NOTES
1. Olin, Margaret, “Violating the Second Commandment's Taboo: Why Art Historian Meyer Schapiro Took on Bernard Berenson,” Forward 98 (11 4, 1994): 23.
2. Rosenberg, Harold, “Is There a Jewish Art?” in Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 230.
3. Greenberg, Clement, “Kafka's Jewishness,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1965), 273.
5. Greenberg, Clement, “The Impressionists and Proust,” Nation 163 (08 31, 1946): 247. (Review of Proust and Painting by Maurice Chernowitz.)
6. Greenberg, Clement, “David Smith's New Sculpture,” Art International 8 (05 1964): 37.
7. Schapiro, Meyer, “Chagall's Illustrations for the Bible” (1956), in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 2: 133.
9. Schapiro, Meyer, “Cézanne” (1959), in Modern Art, 40.
10. Schapiro, Meyer, “Mr. Berenson's Values” (1961), in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 4: 225.
11. Olin, , “Violating,” 23.
12. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 225.
15. Quoted in Wiggershaus, Rolf, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 6.
17. Schapiro, Meyer, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” (1947), in Romanesque Art, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 1: 8.
18. Schapiro, Meyer, “The Sculptures of Souillac” (1939), in Romanesque Art, 104.
19. Schapiro, Meyer, “Nature of Abstract Art” (1937), in Modern Art, 186
20. Schapiro, Meyer, “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957), in Modern Art, 224.
21. Schapiro, , “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” 1.
22. Schapiro, , “Recent Abstract Painting,” 215. Schapiro qualifies this more concretely: “The pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture that becomes increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state intensifies the desire of the artist to create forms that will manifest his liberty in this striking [abstract] way” (222). It is worth noting that Schapiro follows Alois Riegl's method in finding “a necessary creative link” between Romanesque and modern abstract art (Schapiro, , “Style” (1962), in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 78).
23. Schapiro, , “Nature of Abstract Art,” 193.
24. Schapiro, , “Sculptures of Souillac,” 104.
25. Schapiro, , “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” 22.
26. Schapiro, Meyer, “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naivete” (1941), in Modern Art, 73.
27. Schapiro, Meyer, “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ The Symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 27 (1945): 185.
29. Schapiro, Meyer, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I” (1931), in Romanesque Art, 187–88.
30. Schapiro, , “Sculptures of Souillac,” 107, 113–14.
31. Schapiro pays a good deal of attention to the intense color contrasts that prevail in Cézanne's and van Gogh's paintings (Paul Cézanne [New York: Abrams, 1965], 11–12; and Vincent van Gogh [New York: Abrams, 1950], 19–22). This is not unlike the “intense … burning, heraldically bright… bands of contrasted color … spontaneous primitive” visionary color in “The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona,” a medieval manuscript (Art News 61 [1963]: 50). In “From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos” (1939) (Romanesque Art, 35) he describes “Mozarabic painting as an art of color,” using “constantly varied, maximum oppositions in the color through the contrasts of hue (and, to a lesser extent, of value),” and observes that in the “Beatus manuscripts color is felt as a universal force, active in every point and transcending objects”.
It is worth noting that in his recurrent emphasis on “polar meanings,” “polarity expressed through … contrasted positions,” “polar structure,” and “development between two poles” – to cite various references to polar thinking in his book Words and Pictures: On the Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973) and his essay on “Style” – Schapiro strongly resembles Alfred North Whitehead. In Process and Reality (New York: Humanities, 1955), Whitehead argues that the “doctrine of multiple contrasts … when there are or may be more than two elements jointly contrasted” is “a commonplace of art” (349). He also writes, “The organism's” creative achievement of “depth of experience” involves “suppressing the mere multiplicities of things, and designing its own contrasts. The canons of art are merely the expression, in specialized forms, of the requisites of depth of experience” (483). Finally, Whitehead philosophizes that “the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites – of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the ‘opposites’ are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there”. They justify “the aesthetic value of discords in art” (531). It is in effect a “minor exemplification” of major, universal opposites.
32. Schapiro, Meyer, “The Younger American Painters of Today,” Listener 55 (01 26, 1956): 147.
33. Schapiro, Meyer, in “An Illuminated English Psalter” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 [1960]: 183), observes that “the motif of the crossed legs is a general attribute of the ruler, whether good or evil; it isolates him from ordinary mankind, which sits or stands supported by both feet alike”. It is perhaps the most exemplary instance of what Schapiro calls “chiasmic symmetry”.
34. Schapiro, Meyer and seminar, , “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 55 (1973): 518.
35. Schapiro, , “From Mozarabic,” 83 n. 87.
37. Schapiro, , “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” 26 n. 10.
39. Schapiro, Meyer, “Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting” (1978), in Modern Art, 235.
40. Schapiro, , Vincent van Gogh, 29–30.
42. Schapiro, , Paul Cézanne, 27.
46. Schapiro, , Vincent van Gogh, 8.
48. Schapiro, , Words and Pictures, 48.
49. Schapiro, Meyer, “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art” (1932), in Romanesque Art, 268.
50. Schapiro, Meyer, “Freud and Leonardo: An Art Historical Study” (1956), in Theory and Philosophy of Art. See also, in the same book, “Further Notes on Freud and Leonardo” (1994). Schapiro's critique of Freud's psychoanalysis of Leonardo is eloquently epitomized in footnote 9 to “On the Relation of Patron and Artist: Comments on a Proposed Model for the Scientist” (1964) in the same book. Schapiro notes (237) that “Leonardo's slowness of work,” which Freud interprets as “a neurotic sign,” was a “more common characteristic [of artists] than Freud suspected. If one believes that Leonardo's failures to deliver were greater than those of other artists, it is also true that he has left us more writings, scientific observations, and technical inventions than any artist of the Renaissance, and perhaps of all time”. Such slowness has to do with difficulties of creative work, not neurotic inhibition, although that may no doubt play a role.
51. Schapiro's “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art” takes as its point of departure Jurgis Baltrusiatis's La Stylistique Ornementale dans la Sculpture Romane (1931).
52. Schapiro, 's “Nature of Abstract Art” takes as its point of departure Barr, Alfred H. Jr's Cubism and Abstract Art (1936).
53. Schapiro, , “Nature of Abstract Art,” 222.
54. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 222.
56. Schapiro, Meyer, “Diderot on the Artist and Society,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 206.
60. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 224.
61. Schapiro, Meyer, “Eugene Fromentin as Critic,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 105.
62. Schapiro, Meyer, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 6.
63. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 212.
67. Schapiro, , “On the Relation of Patron and Artist: Comments on a Proposed Model for the Scientist,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 237.
68. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 211.
69. As early as 1967, Clement Greenberg, in “Where Is the Avant-Garde?” described it as “hypertrophied” and “institutional,” later noting that “when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over” (Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969: The Collected Essays and Criticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 4:261–62, 299). Harold Rosenberg notes a similar “fashionabilizing” of the avant-garde, in “The Avant-Garde” (1969) (Discovering the Present [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973], 86).
