correspondence with Hubert Damisch as well as with two of Damisch’s own essays on the same topic (see Koering 2019, Schapiro 2019a, and Schapiro 2019b). I would like to thank Jérémie Koering and Yve-Alain Bois for sharing their special issue of October with me before its publication. Fittingly, both Schapiro’s and Damisch’s analyses of Freud’s forgetting the name of Signorelli reveal their joint interest not only in Freud but also in semiotics. This point speaks to the connection between psychoanalysis and the philosophy of language that enjoyed widespread interest at the time and that was most famously investigated

Notes to Pages 103–112  /  203

by Jacques Lacan, with whom both Damisch and Schapiro corresponded. I more fully address Schapiro’s relationship with Damisch in “1973: Words and Pictures: A Color Field Critique of Structuralist Semiotics,” in this volume.. 4. Epstein 1983, 70. 5. Schapiro (1939c) 1977, 87 n. 123. Though Rank’s book was written in the wake of his own reading of The Interpretation of Dreams, Der Kunstler is a more important origin of the psychobiography of artists than is often recognized because it preceded Freud’s first effort to apply psychoanalytic theory to the activity of artists. On this point, see Soussloff 1997. 6. Werckmeister 1994, 62. Interestingly, in a letter to Fritz Saxl dated January 11, 1941, Schapiro himself anticipated Werckmeister’s criticism here (Schapiro, selected correspondence, WIA). 7. See Borneman 1971; Robinson 1990. 8. For a discussion of the Frankfurt school’s use of psychoanalysis, see Jay 1973. 9. See the letter, dated December 12, 1955, from Marcuse to Schapiro concerning Marcuse’s response to Fromm in the January 1956 issue of Dissent (MSC, box 146, folder 9, series II). 10. See Goodenough 1961. For Schapiro’s criticisms, see MSC, box 188, folder 10, series III.2.1. 11. Jay 1973, 102. 12. See Shiff 2012, 342 n. 4; Schreyach 2017, 165–68 and 298–99 n. 30. I would like to thank Michael Schreyach for these references and for additional information on Schapiro’s use of Schilder. 13. Davenport 1948, 59. 14. Schapiro 1948a, 59.

15. Schilder (1935) 2000, 104. 16. On Greenberg’s complaint, see Shiff 2012, 342 n. 4. 17. Hale 1995, 121–23. 18. Schilder (1935) 2000, 8. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Schilder’s reference point for this idea was Morgan 1923. 21. See Hemingway 2006, 246. 22. Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997, 166. 23. James (1907) 1981, 98. 24. For Schapiro’s essay on Vico, see MSC, box 259, folder 1, series IV.4. For a discussion of Marx’s theory of truth in relation to James’s, see Kolakowski 2004. For a criticism of Kolakowski’s interpretation, see Wood 1981. 25. Schapiro 1950f, 32. 26. For a typical expression of this idea at the time, see Jones 1949. 27. Schapiro (1956b) 1994, 192 n. 103. 28. Dewey (1934) 1987, 64–87 and 42–63. 29. Schapiro 1950f, 30. 30. See Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997, 159. Dewey thanks Schapiro for his critical reading of Art as Experience in the preface to the book ([1934] 1987, 7). 31. For the original draft of the letter, see MSC, box 296, series V.5. 32. Thomas 2014. For Schapiro’s reading of Stokes, see Read 2007, 91. I am indebted to Stephen Bann for this reference. 33. Stokes 1978, 178–82. 34. Schapiro 1952d, 10. 35. Dewey 1896. 36. James (1890) 1950, 25. 37. Dewey 1896, 358–60. 38. James (1890) 1950, 224–90. 39. Klein 1935. For a useful overview of Melanie Klein’s life, theory, practice, and influence, see Segal 2004.

204  /  Notes to Pages 113–118

40. One example of midcentury Freudianism that Schapiro criticized in his lectures was Lawrence Kubie’s Neurotic Distortions of the Creative Process of 1958. In his course lectures, Schapiro specifically disparaged Kubie’s claim that the consistency of artists’ styles was a symptom of neurosis (MSC, box 193, folder 5, series III.2). 41. Schapiro 1955e, 3–8. 42. Schapiro (1956b) 1994, 175. 43. Eissler 1961, 41–42. 44. The Schapiro books are located close to Schapiro’s old office in Schermerhorn Hall in locked display cases. I refer to them as the “so-called Schapiro books” because it is sometimes uncertain which specific volumes from these books actually belonged to Schapiro. While some of these books do contain Schapiro’s signed name and his handwritten notes, others do not. The abovementioned copy of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct does not. Its very presence in this collection, however, is suggestive. 45. Gombrich (1954) 1963, 30–44. Gombrich’s essay treats the topic of psychoanalysis at a much more general level than Schapiro’s, and the “bridge” between psychology and art that Gombrich suggests unsurprisingly relates to his reading of Popper’s “logic of the situation.” Gombrich mentioned his essay to Schapiro in his letter of May 30, 1953 (MSC, box 129, folder 24, series II). 46. See the typescript simply titled “Leonardo da Vinci,” in MSC, box 199, folder 11, series III.3. 47. Nagel 1959, 41. 48. Schapiro (1956b) 1994, 192 n. 105. For Levey, see Levey 1939. Schapiro continued to refer to this article in his subsequent course lectures on Freud

(MSC, box 192, folder 1, series III.2). Freud’s idea of sublimation was also being criticized by Theodore Adorno around this same time (1951). I would like to thank Martin Jay for this reference. 49. Schapiro (1956b) 1994, 187. 50. For Schapiro’s discussion of these experiments, see MSC, box 184, folder 9, series III.2. For Pötzl’s experiments themselves, see Pötzl, Allers, and Teler 1960. 51. In a later course lecture on psychoanalysis and art, Schapiro mocked Pfister’s diagram of the hidden vulture in Leonardo’s painting as an example of a scientist finding evidence for his theory everywhere (MSC, box 192, folder 1, series III.2). 52. Schapiro 1994b, 193–99. 53. See the letter of October 17, 1909, in Freud and Jung 1974. For an interpretation of the fuller context that led to Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo, see Davis 1995, 57–73. 54. See MSC, box 191, folder 5, series III.2. 55. For an excellent contextual history of the pragmatist tradition of thought that includes Mead, see Thayer 1981. 56. Peirce (1878) 1992, 132. 57. Peirce to James, January 23, 1903, quoted in Perry 1935, 2:425. For a discussion of various instances within Peirce’s writings where he connected pragmatism to Berkeley, see Friedman 2003. 58. Schapiro’s interpretation of Cézanne’s apples has been both praised and criticized. For an example of the former, see Thomas 2014. For an example of the latter, see Grünbaum 2002. 59. Mead 1938, 103. 60. Schapiro (1956b) 1994, 187. 61. For an example of this type of reading of Schapiro’s essay, see Holly 1992.

Notes to Pages 118–124  /  205

62. Schapiro was in touch with Lacan starting in the 1940s and received multiple signed copies of his writings. For Schapiro’s correspondence with Lacan as well as a signed copy of one of Lacan’s lectures from 1953, see MSC, box 142, folder 8, series II. Schapiro’s signed copy of Lacan’s Écrits of 1966 is preserved in MSB. The book includes an appreciative note of thanks to Lacan that Schapiro presumably sent or meant to send. It reads: “M. Lacan, merci pour le cadeau magnifique! Algorithmiquement je me berce dans l’océan des écrits de Lacan.” Despite this appreciative note, as late as 1974, Schapiro considered psychoanalytic approaches to the structure of art as still in an “embryonic state.” See the typescript of the fourteenth lecture of Schapiro’s 1974 course on the theories and methods of art history (MSC, box 192, folder 1, series III.2). 63. There is little debate over whether this studio visit actually happened, even though de Kooning himself never published an account of it. This seems to be the case because Hess was taken to be de Kooning’s spokesperson at the time— indeed the initial report was literally a preview of the painting in ARTnews— and Schapiro did confirm that he talked to de Kooning about Woman I in an interview with Harry F. Gaugh on October 23, 1982 (Gaugh 1983, 112 n. 55). Hess’s account of the studio visit has been repeated in virtually all the books written on de Kooning, including the most recent volumes such as Krauss 2015. Despite the common consensus surrounding the occurrence of the incident, recent authors have pointed out inconsistencies between Hess’s multiple accounts of the studio visit. This awareness has led some to debate when

the studio visit actually happened and when Woman I was actually finished (see Elderfield 2011, 301 n. 17). 64. For the original account of the studio visit, see Hess 1953. 65. For an account of de Kooning’s life at this time, see Stevens and Swan 2004. 66. Greenberg 1948, 448. 67. The origin of this theory is already found in Greenberg 1939. The most explicit formulation of it, however, is Greenberg 1940. 68. For de Kooning’s exact account of this incident, see Potter 1985, 183. 69. Grace Hartigan and Harry Jackson both reported such incidents. In relation to the rift between de Kooning and Greenberg, it is also relevant to recall the fistfight between the two men at a bar in December 1961. Both de Kooning and Greenberg recounted this incident after the fact, though their recollections are unsurprisingly different. See Abel 1984, 212; Rubenfeld 2004, 232–33. 70. De Kooning 1951, 5–6. 71. Rubenfeld 2004, 147. 72. For Greenberg’s praise of de Kooning in 1953 and for Kramer’s memories of this panel, see ibid., 184 and 155, respectively. For Greenberg’s post-1960 statements about flatness, see Greenberg 1960 and 1962. See also Krauss 1999. 73. Krauss 2015, 3. 74. Davenport 1948, 59. 75. De Kooning quoted in Shapiro 2012.

1961

1. For Fry’s debt to Berenson, see Spalding 1980, 68–69.

206  /  Notes to Pages 124–130

2. For an analysis of Berenson’s relation to a pragmatist theory of perception, see O’Donnell 2017. 3. Berlin 2013, 25–27. For the complete exchange, see Berlin and Schapiro 2004. 4. Schapiro (1961) 1994, 211; Berlin and Schapiro, 2004, n.p. 5. Berlin 2009, 251. 6. Berlin 1961. 7. For Schapiro’s description of this encounter, see Schapiro 2009, 15–16. 8. On the Carnegie Corporation’s funding of American art-historical education, see Smyth and Lukehart 1993. 9. Rosand 1996. 10. On Berenson’s contractual and financial dealings with Duveen, see Cohen 2013, 184–85. 11. Berenson’s account of his meeting with Schapiro is recorded in his letter to Arthur Kingsley Porter, reproduced in Schapiro 2009, 15–16. 12. Another prominent example of Berenson charging a colleague with plagiarism is his dispute with Vernon Lee over the ideas published in her book Beauty and Ugliness. The scholarly consensus is that these charges were misdirected (see Gagel 2010). 13. Schapiro 2009, 15–16. 14. For an overview of many of these issues as they relate to modern American intellectual history, see Hollinger 1996. 15. On Schapiro’s encounter with Richter, see Schapiro 2009, 89–91. 16. Epstein 1983, 80–81. 17. For instance, Schapiro begins his 1956 article on Leonardo and Freud by citing Kenneth Clark as an early instance of an art historian taking Freud’s theory seriously. What Schapiro does not cite is the partial basis

of Clark’s judgment: Berenson’s own connoisseurial claims concerning the historical originality of the very same cartoon by Leonardo that was central to Freud’s argument, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist. In speaking about this cartoon, Clark states, “Mr Berenson has shown that it is probably the earliest representation of the Virgin and Child to include the infant St John, and even if earlier instances could be found, it is certain that the use Leonardo had made of this iconographic motive is in the highest degree original” (Clark 1963, 34). 18. For Berenson’s comment about William James, see Taylor 1957, 124. For Schapiro’s comment about Dewey, see Shapiro 1996, 281–94. Others who attended Derrida’s confrontation with Schapiro have confirmed that something similar to this was said. 19. This correspondence is preserved in both the Berenson archive at I Tatti and in MSC. 20. Berenson 1949, 47. 21. Schapiro (1961) 1994, 58. 22. Berenson’s understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics is recording in his published diary entry of February 11, 1950: “The Israelite chroniclers in the Old Testament seem to have regarded their God as the combination of those forces in the universe which made for the health and prosperity of the individual as well as of the community. That was virtue which accorded with this view, and transgression was to ignore its behests. Even apostasy comes under this category, for it would disintegrate the community, and thereby lead to the impoverishment and degradation of the individuals. ‘Obey my behests, and you will be happy in the land I have allotted

