Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
The Artist Historian
By Willibald Sauerländer
Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
by Meyer Schapiro, edited and with an introduction by Linda Seidel
University of Chicago Press, 227 pp., $40.00
A decade after his death, Meyer Schapiro is remembered as the most inspiring and imaginative American art historian of the past century. Although a distinguished professor of medieval art at Columbia, he was best known as a public intellectual who was as deeply interested in the contemporary art scene as in the art of the past. His legendary lectures attracted not only students and scholars from neighboring fields but also—and more importantly—many well-known New York artists. He was immensely learned, but followed his own idiosyncratic approach. Asked how he managed to move so effortlessly in his work from the early Middle Ages to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he is said to have answered: 'I skipped the Renaissance.' He never wrote a single great book, but his numerous articles and essays made enormous contributions to art scholarship. During the Thirties he had been drawn to Marxism—more precisely to Trotskyism—but he was never dogmatic and strongly opposed the excesses of Stalin. Above all, he believed in the autonomy of art, and viewed abstract painting as the last expression of uninhibited creativity and fantasy in a social world dominated by technology and industrial production.
Review, 5374 words
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