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Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers
1982 edition. Some light edge wear. Binding tight with contents unmarked and clean. From a private collection.
277 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1978
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October 31, 2019
A Scholar's Papers
By John Russei
The New York Times January 7, 1979
19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers. By Meyer Schapiro. Illustrated. 277pp. New York: George Braziller. $20.
To be in the hall when Meyer Schapiro speaks in public is to see exemplified a learning process of the highest and finest order. But Professor Schapiro is now well beyond academic retirement age and al- through his name will De perpetuate at Columbia University by a professorship (financed by artists who donated their work to be sold for the purpose), he no longer teaches a regular course. For this and other reasons, the publication of this book has been most keenly awaited.
Not long ago, during the run of the Cezanne exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Meyer Schapiro made an unscheduled appearance at an evening seminar organized by the museum. Allotted 20 minutes for his intervention, he began somewhat haltingly, with protestations of inadequacy and unreadiness. What he had to offer were mere scraps, he said — notes for an unfinished article. Neither they nor he would detain us for long.
And his first formulations did indeed seem both hesitant and flat. Undeterred by this, we sat tight and waited for the equivalent of the sonic boom: the point at which conventional “lecturing” is transcended. And, sure enough, it came: Ideas and connections of ideas procreation in a continuous and only partly premeditated flood, lighted from above by lightning‐flashes intuition and signalled on the speaker's face by a look of all‐embracing glee. All thoughts of time were discarded (the talk lasted an hour and 90 minutes) and we realized all over again that an idea is the most exciting thing there is. What we had in front of us was demonstration of selfless intellectual energy, the like of which we encounter only once or twice in a lifetime.
On that evening the immediate subject was Cezanne's intellectual development. Did he read John Russell is an art critic for The New York Times. the Latin classics by rote, for instance? Or did they come to inhabit, and even to infest, his inmost being? What exactly was the high‐school curriculum in the department of the Boucher-du-Rhone in the 1850's? Everyone knows that Cèzanne's friend Emile Zola defined art as “a corner of Nature seen through a temperament”; but what did the word “temperament” mean to Zola, and to Cèzanne? Meyer Schapiro had studied the question until he could have doubled as classmate of Cèzanne's and got away with it. All this he brought out with ever‐increasing confidence, until for the last hour of his talk it of vatic possession, almost, that he confronted us.
When it was over, we knew what we knew already: that Meyer Schapiro can look at great paintings with an exceptional intensity and penetration. But we also knew how those paintings can be related to the life of the mind with a vigour, a freedom and a breadth of reference that are peculiar to himself. The collective excitement that he can generate does not derive merely from the fact that a very learned man is sharing his knowledge with us. What excites us is the vertiginous proximity of Thought itself; or, to put it another way, the certainty that by the time we get up and go out of the room we shall see certain things of enduring importance in a completely new way.
For many years, people have been trying to perpetuate such evenings by making Professor Schapiro publish his lectures, or at any rate re‐publish such papers as have already appeared. Some of them are known by name to every serious student of modern art; but it is not everyone who can lay his hand on the “Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes” for that gloomiest of years, 1941, or the Festschrift, published in Mainz, West Germany, in 1976, in memory of Otto J. Brendel. Those are the kinds of publication that Meyer Schapiro has always favoured. Unlike those younger art historians who will seize any and every chance of getting into print, Meyer Schapiro would seem to believe that print kills; or, more exactly, that it freezes a discourse that ideally should forever.
It was doubtless difficult, therefore, for him to pass the proofs of Vol. 1 in this series: his “Romanesque Essays.” Some Of those papers date from the 1930's. Their subject matter I lodged for the most part in the 11th and 12th centuries. He had almost 5(1 years, in at leaone case, to perfect what hr hats written. The transition from Mozarabic to Romaine, que the abbey church of Silas, its Spain, to take only one subject, is not exactly a matter of everyday discussion, even among specialists. Hut it was with that greatest reluctance, and with talk of “imperfections, inconsistencies and unclear formulations” that Professor Schapiro finally gave these papers to the printer.