Notes to Pages 130–141  /  207

to you.’ This doctrine surely is at the root of Spinoza’s teaching, both metaphysically and ethically. God is all the forces of the universe that work in unison for its preservation, and Man can thrive only when he lives and works in harmony with them” (Berenson 1963, 160–61). 23. Berlin 2013, 25–27. 24. For Berenson’s conversion as an undergraduate, see Samuels 1979, 28–40. For the context of Spinoza’s excommunication, see Nadler 1999, 116–54. 25. Berenson 1960, 11. 26. Schapiro (1961) 1994, 211. 27. Berenson 1888, 587–88. 28. Schapiro (1961) 1994, 217. 29. This is documented in Schapiro’s letter to Alan Wald dated June 10, 1974 (MSC, box 174, folder 8, series II). 30. Ernest Samuels notes several of these moments in his biography of Berenson. For one, Berenson stood silent during an openly anti-Semitic discussion of the Dreyfus Affair in 1895, for which his wife reproached him (Samuels 1979, 331). Samuels also notes that Henry Adams explicitly characterized Berenson as a self-hating Jew (Samuels 1979, 429). Erza Brudno’s novel The Tether is based on Berenson’s struggles with religion at Harvard and makes similar conclusions. 31. Berenson quoted in ibid., 74. 32. Berlin and Schapiro 2004. 33. Ibid. 34. One of the most well-known and developed critiques of this distinction is MacCallum 1967. 35. Schapiro 2000f, 22. 36. Wittgenstein’s assertion is reported in Malcolm (1958) 2001. Schapiro and Damisch had discussed these ideas in person—likely in early September 1972—and Damisch recounts this passage of Norman’s book to Schapiro

in a letter of September 26, 1972 (see Schapiro 2019b). For a recent and perceptive analysis of Schapiro’s practice of drawing in relation to his scholarship, see Koering 2016. 37. Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997, 165. Schapiro and Merleau-Ponty did meet and exchange some letters in the 1940s, though their professional relationship does not appear to have been extensive. 38. Schapiro (1949a) 1994. 39. Schapiro quoted in L. Schapiro 2000, 17–18. 40. Schapiro (1949a) 1994, 112. 41. MSC, box 193, folder 2, series III.2. See also Schapiro (1949a) 1994, 112. 42. Epstein 1983, 74. 43. See Berenson 1893, 346. 44. Berenson 1948, 193. 45. For instance, MSC, box 187, folder 6, series III.2; and box 213, folder 12, series III.3. 46. In the early 1950s Schapiro wrote a short essay about the so-called Goetz self-portrait by Van Gogh and had to withhold publication of his essay because of doubt about the painting’s authenticity (MSC, box 344, folder 13, series V.5). 47. Maginnis 1990. 48. Morelli (1890) 1892, esp. 19. 49. Guilbaut 1983. For a reaction against Guilbaut’s claims, see Craven 1999. For a more neutral assessment of the facts that also builds on recent archival discoveries, see O’Donnell 2016a. 50. For the maxim itself, see Peirce (1878) 1992, 132. 51. Putnam 1992. By using the phrase “a logical justification of democracy,” I in fact depart from Putnam slightly and follow the intellectual historian Robert Westbrook. While I believe Putnam

208  /  Notes to Pages 141–146

is correct in his analysis, he uses the phrase “an epistemological justification for democracy” (180), and since, as Westbrook points out, epistemology was a dirty word for Dewey, “logical” seems to be a more precise adjective (Westbrook 2005). 52. For an account of the reception and transformation of pragmatist ideas by Papini and Prezzolini and the subsequent relation of their thought to fascism, see Adamson 1993. 53. MSC, box 228, folder 6, series IV.2.

1968

1. Derrida 1978a, (1978b) 1987. The scholarship on the debate is much too lengthy to cite here. Representative of the fame that it achieved, however, is its inclusion in Preziosi 2009. 2. Koerner 1995, 38–39. Exemplary of this type of reading is Holly 2002. 3. Derrida (1978b) 1987, 272. The original French is “l’homme de l’aphasie.” Here Derrida fittingly plays with the focus of Goldstein’s research and the ailment from which he suffered late in life. 4. A recent essay that explores this relation, though not in the same ways that I do here, is Kenaan 2018. I would like to thank Hagi Kenaan for sharing his article with me immediately upon publication. 5. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein likened propositions to pictures, specifically doing so with the claim that “the proposition is a picture of reality” (1922, 4.01). Schapiro discussed this idea at length with Hubert Damisch (see Schapiro 2019b).

In particular, the correspondence with Damisch reveals that Schapiro likely formulated his rejection of Wittgenstein’s assertion around 1960 soon after reading Norman Malcolm’s 1958 memoir of Wittgenstein, wherein the hypothetical connection between pictures and propositions is said to be an important origin of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a whole. In the same correspondence with Damisch, Schapiro notes that he even confronted Malcolm in 1962 with his criticism of Wittgenstein on this point. 6. MSC, box 193, folder 4, series III.2, 35. Schapiro had long asked such questions; for instance, during the discussion following an early presentation of his essay “The Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text” in 1960 (MSC, box 269, folder 6, series IV.5). 7. See the way Schapiro contextualizes his criticisms on Heidegger in the typescript of the ninth lecture of his course on the theories and methods of art history from 1975 (MSC, box 193, folder 4, series III.2, 28–41). 8. The meeting is documented in Schapiro’s response to a questionnaire about his relationship with Goldstein that was sent to him by Marianne Simmel, the editor of the anthology dedicated to Goldstein that included Schapiro’s initial critique of Heidegger (MSC, box 229, folder 11, series IV.2). Simmel included part of Schapiro’s response in the foreword to that book (Simmel 1968, viii). 9. See Zolberg and Callamard 1998. 10. For an excellent overview of Goldstein’s career and work, see Harrington 1996, esp. 140–74. 11. See Skinner 1940. 12. Sacks 1995, 13–14.

Notes to Pages 146–157  /  209

13. Goldstein (1946) 1971. For the original circumstances of the talk, see Herzog 1946. 14. Schapiro (1946a) 1978, 89. 15. Schapiro 1950f, 32. 16. Goldstein (1946) 1971, 403; Schapiro 1950f, 32. 17. Schapiro (1946a) 1978, 91. 18. Ibid., 99 n. 2. 19. Goldstein (1934) 1995, 231; Schapiro 1997, 157; Sandler 1978, 46–48. Anne Harrington has noted and discussed Goldstein’s relation to existentialist thought. Turning the tables, Mitchell Ash has outlined how Goldstein’s thought impacted the existentialists themselves. 20. Goldstein (1934) 1995, 231. 21. For an overview of the reception of existentialism among Schapiro’s peers, see Cotkin 2003, esp. 105–33. For an additional perspective with more focus on the New York art community, see Jachec 2000, esp. 62–104. Lionel Abel remembered Schapiro and Breton being some of the first to discuss Heidegger’s work in New York in the early 1940s (1984, 145). Beyond his engagement with Heidegger, the extent of Schapiro’s reading of other existentialist writers—including Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Sartre, and Camus—has been difficult to establish. 22. Schapiro’s translation of Masson’s text was anonymous. However, it is listed in his 1995 bibliography— compiled by his wife—and was published in New York by Curt Valentin in 1943 (Masson 1943). For Schapiro’s comments on the relation between Masson’s text and abstract expressionist painting, see the typescript of the fourteenth lecture of his course on abstract painting from 1967–68 (MSC, box 186, folder 5, series III.2).

23. MSC, box 186, folder 5, series III.2. 24. For Schapiro’s personal copy of William Barrett’s Irrational Man of 1958, see MSB. I am indebted to Daniel Esterman for helping me confirm that the marginalia in this book are in fact in Schapiro’s handwriting. For the most developed pragmatist interpretation of Heidegger, see Okrent 1998. 25. Goldstein 1931, 6. See also Goldstein (1934) 1995, chapter 7. 26. MSC, box 193, folder 4, series III.2, 32–33. 27. MSC, box 188, folder 4, series III.2, 20–21. 28. For a discussion of this tendency in Goldstein’s writing, see Harrington 1996, 169–74. 29. Translated and quoted in Harrington 1996, 171. Originally published as Goldstein (1949) 1971, 422–23. 30. MSC, box 198, folder 19, series III. 31. Schapiro 1965b, 302–3. 32. Schapiro (1968e) 1994, 135. 33. Heidegger (1950) 1971, 32–33. 34. The original letter is preserved in MSC, box 133, folder 1, series II. 35. For instance, see Babich 2003. 36. Schapiro (1968e) 1994, 139. 37. MSC, box 193, folder 4, series III.2, 35. 38. MSC, box 193, folder 2, series III.2, 54–56. 39. Ibid., 58–59. 40. Schapiro and Goodman were close friends, and Schapiro is even thanked in the preface to “Languages of Art” (Goodman 1968). In his lecture course on abstract art of 1967–68, however, Schapiro directly rejected Goodman’s radically conventionalist approach to pictures (MSC, box 185, folder 12, series III.2).

210  /  Notes to Pages 157–163

41. Goodman 1968, esp. chapters 1 and 2. 42. Heidegger (1950) 1971, 32. Page 22 in the German Klostermann edition. 43. Heidegger (1950) 1971, 44. Page 34 in the German Klostermann edition. 44. Heidegger’s classic description of this dynamic comes in a late essay of 1959, though a fuller discussion appears in a posthumously published book of 2010. For a lucid analysis of this aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy as it relates to his description of Van Gogh’s painting, see Süner 2014. For a broader analysis of the important place of language in Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole, see Ziarek 2013. 45. Kenaan 2004, 596. 46. Heidegger (1950) 1971, 35. 47. For a helpful overview of this issue, see Lopes 1996. 48. See Schapiro 1999f, 1999l. 49. For instance, see Rosand 1982. 50. Derrida (1978b) 1987, 271–73. 51. Schapiro (1968e) 1994, 138. 52. Yve-Alain Bois, the editor of Macula who initially provided the forum for Derrida’s critique, recognized this quality of Derrida’s intervention in his correspondence with Schapiro (MSC, box 114, folder 19, series II). I would like to thank Bois for sharing his correspondence with Schapiro with me. 53. I owe my knowledge of this fact to Jonathan Crary, who attended the presentation as a graduate student. 54. For Schapiro’s recollection of the debate, see Craven, Schapiro, and Schapiro 1997. 55. Schapiro’s skepticism about Derrida’s doubt that the painting even represents a pair of shoes is documented in a draft of a letter to Yve-Alain Bois, dated July 18, 1977 (MSC, box

114, folder 19, series II). For Schapiro’s reported assertion concerning Dewey and truth, see Shapiro 1996, 293. Schapiro’s reading of Derrida most likely dates to July 1971, as correspondence with Hubert Damisch documents the latter having sent Schapiro copies of some of Derrida’s books in that year. In his letter of September 15, 1971, Damisch speaks of the ambiguity that Schapiro recalled after reading Derrida and reiterates that Schapiro is not alone in his recognition that De la Grammatologie leaves much historical work unfinished (MSC, box 121, folder 11, series II). 56. Schapiro had learned about these marginal notes from the philosopher Robert Crease, who brought them to his attention in January 1981. 57. I owe this point to Babette Babich, though I interpret its significance in my own way. Compare Schapiro (1968e) 1994, 205 and Schapiro (1968e) 1994, 136. 58. In his 1977 critique, Derrida on multiple occasions specifically called out Schapiro’s use of the word “clearly” and the certitude it implies. Derrida even went so far as to label this certitude a trap and played his description off of Schapiro’s own art-historical scholarship about traps, most famously the essay “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ the Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece.” See Derrida (1978b) 1987, 276, 313, 364. 59. MSC, box 192, folder 11, series III.2, 5–7. 60. Mitchell 1995, 29–31.

1973

1. For a helpful overview of the development of research in semiotics

Notes to Pages 164–171  /  211

both in art history and beyond, see Bann 1995. 2. Schapiro 1953c, 61–66. 3. I am indebted to Cynthia Persinger’s 2007 dissertation for this observation. 4. For instance, in his 1975 course on the theories and methods of art history, Schapiro criticized both Barthes and Jakobson for their assertions that visual art is necessarily mediated through language (MSC, box 192, folder 9, series III.2, 36). 5. See the twelfth lecture of Schapiro’s course on the theories and methods of art history from 1974 (MSC, box 191, folder 8, series III.2, 25). For Schapiro’s sarcastic remark that the words “semiotics” and “semiology” should be banned, see his letter to Damisch dated May 12, 1973 (Schapiro 2019b, 93–94). 6. In this regard it is only fitting that Schapiro found one of the most extreme examples of Panofsky’s iconological approach “obscure.” For Schapiro’s extensive response to Panofsky’s book Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, see Panofsky 2001–14, 3:191–94. 7. Damisch (1972) 2004, esp. 76–77. Note that Damisch describes Schapiro’s text as “a scholarly essay in which the question of the cloud is posed in all its aspects—theological and theoretical, semiotic and/or illusionist (emphasis in original) (ibid., 76). 8. Arnaud and Nicole (1662) 1996, 35. For an overview of the tradition of semiologie of which Saussure’s work is a part, see Aarsleff 1982. 9. Saussure (1916) 1959, 66. 10. Ibid., 113. 11. Ibid., 69. 12. Peirce 1931–58, 2:§228. 13. Dewey 1946.

