"Schapiro's letters to his future wife, Lillian Milgram, were written in 1926 and 1927, while he was a graduate student touring the artistic monuments of Europe and the Near East. Bearing intimate witness to this formative journey, they augment the visual and factual details he so painstakingly recorded in his notebooks with impassioned reflections on art and lively accounts of his encounters with an older generation of art historians."--Back cover.

Presents a revision of the late Columbia University art historian's lectures given at Indiana University in 1961.

How can we profitably compare art and philosophy? In the first part of this collection of twenty-one writings, many previously unpublished, Schapiro uses specific works of art to elucidate the rich variety of ways in which artists and art movements have been compared with philosophical systems. His highly lucid arguments, graceful prose, and extraordinary erudition offer new opportunities to broaden and enrich our understanding of even the most familiar works of art. In the second part of the collection, Schapiro explores aspects of our everyday experiences with art: the value of modern art, social realism, revolutionary art, art as a cause of violence, the art market, the public support of artists, public art commissions, church art, and others. Here, in essays that range in a period of more than forty years, we witness Schapiro's unfailing dedication both to the liberty of the artist and to the integration of the arts in society. Throughout all of his writings, Schapiro provides us with a means of ordering our past that is reasoned and passionate, methodical and inventive. In so doing, he revitalizes our faith in the unsurpassed importance of critical thinking and creative independence.

Meyer Schapiro (1904-96), renowned for his critical essays on 19th and 20th century painting, also played a decisive role as a young scholar in defining the style of art and architecture known as Romanesque. This is a transcribed and edited version of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.

Described in the New York Times as the greatest art historian America ever produced, Meyer Schapiro was both a close friend to many of the famous artists of his generation and a scholar who engaged in public debate with some of the major intellectuals of his time. This volume synthesizes his prolific career for the first time, demonstrating how Schapiro worked from the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice to confront some of the twentieth century’s most abiding questions. Schapiro was renowned for pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to interpreting visual art. His lengthy formal analyses in the 1920s, Marxist interpretations in the 1930s, psychoanalytic critiques in the 1950s and 1960s, and semiotic explorations in the 1970s all helped open new avenues for inquiry. Based on archival research, C. Oliver O’Donnell’s study is structured chronologically around eight defining debates in which Schapiro participated, including his dispute with Isaiah Berlin over the life and writing of Bernard Berenson, Schapiro’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s ekphrastic commentary on Van Gogh, and his confrontation with Claude Lévi-Strauss over the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of visual art. O’Donnell’s thoughtful analysis of these intellectual exchanges not only traces Schapiro’s philosophical evolution but also relates them to the development of art history as a discipline, to central tensions of artistic modernism, and to modern intellectual history as a whole. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this study of Schapiro’s career pieces together the separate strands of his work into one cohesive picture. In doing so, it reveals Schapiro’s substantial impact on the field of art history and on twentieth-century modernism.