How much the more daunting, therefore, must have been the prospect of handing over his papers on modern art, where the issues involved are in continual evolution. Meyer Schapiro has been both witness and participant where modern art is concerned. At a time when academic art historians were by no means confident of modern art, he proved that it could be as rewarding, and should be studied as stringently, as the art of any other period. What he had to say was heeded by other scholars, by gifted students, by collectors, by museum people all over the country, and by more than one generation of artists. It would hardly be too much to say that in this matter he has been the conscience of this country for the best part of half a century. This is true with regard to older modern art, from Courbet and Cezanne onward; and it is also true with regard to the American artists of his own day, for whom he spoke out in the 1940's and 50's with a clarity and a freedom from condescension that put new ideas
Much of what appears in his “Modern Art” already has classic status — notably, “The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still Life,” “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” “On a Painting of van Gogh” and “New Light on Seurat.” Anyone who supposes that Centime's paintings of apples stand apart from his paintings of the human figure will be put on quite another path by Professor Schapiro. He will learn about the significance of the apple throughout history, about its appearances in Horace, Virgil and Propertius, and about it, effect on Emile Zola when he came upon it in the markets (0 Paris. He will then move front the meanings of the apple in Cezanne's paintings to Ivy meanings of still life in general.
Cross‐references to Yeats. Bergson, Kant, the “Saturnalia” of Mobius and the conversation of Andre Breton ant Alberta I cornett I will keep. Min on the alert ; and, just case it might seem that Meyer Schapiro is one of those art historians who are happier in the I Mary than they are in front of work of art, I must instance me of the many allusions to individual works of an that can server as a model to aspirant critics. In a lifetime of looking at the Giorgione “Concert Champerty” in the Louvre, how many of us had realized that the young men in the foreground stand for a social and aesthetic duality in matters of love, and that whereas “the shepherd's head resembles the great oak in its shaggy silhouette,” the young courtier's with its hat is in tune with the pitched marlines of the distant villa?
But these are auxiliary benefits. ‐the Apples of Cezanne” is fundamentally what its title suggests: an inquiry into the role of the object in still‐life painting, and into the way in which that object can stand for the vicissitudes of human feeling. Professor Schapiro spells this out in one of the ruminative conclusions that he puts forward rather quietly and with no wish to parade his own cleverness or put other scholars down. “In paintings of the apples,” he says, “Cezanne was able to express through their varied colours and groupings a wide range of moods, from the gravely contemplative to the sensual and ecstatic. In this carefully arranged society of perfectly submissive things the painters could project typical relations of human beings as well as qualities of the larger visible world — solitude, contact, accord, conflict, serenity, abundance and luxury -- and even states of elation and enjoyment.” That Cezanne trust his deepest feelings to that “carefully arranged society of submissive things” makes perfect sense, in view of what we know about his upbringing, his character and his relations with other human beings; but it took Meyer Schapiro to have that particular perception, and to work it out with a conclusive fullness.
Much in these essays defies quotation, so dense is the argument and so cumulative its effect. Sometimes the title gives no indication of the chief interest of the essay. Who could guess, for instance, that the paper (dated 1950) on the Armory Show carries secreted within as telling a brief history of the origins of the mislern movement as we slut II find where? Sometimes, as in the essay on Courbet, there are sidelong glances of a kind that would have occurred to no other writer at the time: the account, for instance, of Rodolphe Toepffer's pioneer investigation of children’s, of the ????? appeared in 1848. Sometimes there are instants of autobiography that bring a whole period to life, as when Professor Schapiro recalls how Arshile Gorky was as tar, in terms of space, from the European masters he admired as the painters of the Renaissance were from the ancients in terms of time. In the 1930's, he tells us, Picasso’s, Braque’s and Minis appeared in New York the way “Roman statuary has emerged from the ground in the 15th century to join the standing objects in the ruins.”
The last third of the book is taken up with papers on abstract art, and more especially on Mondrian. Meyer Schapiro knows very well that among the people who will read him there are some who still resent the idea, and still more so resent the fact, that “in the 20th century the ideal of an imageless art of painting has been realized for the first time.” He also knows that many of those people value abstract painting, if they value it at all, for what they consider its undemanding and decorative aspect. He himself believes, on the contrary, in imageless painting that is “without objects, yet with a syntax as complex as that of an art of representation.” How to justify that belief in terms that are universally persuasive is one of the central problems of the art of writing of the last 60 or 70 years.
In the case of Mondrian, he starts from the “Composition in White and Black” of 1916 in the Museum of Modern Art and shows that “what seems at first glance a square set within a diamond square — a banal motif of decorators and doodlers — becomes to the probing eye a complex design with a subtly balanced asymmetry of unequal lines.” He then moves from these formal considerations to the notion of the 17th‐century master Pieter Sanredam, for instance, who included a large diamond‐shaped escutcheon in his interior of the church of St. Bavo in Haarlem and also pioneered the kind of cropped or lopped‐off composition that Mondrian used over and over again.
