Volume 26, Number 6 · April 19, 1979
Master Classes
By Roger Shattuck
Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Papers, Volume II
by Meyer Schapiro
Braziller, 277 pp., $20.00
In April 1957 the two principal speakers before the American Federation of Arts meeting in Houston were Marcel Duchamp, proto-Dada and practicing non-artist, then seventy years old, and Meyer Schapiro, a Columbia University art historian best known for his articles on Early Christian, Romanesque, and nineteenth-century French art. In an almost symmetrical reversal of roles, Duchamp read a sober (and probably ironic) assessment of the spectator's considerable role in 'the creative act' and cited Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent.' Schapiro delivered an eloquent hortatory defense of contemporary abstract-impressionist painting emphasizing its spontaneity, randomness, automatism, and the self-sufficiency of its pure forms and colors.
Review, 5466 words
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