14. This course was taught by William Pepperell Montague, one of the New Realists, a group of American philosophers for whom Peirce’s philosophy was especially important. I am indebted to Daniel Esterman for Schapiro’s transcript. The course description is preserved in the bound edition of the 1923–24 Columbia College course bulletin in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. 15. See Morris’s letter dated April 19, 1941 (MSC, box 149, folder 18, series II). 16. Morris 1938, 4. 17. Morris 1939, 131 n. 1. 18. On this point it is important to note that Morris and Dewey disagreed on some of the finer points of Peirce’s theory. For a recapitulation and analysis of their disagreement, see Moreno 1983. 19. Dosse 1997, 12. 20. Lévi-Strauss 1988, 7. For more context on Lévi-Strauss’s confrontation with structuralist ideas by way of Jakobson, see Lévi-Strauss 1978. 21. Lévi-Strauss 1953, 62. 22. Ibid., 68. 23. Saussure (1916) 1959, 66–67. 24. Lévi-Strauss 1987, 37. 25. Dosse 1997, 388. 26. The specific references here include: Morris 1938; Sedlmayr (1931) 2000; Mead 1934; and Merleau-Ponty 1945. 27. Throughout this chapter, I refer to Rothko and Newman as protocolor field painters, rather than abstract expressionists, in order to differentiate their painting from the more gestural, “action” painting of figures like Pollock and de Kooning. Schapiro himself did not like the term abstract expressionism precisely because it collapsed artists with quite diverse styles into a single category.

212  /  Notes to Pages 171–177

Though some might feel that color field painting more appropriately refers to artists of a slightly later moment—the paintings of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, for instance—it was already in Greenberg’s 1955 essay “American Type Painting” that Newman was classified as a “field” painter. 28. For example, see Bois 1990b; Schreyach 2013. For a perceptive discussion of Rothko’s paintings in relation to closely related questions of visual perception and the inversion of his canvases, see Weiss 2005, 135–57. 29. Respectively, Schapiro (1957a) 1978, 224; Rothko 1951, 104; and Newman (1965) 1990, 257–58. 30. Two of the most well-known interpretations of this connection are Fried (1967) 1998 and Krauss 1977. For a more extensive overview of the connection that includes a detailed analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s writing, see Potts 2000, esp. 178–296. 31. See, for instance, Crow 1999. Damisch’s 1972 book A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward A History of Painting is a notable exploration of semiological and structuralist ideas for art history. It is revealing that it took thirty years for Damisch’s book to appear in English. 32. Schapiro 1953c, 65. 33. See the typescript of the thirteenth lecture of Schapiro’s course on the theories and methods of art history of 1975 (MSC, box 193, folder 7, series III.2, 36–42). 34. This highly contested point is often associated with the writings of Richard Wollheim. See Wollheim 1995. For a recent art-historical investigation of this position that defends the alternative view, see Smith 2011.

35. For further examples of Schapiro’s use of this anecdote, respectively from 1962, 1967, and 1974, see MSC, box 202, folder 7, series III.3; MSC, box 185, folder 5, series III.2; and MSC, box 191, folders 8 and 9, series III.2. 36. Schapiro’s commitment to understanding visual art in terms of the “semiotic density” of artistic creation testifies both to his championing of abstract expressionist painting as well as to his lack of interest in the art that followed it. Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art of 1973, for instance, directly challenges Schapiro’s presuppositions. Interesting in this regard is that a copy of Burnham’s book is preserved in MSB. Schapiro confessed in his 1983 interview with Helen Epstein that starting around age sixty-five, he no longer had the energy to keep up with the contemporary art world. 37. The letter from Jakobson to Schapiro is dated July 6, 1953 (MSC, box 136, folder 8, series II). 38. See the typescript of the fifth lecture of Schapiro’s course on the theories and methods of art history of 1974 (MSC, box 191, folder 1, series III.2). 39. MSC, box 143, folder 19, series II. 40. Ibid. 41. It is important to note that Schapiro did not completely reject the importance of binaries within semiotic interpretations. His own contrast of the frontal and profile views of figures in medieval manuscript illustrations—as in his 1973 book, Words and Pictures— is very much in keeping with the role of binaries in structuralist thinking. 42. In his De la Grammatologie of 1967, for instance, Derrida wrote: “Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of

Notes to Pages 178–191  /  213

the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign” (49). Unsurprisingly, Derrida’s passing interpretation of Peirce here is highly controversial. 43. Schapiro (1967a) 1994, 12. 44. Ibid., 15. 45. MSC, box 184, folder 7, series III.2. 46. Morris coined the term “sign vehicle” in his 1938 book Foundations of a Theory of Signs. Schapiro’s reluctance to cite Morris in his published work—much like his reluctance to acknowledge his debt to Paul Schilder—may have been connected to Morris’s controversial position within postwar discussions of semiotics. See Gombrich 1949. Morris’s strong claims to establish a true science of signs were also criticized by the New Critics, who saw Morris’s work as dehumanizing. On this point, see Bann 1995, 95. 47. Schapiro (1973b) 1996, 25–26.

48. Ibid., 11. 49. Hindman 1976, 791. 50. Brown 1977, 251. 51. Yoos 1976, 507. 52. MSC, box 256, folders 1–6, series IV.4. 53. Schapiro (1967a) 1994; Lebensztejn 2011. 54. See also Damisch (1987) 1994. 55. For example, Bois 1990a, 231.

Epilogue

1. Mitchell 1995, 29–31; Holly 1997. As a counterpoint to Mitchell’s claims, it is interesting to note that two of the most theoretically sophisticated art-historical books of the late twentieth century—Hubert Damisch’s L’origine de la perspective and Donald Preziosi’s Rethinking Art History—were both dedicated to Schapiro. 2. Peirce (1878) 1992, 140.

Bibliography of Works by Meyer Schapiro

Published Works

Note to the Reader: This bibliography of the published works of Meyer Schapiro updates the existing bibliography of his scholarship that was published in 1995 (see L. Schapiro 1995). However, the following does not contain all of the information concerning the many republications of Schapiro’s various writings, and the reader is directed to the 1995 bibliography of Schapiro for that information. To abet the usefulness of this bibliography, republications are noted when they appeared within the five volumes of Schapiro’s Selected Papers or when a republication is especially noteworthy or commonly available. In this sense, the following bibliography is designed more as a useful tool than as a truly comprehensive reference and is intended to complement, rather than to replace, the existing bibliography of Schapiro’s works. The entries are primarily organized chronologically. When insufficient information was available regarding the season or month in which a specific publication appeared, it has been listed at the end of the year in which it was published. When two publications first appeared in the same month or even in the same publication, an alphabetical organization has been adopted as a secondary organizing principle. Because Schapiro’s Selected Papers are the most commonly available form of his writings, citations in the text refer to these volumes, unless otherwise noted. The Selected Papers encompass the following books published by George Braziller in New York: vol. 1, Romanesque Art, 1977; vol. 2, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, 1978; vol. 3, Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval Art, 1979; vol. 4, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 1994; and vol. 5, Worldview in Painting: Art and Society, 1999. As these books are rarely cited or referred to as wholes, in what follows their contents have been broken down and listed separately.

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1925. “On Emanuel Löwy’s Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art.” Arts 8 (September): 170–72. 1926. “The Sculpture of Moissac.” M.A. thesis, Columbia University. 1928a. Review of Les enluminures romanes des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale, by Phillippe Lauer. Art Bulletin 10 (4): 397–99. 1928b. “Art in the Contemporary World.” In An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, edited by John J. Coss, John Fennelly, Joseph B. McGoldrick, and Irving W. Raymond, 271–317. New York: Columbia University Press. 1929a. “South Transept Portal of SaintSernin in Toulouse.” Parnassus 1 (3): 22–23. 1929b. “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. 1929c. Review of L’art Roman de Bourgogne, by Charles Oursel. Art Bulletin 11 (2): 225–31. 1929d. Review of Bildnerei der Gefangenen: Studie zur bildnerischen Gestaltung Ungeübter, by Hans Prinzhorn. Art Bulletin 11 (3): 309–12. 1930a. Review of Étude sur la paléographie des inscriptions lapidaires de la fin de l’epoque Mérovingienne, by Paul Deschamps. Art Bulletin 12 (1): 101–9. 1930b. Review of Ancient Painting from the Earliest Times to the Period of Christian Art, by Mary Hamilton Swindler. New York Herald Tribune Books, April 6, 1930, 16. 1930c. Review of The Byzantine Achievement, by Robert Byron. New York

Herald Tribune Books, April 27, 1930, 12. 1930d. Review of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, by Jacob Burckhardt. New York Herald Tribune Books, August 24, 1930, 15. 1930e. Review of Les monument des croisés dans le royaume de Jerusalem: Architecture réligieuse et civile, by Camille Enlart. Art Bulletin 12 (3): 301–2. (1931a) 1977. “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac: Part I.” Art Bulletin 13 (3): 249–352. Reprinted in Selected Papers 1:131–200. (1931b) 1977. “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac: Part II.” Art Bulletin 13 (4): 464–531. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:200–264. 1931c. “Mr. Rosenfeld and Matisse.” Nation, December 30, 1931, 725. 1932a. “Matisse and Impressionism.” Androcles 1 (1): 21–36. (1932b) 2002. “The New Architecture.” Published under the pseudonym John Kwait. New Masses (May): 23. Reprinted in “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 66–70. 1932c. Review of The Doom of Youth, by Wyndham Lewis. Published under the pseudonym John Kwait. New Masses (August): 27. 1932d. “Engels on Goethe.” New Masses (September): 13–14. 1932e. Review of Early Muslim Architecture, by K. A. C. Creswell. Art and Archaeology 33 (6): 327–28. (1932f) 2002. “Architecture Under Capitalism.” Published under the pseudonym John Kwait. New Masses (December): 10–13.

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Reprinted in “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 70–80. (1932g) 1977. “Über den Schematismus in der Romanischen Kunst.” Kritische Berichte zu Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 5:1–21. Reprinted as “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art,” in Selected Papers, 1:265–84. 1933a. Review of Neue Streifzüge durch die Kirchen und Klöster Ägyptens, by Johann Georg. Klio 26 (1): 133–34. 1933b. “John Reed Club Art Exhibition.” Published under the pseudonym John Kwait. New Masses (February): 23–24. (1934a) 2002. “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: On Lewis Mumford; Technics and Civilization.” New Masses (July): 37–38. Reprinted in “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 80–84. 1934b. Review of Art Now, by Herbert Read. Nation, July 4, 1932, 25. 1934c. “Pottery.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 12: 280–83. New York: Macmillan. 1934d. “Taste.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 14: 523–25. New York: Macmillan. 1935a. Review of Deutsche Malerei der Gothik, vol. 1, by Alfred Stange. Germanic Review 10 (3): 215–16. 1935b. Review of The Spirit of Man in Asian Art, by Laurence Binyon. New York Herald Tribune Books, August 4, 1935, 12.

1935c. Review of Lombardic Architecture: Its Origin, Development, and Derivatives, by G. T. Rivoira. Art Bulletin 17 (3): 406–7. 1935d. “Seurat and ‘La Grande Jatte.’” Columbia Review 17 (November): 9–17. (1935e) 1977. “New Documents on St.Gilles.” Art Bulletin 17 (4): 414–31. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:328–42. 1935f. “Art Education.” Art Education Today 1:77–78. 1936a. “Race, Nationality, and Art.” Art Front 2 (March): 10–12. (1936b) 2002. “Architecture and the Architect.” Published under the pseudonym John Kwait. New Masses, April 7, 1936, 30–31. Reprinted in “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 84–87. 1936c. “The New Viennese School.” Art Bulletin 18 (2): 258–66. (1936d) 1999. “The Social Bases of Art.” Proceedings of the American Artists Congress, New York 1:31– 37. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 5:119–28. 1936e. “The Public Use of Art.” Art Front 2 (November): 4–6. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 5:173–79. 1937a. “Surrealist Field Day.” Nation, January 23, 1937, 102–3. (1937b) 1978. “The Nature of Abstract Art.” Marxist Quarterly 1 (1): 77–98. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:185–211. (1937c) 1977. “Further Documents on St.-Gilles.” Art Bulletin 19 (1): 111–12. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:343–46.

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1937d. Review of The Pierpont Morgan Library Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts, by Charles Rufus Morey, Belle da Costa Greene, and Meta Harrison. Art Bulletin 19 (1): 126–29. 1937e. Review of Deutsche Malerei der Gothik, vol. 2, by Alfred Stange. Germanic Review 20 (2): 143–44. 1937f. “Reply to ‘A Note on the Nature of Art’ by Delmore Schwartz.” Marxist Quarterly 1 (2): 310–14. 1937g. “Gaugin: A Family Portrait.” Review of My Father, Paul Gaugin, by Pola Gaugin. Nation, July 10, 1937, 50. 1937h. “Blue Like an Orange.” Review of Surrealism, by Herbert Read. Nation, September 25, 1937, 323–24. 1937i. “A Metaphysics for the Movies.” Marxist Quarterly 1 (3): 406–17. 1937j. “The Patrons of Revolutionary Art.” Marxist Quarterly 1 (3): 462–66. 1937k. “The Iconography of Christ in the Wine-Press.” Review of Religion 2 (1): 100–102. 1938a. “Populist Realism.” Partisan Review 4 (2): 244–45. 1938b. Review of Der Sarkophag des Junius Bassus, by Friedrich Gerke. Review of Religion 2 (4): 244–45. (1938c) 2002. “Architect’s Utopia.” Partisan Review 4 (4): 42–47. Reprinted in “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 88–94. (1938d) 2002. “Looking Forward to Looking Backward.” Partisan Review 5 (2): 12–24. Reprinted in “Looking Forward to Looking

Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 94–106. (1938e) 2002. Review of Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, by Nikolaus Pevsner. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7 (1–2):2 91–93. Translated by Sara Ogger in “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” edited by Felicity Scott, Grey Room 6 (Winter): 106–8. 1939a. Review of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, edited and with an introduction by Edward MacCurdy. Nation, April 15, 1939, 446–48. 1939b. Review of L’Art Réligieux Moderne, by G. Arnaud d’Agnel. Review of Religion 3 (4): 469–73. (1939c) 1977. “From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos.” Art Bulletin 21 (4): 469–73. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:28–101. (1939d) 1977. “The Sculptures of Souillac.” In Mediaeval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, edited by W. R. W. Koehler, 359–87. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:102–30. 1940a. “Jean Hélion.” Foreword to Hélion—Recent Paintings, n.p. New York: Gallery Georgette Passedoit. 1940b. “The Revolutionary Personality.” Partisan Review 7 (6): 466–79. (1940c) 1979. “The Carolingian Copy of the Calendar of 354.” Art Bulletin 22 (4): 270–72. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:143–49.

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1940d. Review of Images et Romans: Parenté des estampes et du Roman réaliste de 1815 à 1865, by M. Mespoulet. Romanic Review 31 (4): 414–16. 1941a. Review of The Labors of the Months in Antique and Mediaeval Art to the End of the 12th Century, by J. C. Webster. Speculum 16 (1): 131–37. 1941b. Review of The Elizabeth Day McCormick Apocalypse, by Harold Willoughby. Review of Religion 5 (3): 310–12. 1941c. Review of A Survey of Persian Art, by Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman. Art Bulletin 23 (1): 82–86. (1941d) 1978. “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïveté.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4 (3–4): 164–91. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:47–85. 1941e. “On Style and Expressiveness.” Art Bulletin 23 (2): 143. 1942a. Review of Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and Christianity, by Edwyn Bevan. Review of Religion 6 (2): 237–38. 1942b. Review of The Illustration of Manuscripts of Septuagint, by Ernest T. De Wald. Review of Religion 6 (2): 239. 1942c. “A Note on an Inscription of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.” Speculum 17 (2): 261–64. 1942d. “Athanasius Kircher.” VVV 1 (June): 36–38. 1942e. Review of Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, by Walter Muir Whitehill. Art Bulletin 24 (2): 188–90.

(1942f) 1979. “Cain’s Jaw-Bone That Did the First Murder.” Art Bulletin 24 (3): 205–12. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:249–65. 1942g. “Answer to Three Questions on Dialectical Materialism.” Dyn 2:49–53. 1943a. “Socialism and the Failure of Nerve: An Exchange with Sidney Hook.” Published under the pseudonym David Merian. Partisan Review 10 (1): 248–62; (2): 473–81. (1943b) 1979. “The Image of the Disappearing Christ: The Ascension in English Art Around the Year 1000.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 23 (March): 135–52. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:266–87. 1943c. “Film Chronicle: Mission to Moscow.” Partisan Review 10 (3): 275–78. (1943d) 1979. “The Angel with the Ram in Abraham’s Sacrifice: A Parallel in Western and Islamic Art.” Ars Islamica 10 (1–2): 134–47. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:288–306, 311–17. 1944a. Review of Early Christian Art, by Charles Rufus Morey. Review of Religion 8 (2): 165–86. (1944b) 1979. “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross.” Art Bulletin 24 (4): 232–45. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:150–76, 186–92. 1944c. “The Myth of Oedipus.” In The Myth of Oedipus with Six Original Etchings by Kurt Seligmann, 9–18. New York: Durlacher Bros. 1945a. “A Note on Max Weber’s Politics.” Politics 2 (2): 44–48. 1945b. “Flemish Art Reconsidered.” Review of The Last Flowering of the

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Middle Ages, by Baron Joseph van der Elst. View 5 (1): 43, 49–50. 1945c. “Armenian Art down the Centuries.” Review of Armenia and the Byzantine Empire, by Sirarpie Der Nersessian. New York Times Book Review, July 29, 1945, 20. (1945d) 1979. “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ the Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece.” Art Bulletin 27 (3): 182–87. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:1–11, 16–18. 1945e. Review of Babel’s Tower—The Dilemma of the Modern Museum, by Francis H. Taylor. Art Bulletin 27 (4): 272–76. 1945f. “French Reaction in Exile.” Review of La communion des forts, by Roger Caillois. Kenyon Review 7 (1): 29–42. (1946a) 1978. “On a Painting of Van Gogh: Crows in the Wheat Field.” View 7 (1): 8–14. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:87–99. 1946b. “‘Intolerance’ Thirty Years After: What Has Happened to Motion Pictures?” Call, November 18, 1946, 5. 1946c. “A Note on ‘The Open City’: Some Comments on Farrell’s Review.” New International 12 (10): 311–13. 1947a. “How Did Spinoza Look?” Review of The Face of Benedictus Spinoza, by Simon L. Millner. Commentary 4 (2): 197–99. (1947b) 1977. “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art.” In Art and Thought: Essays in Honour of A. K. Coomaraswamy, 130–50. London: Luzac and Co. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:1–27. 1948a. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art.” Life, October 11, 1948, 58–59.

1948b. Review of Twelfth-Century Paintings at Hardham and Clayton, introduction by Clive Bell. Magazine of Art 41 (8): 322–23. (1949a) 1994. “Fromentin as a Critic.” Partisan Review 16 (1): 25–51. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:103–34. (1949b) 1979. “The Place of the Joshua Roll in Byzantine History.” Gazette des beaux-arts 35 (March): 161–76. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:48–66. 1949c. “The Last Aesthete.” Review of Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts and Sketch for a Self-Portrait, by Bernard Berenson. Commentary 8 (6): 614–16. (1950a) 1979. “The Place of Ireland in Hiberno-Saxon Art.” Review of Essai sur les origines de la miniature dite Irlandais, by F. Masai. Gazettes des beaux-arts 37 (January): 134–38. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:225–41. 1950b. “The Artist’s Creative Process.” Review of The Psychology of Art, by André Malraux. Saturday Review of Literature, February 4, 1950, 37. 1950c. Essay in the symposium “Religion and the Intellectuals III.” Partisan Review 17 (4): 331–39. 1950d. “Daring Mannerist.” Review of Parmigianino, by Syndey J. Freedberg. Saturday Review of Literature, October 7, 1950, 69–70. 1950e. Review of Santa Maria di Castelseprio, by G. P. Bognetti, G. Chierici, and A. de Capitani d’Arzago. Magazine of Art 43 (8): 312–13. 1950f. Vincent van Gogh. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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1951a. Review of Arquitectura y escultura Románicas, by José Gudiol Ricart and Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño. Speculum 26 (3): 508–9. 1951b. Review of History of Modern Painting from Picasso to Surrealism, by Maurice Raynal et al. Magazine of Art 44 (7): 299. (1952a) 1979. Review of The Fresco Cycle of S. Maria di Castelseprio, by Kurt Weitzmann. Art Bulletin 34 (2): 147–63. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:67–114, 130–37. 1952b. Review of Pintura Románica, imagineria Románica, by W. W. S. Cook and J. Gudiol Ricart. Burlington Magazine 94 (591): 181–82. (1952c) 1979. “The Joseph Scenes on the Maximianus Throne in Ravenna.” Gazette des beaux-arts 40 (July): 27–38. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:34–47. 1952d. Paul Cézanne. New York: Harry N. Abrams. (1952e) 1978. “Rebellion in Art.” In America in Crisis, edited by Daniel Aaron, 202–42. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted as “Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show,” in Selected Papers, 2:135–78. 1953a. “The Many da Vincis.” Review of Leonardo da Vinci, by Sir Kenneth Clark. New Republic, March 9, 1953, 20–21. 1953b. “On Ben-Zion.” International Graphic Arts Society Bulletin 5 (June). 1953c. Comments during the International Symposium in Anthropology. In An Appraisal of Anthropology, edited by Sol Tax et al., 63–66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

(1953d) 1994. “Style.” In Anthropology Today, edited by Alfred Kroeber, 287–312. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:51–102. 1954a. “Treasury from Byzantium.” Review of Byzantine Painting, by André Grabar. Art News 52 (9): 52, 85. 1954b. “In Memoriam Emil Kaufmann.” College Art Journal 13 (2): 144. 1954c. “The Content of Painting Without Subject.” Review of French Painting Between the Past and Present, by Joseph C. Sloane. Art Bulletin 36 (2): 163–65. (1954d) 1977. “Two Romanesque Drawings in Auxerre and Some Iconographic Problems.” In Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, edited by Dorothy Miner, 331–49. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:306–27. 1955a. Review of Pittura e scultura d’avanguardia (1890–1950) in Italia, by Raffaele Carrieri. Erasmus 8 (1): 13–17. 1955b. Notice of “On Criteria of Periodization in European History.” American Historical Review 60 (3): 720, 724. Summary printed as “Criteria of Periodization in the History of European Art,” New Literary History 1, no. 2 (1970): 113–14. 1955c. “Unsuspected Treasury.” Review of Monuments of Romanesque Art, by Hanns Swarzenski. Art News 54 (5): 44, 59, 60. 1955d. “Humanism and the Demonic in Art.” Review of L’umanesimo e il demoniaco nell’arte, edited by

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Enrico Castilli. Review of Religion 20 (1–2): 56–60. 1955e. “Two Slips of Leonardo and a Slip of Freud.” Psychoanalysis 4 (2): 3–8. 1956a. “The Younger American Painters of Today.” Listener, January 26, 1956, 146–47. (1956b) 1994. “Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study.” Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (2): 147–78. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:153–300. 1956c. Review of Die Bronzetüren des Bonanus von Pisa und des Barisanus von Trani, by Albert Boekler. Erasmus 9 (11–12): 361–63. 1956d. “The Fantastic Eye.” Review of Le moyen age fantastique: Antiquités et exotisme dans l’art Gothique and anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses, by Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Art News 55 (8): 40, 51. (1956e) 1978. Introduction to Illustrations for the Bible by Marc Chagall, n.p. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:121–34. (1956f) 1979. “On an Italian Painting of the Flagellation of Christ in the Frick Collection.” In Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Lionello Venturi, edited by M. Salmi, 1:29– 53. Rome: De Luca. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:355–79. (1957a) 1978. “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art.” Art News 56 (4): 36–42. Reprinted as “Recent Abstract Painting,” in Selected Papers, 2:213–16. (1957b) 1978. Introduction to Arshile Gorky, by Ethel Schwabacher, 11–14. New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:179–83.

(1957c) 1979. “Notes on Castelseprio.” Art Bulletin 39 (4): 295–39. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:115– 30, 137–42. 1957d. “Simultaneous Contrast in Painting.” In Problèmes de la couleur, edited by Ignace Meyerson, 248–53. Paris: Sevpen. 1958a. “German Art in Three Books.” Reviews of German Expressionist Painting by Peter Selz, The German Expressionists by Bernard S. Myers, and Modern German Painting by Hans Konrad Roethel. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, January 5, 1958, 4. 1958b. “Art of the Middle Ages.” Review of Early Medieval Painting from the Fourth to the Eleventh Century, by Carl Nordenfalk and André Grabar. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, January 26, 1958, 4. (1958c) 1978. “New Light on Seurat.” Art News 57 (2): 22–24, 44–45, 52. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:101–9. 1958d. Summary of “The Significance to Medical History of the Newly Discovered Fourth Century Roman Catacomb Fresco.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 34 (10): 685–86. (1958e) 1979. “The Decoration of the Leningrad Manuscript of Bede.” Scriptorium 12 (2): 191–207. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:199–224. 1959a. Review of Style and Civilizations, by A. L. Kroeber. American Anthropologist 61 (2): 303–5. (1959b) 1978. Foreword to Cézanne. New York: Wildenstein and Co. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:39–41.

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(1959c) 1979. “A Note on the Mérode Altarpiece.” Art Bulletin 41 (4): 327–28. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:12–15, 18–19. (1959d) 1979. “A Note on the Wall Strips of Saxon Churches.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 18 (4): 123–25. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:242–48. (1960a) 1979. “An Illuminated English Psalter of the Early Thirteenth Century.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (3–4): 179–89. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:329–54. 1960b. Review of Le dossier Caravage: La psychologie de l’attribution et la pscychologie de l’art, by Berne Joffroy. Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (4): 609–10. 1960c. Review of Die Karolingischen Minaturen, vol. 2: Die Hofschule, by Wilhelm Koehler. Art Bulletin 42 (4): 301–2. 1960d. “In Memoriam, Wilhelm Koehler.” Art Bulletin 42 (4): 302. (1960e) 1978. “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 10:316–23. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:227–32. Reprinted also in Schapiro, Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting, 9–17. New York: George Braziller, 1995. (1960f) 1979. Preface to Israel, Ancient Mosaics, by Michael Avi-Yonah, n.p. New York: New York Graphic Society, 5–13. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:20–33. (1961) 1994. “Mr. Berenson’s Values.” Encounter 18 (1): 57–65. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:209–26.

1962a. Foreword to Forrest Bess, 14–15. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery. 1962b. Foreword to The Louis E. Stern Collection, 3. New York: Brooklyn Museum. 1962c. “Jan Müller, XXXI Biennale, Venezia, 1962.” In 2 pittori, 2 scultori, Statis Uniti d’America, n.p. New York: International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. (1963a) 1979. “The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona.” Review of The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona, by Jaime Marques Caranovas, Cesar E. Dubler, and Wilhelm Neuss. Art News 61 (9): 36, 49–50. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:319–28. 1963b. Review of The Mosaics of Monreale, by Ernst Kitzinger. Art Bulletin 45 (1): 65–67. (1963c) 1978. “Cézanne as a Watercolorist.” Introduction to Cézanne Watercolors, 11–15. New York: M. Knoedler and Co. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:43–45. 1963d. “On David Siqueiros—A Dilemma for Artists.” Dissent 10 (Spring): 106, 197. 1963e. “Lives of the Painters.” Review of Born Under Saturn, by Rudolf and Margot Wittkower. New York Review of Books, November 28, 1963, 3–4. (1963f) 1979. “The Bowman and the Bird on the Ruthwell Cross and Other Works: The Interpretation of Secular Themes in Early Mediaeval Religious Art.” Art Bulletin 45 (4): 351–55. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:177–86, 192–95. 1963g. “The Reaction Against Impressionism in the 1880s: Its Nature and Causes.” In Studies in Western Art: Acts of the Twentieth

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International Congress of the History of Art, edited by Millard Meiss et al., 4:91–92. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1963h) 1977. “A Relief in Rodez and the Beginnings of Romanesque Sculpture in Southern France.” In Meiss, Studies in Western Art, 1:40–66. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 1:285–305. 1964a. “Kurt Seligmann—The Early Years.” New York: D’Arcy Galleries. (1964b) 1994. “On the Relation of Patron and Artist: Comments on a Proposed Model for the Scientist.” American Journal of Sociology 70 (3): 363–69. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:227–38. (1964c) 1994. “Diderot on the Artist and Society.” Preface to Society and the Freedom of the Creative Man in Diderot’s Thought, by Joseph L. Waldauer, 5–11. Geneva: Droz. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:201–8. 1964d. The Parma Ildefonsus: A Romanesque Illuminated Manuscript from Cluny and Related Works. New York: College Art Association of America. 1964e. Contribution to “Interrogation of Jean Wahl.” In Philosophical Interrogations—Seven Philosophers and Theologians, edited by Sydney and Beatrice Rome, 183–85. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1965a. “In Memoriam Matthew Fryde.” Polish Review 10 (2): 106–7. 1965b. “In Memoriam Kurt Goldstein.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26 (December): 302–3. 1965c. “In Memoriam Alfred Rosmer (1877–1964).” Dissent 12 (1): 75–76.

1966a. “On a Letter from Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust.” New York Review of Books, March 17, 1966, 28. 1966b. “The Role of Art in Contemporary Society.” In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Fine Arts in the East and the West, 80–87. Tokyo: Japanese National Commission for UNESCO. 1966c. “Letter: The Mérode Mousetrap.” Burlington Magazine 108 (August): 430. 1966d. “On Delmore Schwartz (1913– 1966).” New York Review of Books, September 8, 1966, 15. 1966e. “Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch (1874–1959): In Memoriam.” American Philosophical Association Proceedings and Addresses 39 (October): 124. (1966f) 1994. “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content.” In Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, edited by Sidney Hook, 3–15. New York: New York University Press. Reprinted in Selected Papers 4:33–50. (1967a) 1994. “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in ImageSigns.” Translated into Polish by E. König-Krasińska in Kultura I Spoleczeństwo 11 (1): 101–17. Reprinted in Semiotica 1, no. 3 (1969): 223–42. Translated by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn as “Sur quelques problèmes de sémiotique de l’art visuel: Champ et véhicule dans les signes iconiques,” Critique 315–16 (August–September 1973): 843–66. Reprinted again in Selected Papers, 4:1–32. Unless

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otherwise noted, page numbers refer to the Selected Papers reprint. 1967b. “Dangerous Acquaintances.” Review of Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, by Meyer A. Zeligs. New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967, 5–9. 1967c. “Hiss and Chambers—Replies to Letters of Conor Cruise O’Brien.” New York Review of Books, April 6, 1967, 35; May 4, 1967, 37. 1967d. “Baudelaire Between the Imaginary and the Real.” Bulletin of the Poetry Society of America (December): 4–6. (1967e) 1979. Introduction to The Bird’s Head Haggada of the Bezalel National Art Museum in Jerusalem, edited by M. Spitzer, 15–19. Jerusalem: Tarshish Books. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:380–86. (1967f) 1979. “An Irish-Latin Text on the Angel with the Ram in Abraham’s Sacrifice.” In Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, 17–19. New York: Phaidon. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 3:307–11, 317–18. 1968a. “Carolingian Classic.” Review of The Lorsch Gospels, introduction by Wolfgang Braunfels. Art News 67 (2): 53. 1968b. Review of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, by Otto Pächt and J. J. G. Alexander. Cahier de civilisation médiévale 11 (4): 625. 1968c. Preface to Sima, 9. Paris: Musée national d’art moderne. (1968d) 1978. “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of StillLife.” Art News Annual 34:35–53.

Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:1–38. (1968e) 1994. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh.” In The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, edited by Marianne L. Simmel, 203–9. New York: Springer. Translated as “La nature morte comme objet personnel,” Macula 3, no. 4 (1978): 6–10. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 4:135–42. 1969a. Preface to “Bob Thompson,” n.p. New York: New School for Social Research Art Center. 1969b. “Religious Imagination and the Artist.” ARC Directions 7 (Fall): 1–4. Reprinted as “Church Art: Religious Imagination and the Artist,” in Selected Papers, 5:185–91. 1969c. Postface to Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations, by Minor White. New York: Aperture Monograph. 1970a. “A Proposal for Democratizing the Board of Trustees, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Art News 68 (9): 29. (1970b) 1979. Review of Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, by Lillian M. C. Randall. Speculum 45 (4): 684–86. Reprinted as “Marginal Images and Drôlerie,” in Selected Papers, 3:196–98. 1972. Review of Der Ingeborg Psalter, by Florens Deuchler. Cahier de civilisation médiévale 15(2): 151–53. 1973a. “The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaron (Laurentian MS. Or. 81): Their Place in Late Medieval Art and Supposed Connection with Early Christian and Insular Art.” Art Bulletin 50 (4): 494–531. (1973b) 1996. Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the

Bibliography of Works by Meyer Schapiro  /  225

Illustration of a Text. The Hague: Mouton. Reprinted in Schapiro, Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language (New York: George Braziller), 9–114. (1976) 1978. “Picasso’s ‘Woman with a Fan’: On Transformation and Self-Transformation.” In Essays in Archaeology and the Humanities: In Memoriam Otto J. Brendel, 249–54. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern. Reprinted in Selected Papers, 2:111 –20. 1978a. “On Tom Hess.” Art in America 66 (6): 12–13. 1978b. “Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting.” In Selected Papers, 2:233–61. Reprinted in Schapiro, Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting (New York: George Braziller, 1995), 25–78. 1981. “Gandy Brodie, in Memoriam.” Art in America 64 (1): 109. 1987. “A Reply to the Protest of Certain Artists Against Keeping Picasso’s Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art.” In Picasso’s Guernica, edited by Ellen C. Oppler, 242–43. New York: W. W. Norton. 1994a. Letter to Sigfried Kracauer, August 12, 1942. In Ingrid Belke, “Das Geheimnis des Faschismus liegt in der Weimarer Republik.” Filmexil, June 4, 1994, 40–42. 1994b. “Further Notes on Freud and Leonardo.” In Selected Papers, 4:143–51. 1994c. “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh.” In Selected Papers, 4:193–99. 1996. “Script in Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language.” In Schapiro, Words, Script, and Pictures, 115–99.

1997. Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions. New York: George Braziller. 1999a. “Architects and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Architects, Draughtsman, and Technicians of America.” In Selected Papers, 5:168–72. 1999b. “Art Criticized as a Cause of Violence.” In Selected Papers, 5:163–66. 1999c. “On the Art Market.” In Selected Papers, 5:202–4. 1999d. “Art and Social Change.” In Selected Papers, 5:113–18. 1999e. “The Arts Under Socialism.” In Selected Papers, 5:129–32. 1999f. “Cézanne and the Philosophers.” In Selected Papers, 5:75–105. 1999g. “On Despotism, Freedom, and the Quality of Art.” In Selected Papers, 5:161–62. 1999h. “The Fine Arts and the Unity of Mankind.” In Selected Papers, 5:232–47. 1999i. “The Function of Art.” In Selected Papers, 5:108–10. 1999j. “The Future Possibilities of the Arts.” In Selected Papers, 5:192–99. 1999k. “Humanism and Science: The Concept of the Two Half-Cultures.” In Selected Papers, 5:158–60. 1999l. “Philosophy and Worldview in Painting.” In Selected Papers, 5:11–74. 1999m. “On the Rarity of Painting and Sculpture in Projects of Architects.” In Selected Papers, 5:180–84. 1999n. “Social Realism and Revolutionary Art.” In Selected Papers, 5:210–31. 1999o. “The Study of Art as Humanistic.” In Selected Papers, 5:111 –12.

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1999p. “On the Support of Artists.” In Selected Papers, 5:205–7. 1999q. “The Value of Modern Art.” In Selected Papers, 5:133–57. 2000a. “Art Schools: Drawing from the Figure.” In Meyer Schapiro’s Paintings, Drawing, and Sculpture, 31–48. 2000b. “Color as Expressive.” In Meyer Schapiro’s Paintings, Drawing, and Sculpture, 25–30. 2000c. “Einstein and Cubism.” In Schapiro, The Unity of Picasso’s Art, 49–149. New York: George Braziller. 2000d. “Guernica: Sources, Changes.” In Schapiro, Unity of Picasso’s Art, 151–85. 2000e. Meyer Schapiro’s Paintings, Drawing, and Sculpture. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 2000f. “On Representing and Knowing.” In Meyer Schapiro’s Paintings, Drawing, and Sculpture, 22–24. 2000g. “The Unity of Picasso’s Art.” In Schapiro, The Unity of Picasso’s Art, 1–47.

2005. The Language of Forms: Lectures on Insular Manuscript Art. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library. 2006. Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1967. Edited by Linda Seidel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks. Edited by Daniel Esterman with an essay by Hubert Damisch. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. 2019a. “On Freud’s Forgetting of ‘Signorelli.’” In “Damisch/Schapiro,” edited by Jérémie Koering and Yve-Alain Bois. Special issue, October 167 (Winter): 124–29. 2019b. “Letters: 1972–73.” In “Damisch/ Schapiro,” edited by Jérémie Koering and Yve-Alain Bois. Special issue, October 167 (Winter): 25–123.

General Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Papers. Princeton University Libraries. Farrell, James T. Papers. University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia. Gombrich, Ernst. Papers. Warburg Institute Archive, University of London. Schapiro, Meyer. Books. Stronach Center, Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York. ———. Collection. Columbia University Libraries, New York. ———. Letters and Manuscripts of Whittaker Chambers and James Thomas Farrell, 1923–1991. Columbia University Libraries, New York. Warburg Institute Archive. University of London.

Published Works

Aarsleff, Hans. 1982. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Abel, Lionel. 1984. Intellectual Follies. New York: Norton.

Adamson, Walter L. 1993. AvantGarde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Adorno, Theodor. 1951. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. 2001. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. (1662) 1996. Logic or the Art of Thinking. Edited by Jill Vance Buroker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published as La logique ou l’art de penser contenant, outre les règles communes, plusieurs observations nouvelles, propres à former le jugement (Paris). Arnheim, Rudolf. 1956. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. New York: Faber and Faber. ———. 1957. “Accident and the Necessity of Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (1): 18–31. Ash, Mitchell G. 1995. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967.

228 / General Bibliography

New York: Cambridge University Press. Babich, Babette. 2003. “From Van Gogh’s Museum to the Temple at Bassae: Heidegger’s Truth of Art and Schapiro’s Art History.” Culture, Theory and Critique 44 (2): 151–69. Baltrušaitis, Jurgis. (1931) 1986. Formations, déformations: La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane. Paris: Flammarion. Originally published as La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (Paris: Leroux). Citations refer to the Flammarion edition. ———. (1955) 1977. Anamorphic Art. New York: Abrams. Originally published as Anamorphoses, ou Perspectives curieuses (Paris: Perrin). Citations refer to the Abrams edition. Bambach, Charles R. 1995. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bann, Stephen. 1995. “Semiotics.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, edited by Ramen Selden, 85–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrett, William. 1958. Irrational Man. New York: Doubleday. Bell, Clive. 1914. Art. New York: Stokes. Berenson, Bernard. 1888. “Contemporary Jewish Fiction.” Andover Review: A Religious and Theological Monthly 8 (60): 587–602. ———. 1893. “Isochromatic Photography and Venetian Pictures.” Nation 57 (November): 346–47. ———. 1948. Aesthetics and History. London: Constable.

———. 1949. Sketch for a Self-Portrait. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1960. One Years Reading for Fun (1942). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. 1963. Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–58. London: Hamish Hamilton. Berlin, Isaiah. 1961. Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2009. The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin. Edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Boydell Press. ———. 2013. Building: Letters, 1960– 1975. London: Pimlico. Berlin, Isaiah, and Meyer Schapiro. 2004. “Isaiah Berlin and Meyer Schapiro: An Exchange.” Brooklyn Rail, September 1, 2004. Blaha, Agnes. 2009. “Fritz Novotny and the New Vienna School of Art History—An Ambiguous Relation.” Journal of Art Historiography 1 (December). https://arthistoriog raphy.files.wordpress.com/2011/02 /media_139126_en. Boas, Franz. 1927. Primitive Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bohde, Daniela. 2008. “Pieter Bruegels Macchia und Hans Sedlmayrs physionomische Sehen: Psychologische Interpretationsmodelle von Hans Sedlmayr.” Wiener Jahrbüch für Kunstgeschichte 57:239–62. Bois, Yve-Alain. 1990a. Painting as Model. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1990b. “Perceiving Newman.” In Painting as Model, 186–211.

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Borneman, Ernest. 1971. “When Dogma Bites Dogma, or The Difficult Marriage of Marx and Freud.” Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 1971. Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays on the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brown, Robert L., Jr. 1977. Review of Words and Pictures, by Meyer Schapiro. Leonardo 10 (3): 250–51. Broyard, Anatole. 1997. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. Brudno, Ezra. 1908. The Tether. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Bryson, Norman, ed. 1988. Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnham, Jack. 1973. The Structure of Art. New York: George Braziller. Burnham, John C., ed. 2012. After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cahn, Walter. 2002. “Schapiro and Focillon.” Gesta 41 (2): 129–36. Chambers, Whittaker. 1952. Witness. New York: Random House. Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Language and Politics. Edinburgh: AK Press. Clark, Kenneth. 1963. Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Clark, T. J. 1990. “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction.” In Reconstructing

Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–1964, 172–243. Edited by Serge Guilbaut. Cambridge: MIT Press. Clark, Vernon. 1941. “The Guernica Mural—Picasso and Social Protest.” Science and Society 5 (1): 72–78. Cohen, Rachel. 2013. Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press. Conquest, Robert. (1968) 2008. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1907. Medieaeval Sinhalese Art. Broad Campden: Essex House Press. ———. 1929. “The Tree of Jesse and Indian Parallels or Sources.” Art Bulletin 11 (2): 216–20. ———. 1932. “Introduction to the Art of Eastern Asia.” Open Court 46 (March): 185–215. ———. 1946. Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought. London: Luzac. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., and Meyer Schapiro. 1941. “Letters to the Editor.” Art Bulletin 23 (2): 173. Cotkin, George. 2003. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Craven, David. 1994. “Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, and the Emergence of Critical Theory.” Oxford Art Journal 17 (1): 42–54. ———. 1999. Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. “Meyer Schapiro.” In Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, edited by Chris Murray, 239–45. New York: Routledge. Craven, David, Robert Motherwell, and Meyer Schapiro. 1996.

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“Commentary: Aesthetics as Ethics in the Writings of Robert Motherwell and Meyer Schapiro.” Archives of American Art 36 (1): 25–32. Craven, David, Meyer Schapiro, and Lillian Milgram Schapiro. 1997. “A Series of Interviews (July 15, 1992—January 22, 1995).” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31 (Spring): 159–68. Crow, Thomas. 1983. “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts.” In Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, edited by B. H. D. Buchloch, Serge Guilbaut, and David Solkin, 224–35. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. ———. 1996. “Village Voice: On Meyer Schapiro.” Artforum 34 (10): 9–10, 122. ———. 1999. The Intelligence of Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Damisch, Hubert. (1972) 2004. A Theory of /Cloud/. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published as Théorie du nuage (Paris: Éditions du seuil). Citations refer to the Stanford edition. ———. 1978. “Six Notes in the Margin of Meyer Schapiro’s Words and Pictures.” Social Research 45 (1): 15–35. ———. (1987) 1994. The Origin of Perspective. Translated by John Goodman. Cambridge: MIT Press. Originally published as L’origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion).

Davenport, Russell W. 1948. “A Life Round Table on Modern Art.” Life, October 11, 1948. Davis, Whitney. 1995. “Freuds Leonardo und die Kultur der Homosexualität.” Texte zur Kunst 5 (17): 57–73. ———. 2011. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2018. Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Kooning, Willem de. 1951. “What Abstract Art Means to Me.” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin (Spring): 5–6. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published as De la Grammatologie (Paris: Editions de minuit). ———. 1978a. “Restitutions de la vérité en pointure.” As part (pp. 11–37) of “Martin Heidegger et les souliers de Van Gogh,” Macula 3 (4): 3–47. ———. (1978b) 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by G. Bennington and I. McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion). Citations refer to the Chicago edition. Dewey, John. 1896. “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.” Psychological Review 3 (4): 357–70. ———. (1922) 1983. Human Nature and Conduct. Vol. 14 of The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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———. (1925) 1983. Experience and Nature. Vol. 1 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. ———. (1929) 1984. The Quest for Certainty. Vol. 4 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. ———. 1934. “Why I Am Not a Communist.” Modern Monthly (April): 133–65. ———. (1934) 1987. Art as Experience. Vol. 10 in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. ———. (1935) 1987. “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925– 1953, vol. 11, 69–83. ———. 1946. “Peirce’s Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning.” Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 85–95. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1984. “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain).” October 29 (Summer): 63–81. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1927. “Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 191–291. Leipzig: Teubner. Dittman, Lorenz. 1967. Stil—Symbol— Struktur: Studien zu Kategorien der Kunstgeschichte. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Dosse, François. 1997. The Rising Sign, 1945–1966. Vol. 1 of History of Structuralism. Translated by Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dvořák, Max. 1924. Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte. Munich: Piper. Eastman, Max. 1933. “An Interpretation of Marx: Sidney Hook’s Daydream of What Marx Might

Have Said Had He Been a Pupil of John Dewey.” New York Herald Tribune of Books, April 13, 1933, 6. Eissler, K. R. 1961. Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on the Enigma. New York: International Universities Press. Elderfield, John. 2011. De Kooning: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Elkins, James. 2003. “What Does Peirce’s Sign System Have to Say to Art History?” Culture, Theory, and Critique 44 (1): 5–22. Epstein, Helen. 1983. “Meyer Schapiro: A Passion to Know and Make Known.” ARTnews 82 (May): 60–85, and (Summer): 84–95. Focillon, Henri. (1934) 1992. The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by George Kubler. New York: Zone Books. Originally published as Vie des Formes (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux). Citations refer to the Zone edition. ———. (1938) 1980. The Art of the West in the Middle Ages. Translated by Donald King. Edited by Jean Bony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Originally published as Art d’Occident, le moyen âge, roman et gothique (Paris: Colin). Foucault, Michel. (1966) 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Originally published as Les mots et les chose: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard). Citations refer to the Tavistock edition. Freud, Sigmund, and Carl Jung. 1974. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung. Edited by William

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McGuire. Translated by R. Mannheim and R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fried, Michael. (1967) 1998. “Art and Objecthood.” In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 148–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in Artforum 5 (10): 12–23. Friedman, Lesley. 2003. “Pragmatism: The Unformulated Method of Bishop Berkeley.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (1): 81–96. Fry, Roger. 1920. Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1926. Transformations. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1939. Last Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gagel, Mandy. 2010. “1897, A Discussion of Plagiarism: Letters Between Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson, and Mary Costelloe.” Literary Imagination 12 (2): 154–79. Gaiger, Jason. 2011. “Hegel’s Contested Legacy: Rethinking the Relation between Art History and Philosophy.” Art Bulletin 92 (2): 178-94. Gaugh, Harry F. 1983. Willem de Kooning. New York: Aberville Press. Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. 1995. Einführung in die Ästhetik. Munich: Fink. Gilbert, Katherine. 1948. Review of Why Exhibit Works of Art?, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. Art Bulletin 30 (2): 157–59. Goldstein, Kurt. 1931. “Das psycho-physische Problem in seiner Bedeutung für arztliches Handeln.” Therapie der Gegenwart: Medizinisch-chirurgische Rundschau für praktische Arzte 33:1–11.

———. (1934) 1995. The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man. New York: Zone Books. Originally published as Der Aufbau des Organismus: Einführung in die Biologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen am kranken Menschen (The Hague: Nijhoff). Citations refer to the Zone edition. ———. (1946) 1971. “On Naming and Pseudonaming: From Experiences in Psychopathology.” Word 2 (1): 1–7. Reprinted in Goldstein, Selected Papers (Dordrecht: Springer), 400–408. Citations refer to the reprint. ———. (1949) 1971. “Bemerkung zum Vortrag von Prof. Otto Meyerhof: Über Goethes Methoden der Naturforschung.” Proceedings of the Rudolf Virchow Medical Society (New York) 8:2–4. Reprinted in Goldstein, Selected Papers (Dordrecht: Springer), 422–24. Citations refer to the reprint. Gombrich, Ernst. 1945. “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8:7–60. ———. 1949. Review of Signs, Language and Behavior, by Charles Morris. Art Bulletin 31 (1): 68–73. ———. (1954) 1963. “Psycho-Analysis and the History of Art.” In Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, 30–44. London: Phaidon. Originally published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 35:401– 11. Citations refer to reprint.

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———. (1956) 1966. “Raphael’s ‘Madonna della Sedia.’” Gombrich on the Renaissance: Norm and Form. London: Phaidon. Originally published as Raphael’s Madonna della sedia (London: Oxford University Press). Citations refer to reprint. ———. (1960) 2000. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Citations are to 2000 edition. ———. 1968. “Style.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David Sills, 15:352–61. New York: Macmillan. ———. (1969) 1979. “In Search of Cultural History.” In Ideas and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art, 24–59. Oxford: Phaidon. Originally published as In Search of Cultural History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goodenough, Erwin. 1961. “Judaism at Dura-Europos.” Israel Exploration Journal 11 (4): 161–70. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Gorsen, Peter. 1966. Zur Phänomenologie des Bewusstseinsstroms: Bergson, Dilthey, Husserl, Simmel und die lebensphilosophischen Antinomien. Bonn: Bouvier. Grant, Kim. 2017. All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1939. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review 6 (Fall): 34–49.

———. 1940. “Towards a Newer Laocoön.” Partisan Review 7 (4): 296–310. ———. 1948. “Art.” Nation, April 24, 1948. ———. 1955. “American Type Painting.” Partisan Review 22 (2): 179–96. ———. 1960. “Modernist Painting.” Forum Lectures. Washington, D.C.: Voice of America. ———. 1962. “After Abstract Expressionism.” Art International, October 25, 1962. Greif, Mark. 2015. The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grünbaum, Adolf. 2002. “A Critique of Psychoanalysis.” In The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by E. Erwin, 117–36. New York: Routledge. Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hale, Nathan. 1995. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. New York: Oxford University Press. Harrington, Anne. 1996. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1950) 1971. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstader, 15–86. New York: Harper Collins. Originally published as “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege,

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Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960.” Burlington Magazine 151 (1281): 836–39. Yoos, George E. 1976. Review of Words and Pictures: On the Literary and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text, by Meyer Schapiro. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (4): 506–7. Zerner, Henri. 1974. “Master of Arts.” Review of Words and Pictures, by Meyer Schapiro. New York Review of Books, November 14, 1974. Ziarek, Krzysztof. 2013. Language After Heidegger. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Zolberg, Aristide, and Agnès Callamard. 1998. “The École Libre at the New School, 1941–1946.” Social Research 65 (4): 921–51. Žukauskienė, Odeta. 2014. “Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis, and Visionary Worlds: Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Contribution to Art History.” In Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory, edited by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, 190–215. London: Tauris.

Index

Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the note number. abstract art, 2, 97, 172 defining qualities of, 20 and fascism, 128 See also abstract expressionism; color field painting; Judd, Donald; minimalism; Newman, Barnett; Rothko, Mark abstract expressionism, 27, 97–98, 122, 173 Adorno, Theodor, 68, 199n20, 204n48 Albers, Josef, 120 Alexander the Great, 54 American Artists’ Congress, 61 anxiety, 148–49 aphasia, amnesic, 143, 146–48, 160, 162 architecture, 31–34, 42, 61 Arnaud, Antoine, 166 Arnheim, Rudolf, 24, 194n28, 195n34 Art Bulletin, 35, 89 Art Workers’ Coalition, 80–81 Augustine, Saint, 166 Bal, Mieke: “Semiotics and Art History” (with Norman Bryson), 185 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, 36, 42–43, 45 La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane, 38–41 See also Schapiro, Meyer: “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art” Barr, Alfred, 61 Barrett, William: Irrational Man, 149 Barthes, Roland, 164, 176 behaviorism. See Gestalt psychology Bell, Clive, 22

Benjamin, Walter: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 68 Berenson, Bernard, 8, 123–33, 136–41, 189 Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, 128 commercial art world, participation in, 123–25, 129–30 I Tatti (villa in Florence), 124, 125–27, 133 Judaism of, 126–27, 130–32 Meyer Schapiro’s drawing of, 126 One Year’s Reading for Fun, 130 use of photographs in scholarship of, 125, 136–39 religious conversions of, 130–31 Sketch for a Self-Portrait, 128–30 Bergson, Henri, 42 Berkeley, George, 117 Berlin, Isaiah, 6, 8, 188 defense of Bernard Berenson, 124, 129, 131–32, 141 “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 124, 132 Bible moralisée, 180, 181 Black Mountain College, 120 Bois, Yve-Alain, 184–85 Painting as Model, 185 Bordone, Paris: Game of Chess, 177 Botticelli, Sandro, 28–29 Breton, André, 68, 209n21 Brownsville (neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York), 14, 16, 59, 73 Broyard, Anatole, 4–5 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 36–37, 47–50 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 38, 52–54, 53(see also Schapiro, Meyer: “Two Legends of the Invention of Flying”) Netherlandish Proverbs, 48–49, 49

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Bryson, Norman, 185 Calligram, 185 “Semiotics and Art History” (with Mieke Bal), 185 Buchon, Max, 65 Buddhism, 86 Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (book series), 163 Carnap, Rudolf, 149 Carnegie Corporation, 125 Castelseprio. See Schapiro, Meyer: “The Frescoes of Castelseprio” Cézanne, Paul, 3, 8, 28, 36–37, 47, 50–51, 102–3, 109–12, 114, 116–18, 128 Mont Sainte-Victoire, 50 Three Apples, 110(see also Schapiro, Meyer: “The Apples of Cézanne”) See also Schapiro, Meyer: Paul Cézanne Chambers, Whittaker, 61–62, 72 Witness, 62 See also Hiss-Chambers affair Chartres Cathedral, 31–33, 31 See also Garland, Robert; Soutine, Chaim Chomsky, Noam, 3 Christian art, 84–85, 104, 166, 179–82 See also Leonardo; Moses; Pentecost; Rubens, Peter Paul; sculpture, Mozarabic; sculpture, Romanesque; and names of individual artworks Cold War, 5, 8, 72, 98, 123, 132, 140 color field painting, 9, 171–73, 178, 211n27 Columbia University: 1, 2, 3, 41, 124, 127, 147, 148, 161, 172, 178, 193n1, 198n2 art history department, origins of, 125 Meyer Schapiro archive, 10–11, 114 Teachers College, 134 Committee for Cultural Freedom, 73 “Communication and the Theory of Signs” (conference at the University of Chicago), 168 Communism, 60–62, 72, 75, 81 See also Communist Manifesto; Hiss-Chambers affair; John Reed Club, Marx, Karl; Marxism; McCarthy, Joseph; Moscow show trials; New Masses; Soviet Union

Communist Manifesto (by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), 63, 66 connoisseurship, 8, 123–25, 127, 132, 136–41 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 7–8, 82–94, 98–100 Festschrift of, 82–83, 92 Introduction to the Art of Eastern Asia, 84–85 philosophical theory of, 85–87 Courbet, Gustave, 57–58, 60, 65–66, 115 L’Atelier, 65 See also Schapiro, Meyer: “Courbet and Popular Imagery” Crary, Jonathan, 161 Craven, David, 97 Cubism and Abstract Art (exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York), 61 Damisch, Hubert, 184–85, 202n3, 207n36, 208n5, 210n55 The Origin of Perspective, 185 A Theory of /Cloud/, 166 de Kooning, Willem, 118–22, 148 Woman I, 1, 8, 103, 118–19, 119, 121–22 Woman paintings, 119–21 See also Schapiro, Meyer: visit to studio of Willem de Kooning in 1953 Delacroix, Eugène: Liberty Leading the People, 76 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 128, 142–43, 144, 153, 160–62, 177, 185 DeWald, Ernest, 16, 17, 126 Dewey, John, 7, 12, 24, 26–27, 58, 68–71, 96, 102–3, 106–7, 111, 116, 124, 128, 135, 147, 149, 161, 168–69, 171, 189 Art as Experience, 23, 27, 108–9, 168 Dewey Commission, 78 Experience and Nature, 23 Human Nature and Conduct, 114 reflex arc, concept of, 111–12 The Quest for Certainty, 162 Theory of Valuation, 26, 80 See also Schapiro, Meyer: influence of John Dewey on dialectics, 107 dialectical materialism, 58, 67–70 dialectical metaphysics, 94

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See also Schapiro, Meyer: “On Dialectics” Didi-Huberman, Georges, 186 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7, 36, 41, 43–44, 47, 48–50 Dissent, 73–74, 104 Dreyfus Affair, 127, 207n30 Dura Europos, synagogue of, 105 Duveen, Joseph, 125, 130 Dvořák, Max, 12 Eastman, Max, 68, 71 Edelman, Gerald, 145–46 ekphrasis, 9, 144–62 empiricism, 33, 43–46, 51, 53, 66–69, 80, 84, 89, 113, 116, 118, 149, 170, 189–90 See also positivism; pragmatism. Encounter, 123, 132 Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, 45, 168 Engels, Friedrich, 58, 66, 69 See also Communist Manifesto Epstein, Helen, 127, 135 existentialism, 144, 148–49 Farrell, James, 69–71, 78 feminist art history, 2 First World War. See World War I Florence, Italy: Renaissance in, 128 See also Berenson, Bernard, I Tatti; Laurentian Library; Medici Palace Focillon, Henri, 42–43 L’art des sculpteurs romans, 41 La vie des forms, 41–42 formalism, 6–7, 14–15, 19–20, 23, 28–29, 34, 37–38, 42, 70, 80, 121, 188 Frankfurt School of Social Research, 68, 104, 105 French impressionism, 2, 51, 64–65, 73 French Revolution, 73 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 101–18, 127, 132, 190 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, 113 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 103. Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud, 101 See also psychoanalysis Fromentin, Eugène, 134, 135 Fromm, Erich, 101, 104

Fry, Roger, 7, 15, 16, 20–24, 124, 135 Transformations, 21 Garland, Robert, drawing of Chartres Cathedral, 31–32, 31 Geisteswissenschaften, 7, 41 Géricault, Théodore: The Raft of the Medusa, 76 Gestalt psychology, 3, 7, 15, 22–28, 32–33, 36, 37, 43–44, 145, 171 Ginsberg, Allen, 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 150 Goldstein, Kurt, 9, 142–51, 156, 160–62 Der Aufbau des Organismus, 145, 148 Festschrift of, 151 “On Naming and Pseudonaming: From Experiences in Psychopathology,” 146 personal history, 160–61 “The Significance of the Mind-Body Problem for Medical Practice,” 149 Gombrich, Ernst, 6, 7, 15, 17, 28–34, 114 Art and Illusion, 30–31 “Botticelli’s Mythologies,” 28 “In Search of Cultural History,” 94 Story of Art, 34 Goodman, Nelson, 156–57 Languages of Art, 157 Great Depression, 59, 66 (“world crisis of 1929”), 193n1 Greenberg, Clement, 20, 23, 105, 119–21 “American Type Painting,” 121 “The New Figurative Painting” (1953 panel), 120–21 Guilbaut, Serge, 140 Haldane, J. B. S., 54 Harvard University, 3, 124, 125, 126 Hegel, G. W. F., 67, 94 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 15, 142–44, 148–49, 151 Nazism, affiliation with, 160 “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 151–155, 157–62 Hemingway, Andrew, 61, 193n16 hermeneutics, 178, 189–90 Hindu art, 6, 84, 86 See also South Asian art

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Hiss, Alger. See Hiss-Chambers affair Hiss-Chambers affair, 72 Hollinger, David, and Charles Capper: The American Intellectual Tradition, 11 Hook, Sidney, 45, 57–58, 67, 68, 71 Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx, 67, 68 Horkheimer, Max, 68 I Tatti. See Berenson, Bernard: I Tatti Immigration Act of 1924 (US), 127 impressionism. See French impressionism Indian art. See South Asian art Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton University), 3 International Symposium of Anthropology, 164, 176 See also Schapiro, Meyer: debate with Claude Lévi-Strauss Jakobson, Roman, 145, 148, 164, 169, 175 James, William, 106–8, 111–12, 124, 127–28, 179 Varieties of Religious Experience, 148 Jay, Martin, 71, 105 John Reed Club, 61 Journal of the History of Ideas, 101, 190 Judaic art, 105, 181–82 Judd, Donald, 5, 165, 172–73, 178 Jung, Carl, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 29 Kaprow, Allan, 5 Kierkegaard, Søren, 148 Klein, Melanie, 109, 111 object relations, theory of, 112 Koerner, Joseph, 143 Koffka, Kurt, 22, 24 Köhler, Wolfgang, 22, 24 Korsch, Karl, 67 Krauss, Rosalind, 121, 186 Kritische Berichte, 38 Kroiz, Lauren, 99 Kuhn, Thomas: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 45 Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, 12, 44

See also Schapiro, Meyer: review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen Kwait, John. See Schapiro, Meyer: John Kwait (pseudonym of) Lacan, Jacques, 185, 205n62 unconscious mind, model of, 118 Laurentian Library, Florence, 127 Lebensphilosophie, 43 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude, 184–85 translation of Schapiro’s “Field and Vehicle in Image Signs,” 185 Léger, Fernand, 1, 10, 192n1 Lenin, Vladimir, 69, 71 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 58, 108 Leonardo da Vinci, 8, 101, 115, 127 The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne, 113, 115 Levey, Harry, 115 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 6, 9, 164–65, 169–171, 175–77, 179, 183 The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 169 See also Schapiro, Meyer: debate with Claude Lévi-Strauss Life Magazine. See Museum of Modern Art: Roundtable Linguistic Circle of New York, 144–45, 165 Loran, Erle, 28 Löwy, Emanuel, 7, 15, 16–20, 30, 90, 121 The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, 17–20 Lukacs, Georg, 63 Mâle, Émile, 16 Marcuse, Herbert: Eros and Civilization, 104 Marin, Louis, 186 Martin, Charles, 134–35 Marx, Karl, 60, 68–69, 71, 113, 132 Capital, 66 See also Communist Manifesto; Marxism Marxism, 2, 3, 7, 15, 16, 34, 57–81, 104 See also Marx, Karl; Communist Manifesto; Communism; Marxist Quarterly; New Left; Schapiro, Meyer: Marxist approach of Marxist Quarterly, 61, 190

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Masson, André: The Anatomy of My Universe, 148 mathematics and the visual arts, 9, 94–95, 169–171, 174–75, 177 See also Schapiro, Meyer: “law of spatiotemporal constants” Matisse, Henri, 3, 27 McCarthy, Joseph (US Senator), 72 Mead, George Herbert, 103, 116–18, 149, 168, 171 Medici palace, Florence, 127 medieval art, study of, 3, 14, 16, 82, 84, 86, 92, 104, 155, 190 See also names of individual sites and artworks Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 134, 171 Mérode Altarpiece (by Robert Campin), 166 Metz, Christian: Film Language—A Semiotics of Cinema, 176 Michelson, Annette, 186 Middle Ages. See medieval art, study of minimalism, 165, 172–73 See also Judd, Donald modernism, 2, 6, 8, 20–22, 58–59, 28, 83, 93, 95, 96–100, 118, 121, 128, 140, 190 Moissac, abbey of: 14, 18, 21, 23, 24, 32, 33 See also Schapiro, Meyer: The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac Morelli, Giovanni, 127, 139–40 Morgan Library, 1 Morris, Charles W., 9, 164, 168–69, 179, 184 “Esthetics and the Theory of Signs,” 168 Foundations of the Theory of Signs, 179 Morris, William, 86 Moscow show trials, 61, 77 Moses battling the Amelekites, artistic depictions of, 163, 179–83, 181, 182, 183 Motherwell, Robert, 1, 8, 97 Mozac, Abbey of Saint-Pierre, 39 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 82, 98–99 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 61, 80–81 Roundtable on Modern Art (1948), 102, 105 “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951 symposium), 120

See also Cubism and Abstract Art Nagel, Ernest, 53, 68, 94, 114–15 National Socialism, 37 See also Nazism naturalism in art, 17–30, 34, 67, 68, 71, 80–81, 85–89, 93, 113, 128 Naturwissenschaften, 7, 41 Nazism, 130, 160, 169 See also National Socialism Nesbit, Molly, 189, 193n19 Neurath, Otto, 45 See also Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences; Schapiro, Meyer: “law of spatiotemporal constants” New Left, 81 New Masses, 61 New School of Social Research (New York), 25, 48, 145, 169 New Vienna School of Art History, 7, 35–56, 102, 171 “law of the frame,” 41–42 New York Call, 59, 103 New York Psychoanalytic Society, 106 New York Times, 2, 4 New York University, 106, 114 Newman, Barnett, 1, 165, 171–72, 178 Dionysius, 173 zip paintings, 6, 9, 171 nonobjective painting. See abstract art Norman, Dorothy, 98 Novotny, Fritz, 37, 52 Cézanne und das Ende der wissenschaftliche Perspektive, 50–51 Occam’s Razor, 17 Pächt, Otto, 35, 37–38, 49 Panofsky, Erwin, 1, 166 Studies in Iconology, 165 Paris International Exhibition (1937), 75 Partisan Review, 3, 57, 150 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 9, 117, 163, 166–69, 171, 177–180, 185–86, 190 Pentecost, artistic depictions of, 155–56, 156, 157, 159 Persinger, Cynthia, 193n19 Pfister, Oskar, 115–16

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Phillips, William, 3 photography, 98–99 See also Berenson, Bernard: use of photographs; Stieglitz, Alfred Picasso, Pablo, 60, 74–75, 79 Girl Before A Mirror, 80, 105, 106 Guernica, 6, 7, 58–59, 66, 75–81, 76, 77 mural of Icarus for UNESCO headquarters, 56 Popper, Karl, 29–30 Port Royal writers, 166 Porter, Arthur Kingsley, 16 Festschrift of, 138 positivism, 7, 26, 43, 45–46, 53, 67, 93–94, 108, 113, 149 See also empiricism; pragmatism poststructuralism, 16, 46, 162, 177 pragmatics (branch of semiotics), 180, 183 See also semiotics pragmatism, 45, 59, 71–72, 80, 102–3, 106, 112, 117–18, 124–25, 127, 140–41, 148–49, 164, 168, 188–89 See also Berenson, Bernard; Dewey, John; empiricism; Nesbit, Molly; positivism; Schapiro, Meyer: pragmatism and Prague school of linguistics, 169 Princeton University, 127 See also Institute for Advanced Study psychoanalysis, 2, 3, 101–18, 147 libido, theory of, 104–5 preconscious, theory of, 115 repression, theory of, 108 sublimation, theory of, 103, 114–15 See also Freud, Sigmund; Jung, Carl; Klein, Melanie; Lacan, Jacques; New York Psychoanalytic Society psychology. See psychoanalysis See also Freud, Sigmund; Gestalt psychology; Jung, Carl Putnam, Hilary, 141, 207n51 Rank, Otto: Der Kunstler, 104 Rapaport, David, 101 Raphael, Max, 7, 57–60, 65–67, 77–79, 93, 115 Zur Erkenntnis Theorie der konkreten Dialektik, 67

Reichenau Lectionary, 156 Richter, Jean-Paul, 127 Rothko, Mark, 9, 165, 171–73, 178 Untitled (National Gallery), 172 Rubens, Peter Paul Descent from the Cross, 135, 136 Meyer Schapiro’s analytical diagram of, 137 Rude, François: The Marseillaise, 76 Ruskin, John, 86 Russell, Bertrand, 54 Russian Revolution, 73, 103 Samuels, Ernest, 131 Sandler, Irving, 4–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 163, 166–70, 179–80, 184, 186 Course in General Linguistics, 168, 170, 177 Schapiro, Meyer “Aesthetics of Perception” (unpublished typescript), 23 “The Apples of Cézanne,” 102–3, 114, 116 “Art in the Contemporary World,” 21–22 artwork by, 125, 126, 133–38 artistic training of, 134–35 analytical drawings of, 135–36, 137, 138, 140, 171, 173–74, 174, 177–78; analytic diagram of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross, 137; diagram of the relief of Theophilus, 138; diagrams from An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, 171, 174, 177–78 caricature of Bernard Berenson, 126 Icarus, 55, 56 “Cain’s Jawbone That Did the First Murder,” 165–66 class issues and, 16, 63–65, 75, 125 “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïvete,” 57–58, 65–66, 78 course on theories and methods of art history (1975), 144, 155, 162 (1963), 178–79

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concept of design and, 21–22, 37 visit to studio of Willem de Kooning in 1953, 103, 118–22, 205n63 “Field and Vehicle in Image Signs,” 185 “The Fine Arts and the Unity of Mankind,” 93, 96 “The Frescoes of Castelseprio,” 10 “From Romanesque to Mozarabic in Silos,” 102, 103, 105 “Further Notes on Freud and Leonardo”, 102 “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh,” 163 “Humanism and Science: The Concept of the Two Half-Cultures,” 47 “The Image of the Disappearing Christ,” 166 influence of, 4–5, 184–85 interdisciplinary of, 10 Judaism of, 14, 16, 57, 59, 124, 131 John Kwait (pseudonym of), 61, 72 “The Social Bases of Art,” 61, 62–64, 72 “law of spatiotemporal constants,” 46 “Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study,” 101–3, 112, 115–18 debate with Claude Lévi-Strauss at the International Symposium of Anthropology (1952), 164, 165, 169, 173, 175, 176, 177 via correspondence, 176 Marxist approach of, 43, 45, 55–56, 57–81, 82, 88–91, 102, 104, 107–8, 113, 115, 123, 133–34, 140, 147, 188, 190 master’s thesis of, 84 “Mr. Berenson’s Values,” 123–24, 141 “‘Muscipula Diaboli’: The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece,” 165–66 “The Nature of Abstract Art,” 61, 62–64, 71, 96 “On Dialectics” (unpublished typescript), 69–70 “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art” (review of Jurgis Baltrušaitis, La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane), 36, 38–41

“On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content,” 133 “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” 164, 176, 177–79 “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” 82–83, 92 “On the Liberating Quality of the Avant-Garde,” 74 overview of scholarship, 1–3, 188–91 Paul Cézanne, 109–10 personal history, 14, 16, 59, 125, 134 “Philosophy and Worldview in Painting,” 94 unpublished essay on Pablo Picasso, 56 “The Present State of Art History” (lecture), 100 “Religion and Intellectuals,” 150 “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross,” 165 reviews by Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts and Sketch for a Self-Portrait, 128–32 G. V. Plekhanov, Art and Society, 67 Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, 35–37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 51, 53 Modern Art in the United States (Tate Gallery), 121 Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac (dissertation), 14–15, 16, 17–20, 21, 59–60, 84 scholarly training of, 3, 12 “The Sculptures of Souillac,” 136, 138 Selected Papers, 64 “The Sources of Pragmatism” (unfinished essay), 71 “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh” 142, 151–62 on still-life painting, 114, 116–17, 142 (see also van Gogh, Vincent, Shoes) “Style,” 19 “Two Legends of the Invention of Flying,” 47, 53–56 “Two Slips of Leonardo and One of Freud,” 113 “The Value of Modern Art” (lecture), 19–20, 73–74

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Schapiro, Meyer (continued) Words and Pictures: On the Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text, 9, 163–65, 178, 179–84 work habits, 11 See also Columbia University, Schapiro archive Schefer, Jean-Louis: Scénographie d’un tableau, 176–77 schematics, 30, 37, 39 Schilder, Paul, 102, 105 science as a methodological approach, 29–30, 34, 40–41, 43–47, 49, 54, 58, 66–68, 81, 89, 93, 150–51, 185 philosophy of, 3, 29–30, 34 sculpture of ancient Greece (see Löwy, Emanuel: The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art) of ancient Mesopotamia, 21 Mozarabic, 60 (see also Schapiro, Meyer: “From Romanesque to Mozarabic in Silos”; Silos) of ancient Persia, 89–90, 90 Romanesque, 60, 103–4, 121–22, 122, 138 (see also Moissac, Abbey of; Schapiro, Meyer: “From Romanesque to Mozarabic in Silos”; Schapiro, Meyer: The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac; Silos; Souillac, Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie; Vézelay, Abbey of) Second International, 67, 108 Second Vienna School. See New Vienna School Second World War. See World War II Sedlmayr, Hans, 35–38, 44–45 on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 48–51, 52–53 Verlust der Mitte, 51 “Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft,” 43 Semiotica, 190 semiotics, 2, 3, 9, 144, 155, 163–87, 188 See also Bal, Mieke; Barthes, Roland; Bryson, Norman; “Communication and the Theory of Signs”; Damisch, Hubert; Didi-Huberman, Georges;

Jakobson, Roman; Krauss, Rosalind; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Linguistic Circle of New York; Marin, Louis; Metz, Christian; Michelson, Annette; Morris, Charles W.; Peirce, Charles Sanders; Port Royal writers; Saussure, Ferdinand de; Schefer, Jean-Louis; Semiotica Silos, Abbey of Santo Domingo de, 60, 102–5 Sloan, John, 134 Snow, C. P., 7, 47–48 See also New School of Social Research socialism, 28, 34, 55–56, 57, 59, 67, 73–76, 86, 91, 103, 123 See also Communism; Marxism; Second International Souillac, Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie, 25, 32, 33, 122, 136, 138 See also Schapiro, Meyer: “The Sculptures of Souillac” South Asian art, 84–87, 87, 99 Soutine, Chaim: Chartres Cathedral, 32, 33 Soviet Union, 56, 61, 64, 72, 75, 77–78 Spanish Civil War, 75, 97 Spinoza, Baruch, 129–31 Stalin, Joseph, 61, 70, 78, 123, 128, 141 Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 58 Stieglitz, Alfred, 97, 98 Camera Work, 98 Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait, 99 still-life painting. See Schapiro, Meyer: on still-life painting Stokes, Adrian, 109–10, 112 structuralism, 9, 164, 163–87 See also poststructuralism Strukturforschung, 36, 37, 50 Strzygowski, Josef, 37 style, theories of, 7, 14–19, 30–34, 40–41, 46, 65, 75, 83, 90–91, 113, 169, 175–76 See also Schapiro, Meyer: “Style” Thomas, Kerstin, 109, 193n19 Trotsky, Leon, 69, 71, 78 See also Dewey Commission Trubetzkoy, Nikolai: Principles of Phonology, 176 Two Cultures debate, 36–37, 47, 48, 53

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universalizing theory of art, 29, 74, 83–84, 91, 95–96, 98, 121 Van Gogh, Vincent, 3, 6, 102–3, 108–9, 116, 139, 142–44, 147–48, 151 mental condition of, 147, 160 Shoes (“Old Shoes”), 9, 143, 152–62, 153 Wheat Field with Rising Sun, 109 Vézelay, Abbey of, 39–40, 40 Vico, Giambattista, 107–8 Vienna, Austria, 17 See also New Vienna School Vietnam War, 80 Warburg Institute, London, 28 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57 Weltanschauungen, 37, 94

Wertheimer, Max: 7, 15, 22, 24–28, 171 Western bias, in art history, 8, 83–84, 95–98 White, Morton, 3, 69 William Alanson White Institute (New York): 8, 103, 115 Windelband, Wilhelm, 41, 49 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 133–34, 144 Worcester Psalter, 157 World War I, 54 World War II, 28, 57–58, 72, 101 See also Nazism Wright, Willard Huntington, 135 Yeats, William Butler: “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” 54 Zerner, Henri, 3