It is the further particularity of Meyer Schapiro that by reason of the date of his birth (1904) and his enforced emigration at a very early age from his native Lithuania, he had an exceptional sympathy both with American painters such as Bar- nett Newman, whose experience paralleled his own, and with the more general phenomenon of exile that brought Mondrian to New York during World War II. No one either older or much younger than he could bring comparable depth and immediacy of feeling to the predicaments in question. Every student of Mondrian knows by now that “Broadway Boogie‐Woogie” has to do with jazz, on the one hand, and with the grid‐patterns of Manhattan on the other. But Meyer Schapiro was there at the time, and still quite young; and he spotted at once that in addition to the two self‐evident themes the painting is remarkable for its “vigilant planning for variation, balance and interest.” To be there at the time, and to look at new and difficult art in exactly the right way: those are the decisive challenges of art criticism, and the ones in relation to which almost all of us can be faulted.
Meyer Schapiro is not a brilliant writer, as that word is generally understood. When on his way to an important conclusion, his manner of speech is often workmanlike at best, as if he were out to avoid the kind of surface gloss in which we simply see the author's face reflected. But by getting his thoughts down on paper complete and entire, with nothing superfluous and nothing left out, he arrives tit a precision of statement that makes us think of “brilliance” as something to be shunned.
Nor does he write for a chosen few, or without regard for the exceptional demands that are made upon the observer by the art of our own time. Where others give in before what he calls “the exceptional variability of modern art” and wall themselves up with one single limited notion of it, Meyer Schapiro tells us that living art “requires from its audience a greater inner freedom and openness to others, and to unusual feelings and perceptions, than most people can achieve under modern conditions.” Of that openness, and of that inner freedom, he is our great exemplar.
By John Russei
The New York Times January 7, 1979
19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers. By Meyer Schapiro. Illustrated. 277pp. New York: George Braziller. $20.
To be in the hall when Meyer Schapiro speaks in public is to see exemplified a learning process of the highest and finest order. But Professor Schapiro is now well beyond academic retirement age and al- through his name will De perpetuate at Columbia University by a professorship (financed by artists who donated their work to be sold for the purpose), he no longer teaches a regular course. For this and other reasons, the publication of this book has been most keenly awaited.
Not long ago, during the run of the Cezanne exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Meyer Schapiro made an unscheduled appearance at an evening seminar organized by the museum. Allotted 20 minutes for his intervention, he began somewhat haltingly, with protestations of inadequacy and unreadiness. What he had to offer were mere scraps, he said — notes for an unfinished article. Neither they nor he would detain us for long.
And his first formulations did indeed seem both hesitant and flat. Undeterred by this, we sat tight and waited for the equivalent of the sonic boom: the point at which conventional “lecturing” is transcended. And, sure enough, it came: Ideas and connections of ideas procreation in a continuous and only partly premeditated flood, lighted from above by lightning‐flashes intuition and signalled on the speaker's face by a look of all‐embracing glee. All thoughts of time were discarded (the talk lasted an hour and 90 minutes) and we realized all over again that an idea is the most exciting thing there is. What we had in front of us was demonstration of selfless intellectual energy, the like of which we encounter only once or twice in a lifetime.
On that evening the immediate subject was Cezanne's intellectual development. Did he read John Russell is an art critic for The New York Times. the Latin classics by rote, for instance? Or did they come to inhabit, and even to infest, his inmost being? What exactly was the high‐school curriculum in the department of the Boucher-du-Rhone in the 1850's? Everyone knows that Cèzanne's friend Emile Zola defined art as “a corner of Nature seen through a temperament”; but what did the word “temperament” mean to Zola, and to Cèzanne? Meyer Schapiro had studied the question until he could have doubled as classmate of Cèzanne's and got away with it. All this he brought out with ever‐increasing confidence, until for the last hour of his talk it of vatic possession, almost, that he confronted us.
When it was over, we knew what we knew already: that Meyer Schapiro can look at great paintings with an exceptional intensity and penetration. But we also knew how those paintings can be related to the life of the mind with a vigour, a freedom and a breadth of reference that are peculiar to himself. The collective excitement that he can generate does not derive merely from the fact that a very learned man is sharing his knowledge with us. What excites us is the vertiginous proximity of Thought itself; or, to put it another way, the certainty that by the time we get up and go out of the room we shall see certain things of enduring importance in a completely new way.
For many years, people have been trying to perpetuate such evenings by making Professor Schapiro publish his lectures, or at any rate re‐publish such papers as have already appeared. Some of them are known by name to every serious student of modern art; but it is not everyone who can lay his hand on the “Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes” for that gloomiest of years, 1941, or the Festschrift, published in Mainz, West Germany, in 1976, in memory of Otto J. Brendel. Those are the kinds of publication that Meyer Schapiro has always favoured. Unlike those younger art historians who will seize any and every chance of getting into print, Meyer Schapiro would seem to believe that print kills; or, more exactly, that it freezes a discourse that ideally should forever.
It was doubtless difficult, therefore, for him to pass the proofs of Vol. 1 in this series: his “Romanesque Essays.” Some Of those papers date from the 1930's. Their subject matter I lodged for the most part in the 11th and 12th centuries. He had almost 5(1 years, in at leaone case, to perfect what hr hats written. The transition from Mozarabic to Romaine, que the abbey church of Silas, its Spain, to take only one subject, is not exactly a matter of everyday discussion, even among specialists. Hut it was with that greatest reluctance, and with talk of “imperfections, inconsistencies and unclear formulations” that Professor Schapiro finally gave these papers to the printer.
How much the more daunting, therefore, must have been the prospect of handing over his papers on modern art, where the issues involved are in continual evolution. Meyer Schapiro has been both witness and participant where modern art is concerned. At a time when academic art historians were by no means confident of modern art, he proved that it could be as rewarding, and should be studied as stringently, as the art of any other period. What he had to say was heeded by other scholars, by gifted students, by collectors, by museum people all over the country, and by more than one generation of artists. It would hardly be too much to say that in this matter he has been the conscience of this country for the best part of half a century. This is true with regard to older modern art, from Courbet and Cezanne onward; and it is also true with regard to the American artists of his own day, for whom he spoke out in the 1940's and 50's with a clarity and a freedom from condescension that put new ideas
Much of what appears in his “Modern Art” already has classic status — notably, “The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still Life,” “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” “On a Painting of van Gogh” and “New Light on Seurat.” Anyone who supposes that Centime's paintings of apples stand apart from his paintings of the human figure will be put on quite another path by Professor Schapiro. He will learn about the significance of the apple throughout history, about its appearances in Horace, Virgil and Propertius, and about it, effect on Emile Zola when he came upon it in the markets (0 Paris. He will then move front the meanings of the apple in Cezanne's paintings to Ivy meanings of still life in general.
Cross‐references to Yeats. Bergson, Kant, the “Saturnalia” of Mobius and the conversation of Andre Breton ant Alberta I cornett I will keep. Min on the alert ; and, just case it might seem that Meyer Schapiro is one of those art historians who are happier in the I Mary than they are in front of work of art, I must instance me of the many allusions to individual works of an that can server as a model to aspirant critics. In a lifetime of looking at the Giorgione “Concert Champerty” in the Louvre, how many of us had realized that the young men in the foreground stand for a social and aesthetic duality in matters of love, and that whereas “the shepherd's head resembles the great oak in its shaggy silhouette,” the young courtier's with its hat is in tune with the pitched marlines of the distant villa?
But these are auxiliary benefits. ‐the Apples of Cezanne” is fundamentally what its title suggests: an inquiry into the role of the object in still‐life painting, and into the way in which that object can stand for the vicissitudes of human feeling. Professor Schapiro spells this out in one of the ruminative conclusions that he puts forward rather quietly and with no wish to parade his own cleverness or put other scholars down. “In paintings of the apples,” he says, “Cezanne was able to express through their varied colours and groupings a wide range of moods, from the gravely contemplative to the sensual and ecstatic. In this carefully arranged society of perfectly submissive things the painters could project typical relations of human beings as well as qualities of the larger visible world — solitude, contact, accord, conflict, serenity, abundance and luxury -- and even states of elation and enjoyment.” That Cezanne trust his deepest feelings to that “carefully arranged society of submissive things” makes perfect sense, in view of what we know about his upbringing, his character and his relations with other human beings; but it took Meyer Schapiro to have that particular perception, and to work it out with a conclusive fullness.
Much in these essays defies quotation, so dense is the argument and so cumulative its effect. Sometimes the title gives no indication of the chief interest of the essay. Who could guess, for instance, that the paper (dated 1950) on the Armory Show carries secreted within as telling a brief history of the origins of the mislern movement as we slut II find where? Sometimes, as in the essay on Courbet, there are sidelong glances of a kind that would have occurred to no other writer at the time: the account, for instance, of Rodolphe Toepffer's pioneer investigation of children’s, of the ????? appeared in 1848. Sometimes there are instants of autobiography that bring a whole period to life, as when Professor Schapiro recalls how Arshile Gorky was as tar, in terms of space, from the European masters he admired as the painters of the Renaissance were from the ancients in terms of time. In the 1930's, he tells us, Picasso’s, Braque’s and Minis appeared in New York the way “Roman statuary has emerged from the ground in the 15th century to join the standing objects in the ruins.”
The last third of the book is taken up with papers on abstract art, and more especially on Mondrian. Meyer Schapiro knows very well that among the people who will read him there are some who still resent the idea, and still more so resent the fact, that “in the 20th century the ideal of an imageless art of painting has been realized for the first time.” He also knows that many of those people value abstract painting, if they value it at all, for what they consider its undemanding and decorative aspect. He himself believes, on the contrary, in imageless painting that is “without objects, yet with a syntax as complex as that of an art of representation.” How to justify that belief in terms that are universally persuasive is one of the central problems of the art of writing of the last 60 or 70 years.
In the case of Mondrian, he starts from the “Composition in White and Black” of 1916 in the Museum of Modern Art and shows that “what seems at first glance a square set within a diamond square — a banal motif of decorators and doodlers — becomes to the probing eye a complex design with a subtly balanced asymmetry of unequal lines.” He then moves from these formal considerations to the notion of the 17th‐century master Pieter Sanredam, for instance, who included a large diamond‐shaped escutcheon in his interior of the church of St. Bavo in Haarlem and also pioneered the kind of cropped or lopped‐off composition that Mondrian used over and over again.
It is the further particularity of Meyer Schapiro that by reason of the date of his birth (1904) and his enforced emigration at a very early age from his native Lithuania, he had an exceptional sympathy both with American painters such as Bar- nett Newman, whose experience paralleled his own, and with the more general phenomenon of exile that brought Mondrian to New York during World War II. No one either older or much younger than he could bring comparable depth and immediacy of feeling to the predicaments in question. Every student of Mondrian knows by now that “Broadway Boogie‐Woogie” has to do with jazz, on the one hand, and with the grid‐patterns of Manhattan on the other. But Meyer Schapiro was there at the time, and still quite young; and he spotted at once that in addition to the two self‐evident themes the painting is remarkable for its “vigilant planning for variation, balance and interest.” To be there at the time, and to look at new and difficult art in exactly the right way: those are the decisive challenges of art criticism, and the ones in relation to which almost all of us can be faulted.
Meyer Schapiro is not a brilliant writer, as that word is generally understood. When on his way to an important conclusion, his manner of speech is often workmanlike at best, as if he were out to avoid the kind of surface gloss in which we simply see the author's face reflected. But by getting his thoughts down on paper complete and entire, with nothing superfluous and nothing left out, he arrives tit a precision of statement that makes us think of “brilliance” as something to be shunned.
Nor does he write for a chosen few, or without regard for the exceptional demands that are made upon the observer by the art of our own time. Where others give in before what he calls “the exceptional variability of modern art” and wall themselves up with one single limited notion of it, Meyer Schapiro tells us that living art “requires from its audience a greater inner freedom and openness to others, and to unusual feelings and perceptions, than most people can achieve under modern conditions.” Of that openness, and of that inner freedom, he is our great exemplar.
September 25, 2013
The essays in this collection are for the most part excellent, and differ from much "art speak" in that the author is not adverse to using clear language.
The Mondrian article is especially incisive. He has three essays on abstract art from different time periods, before ascendency in American art (30's) at ascendency (50's), and post-ascendency (60's). He is a bit apologetic about the earlier essays, but they are all pretty good (and of their time).
I felt the sprawling essay on Cezanne, which makes the probably valid point that he was somewhat afraid of the figure, and that he transferred his erotic and romantic feelings to apples, a bit too labored, although never unclear, and an exception to the general rule that these essays are reasonably tightly constructed.
The Mondrian article is especially incisive. He has three essays on abstract art from different time periods, before ascendency in American art (30's) at ascendency (50's), and post-ascendency (60's). He is a bit apologetic about the earlier essays, but they are all pretty good (and of their time).
I felt the sprawling essay on Cezanne, which makes the probably valid point that he was somewhat afraid of the figure, and that he transferred his erotic and romantic feelings to apples, a bit too labored, although never unclear, and an exception to the general rule that these essays are reasonably tightly constructed.
May 5, 2013
The essay "The Armory Show" is rich, especially in its second half, with ideas about the role of naturalistic art in society and about the role of modernist painting in considerations of human expression and how it is influenced by capitalism. Lots of material for those looking to explore ways into modernism and literature at the time of the show, and some juicy bits about the way film works in a room in comparison to how paintings exist before a viewer.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews