Meyer Schapiro

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Meyer Schapiro (born September 23, 1904 in Schaulen , Kovno Governorate , Russian Empire , † March 3, 1996 in New York City ) was an American art historian of Lithuanian-Jewish descent.

Childhood and youth

Meyer Schapiro was born in Lithuania as the second son of Jewish parents. His parents were descendants of Talmudic scholars .

Due to the increasing anti-Semitism in Russia , to which Lithuania belonged around this time, his father Nathan Menachem Schapiro decided to emigrate to the USA in 1906 . The father's plan was to find work first so that the family could later use the money he saved to bring them back. The father worked as a Hebrew teacher after his arrival in the Lower East Side district of New York . After a year, Nathan Menachem Schapiro had enough money to send to his family. These followed him to the USA in 1907. Meyer, then 3 years old, arrived on Ellis Island with his mother, Fanny Adelman Schapiro, and his older brother Morris Schapiro . There the formalities regarding the entry into the USA were clarified. On Ellis Island, his original name "Meir" (the real first name Schapiros) was changed to Meyer. He and his family moved to Brownsville , a borough of Brooklyn . His father worked as a successful cord and paper dealer during that time .

schooldays

Meyer Schapiro went to school in Brooklyn. First to the "Public School 84", then later to the Boys High School, which he successfully completed in 1920 at the age of 16 and where he received consistently good grades in Latin and mathematics . In his spare time he attended various Young People's Socialist League lectures on anthropology and economics . During his school days, encouraged by his parents, he also dealt with photography and the development of images , both of which he learned in a class of John French Sloan .

Academic work

Schapiro spent his entire professional career at Columbia University in New York. After studying there, among others with Mark Van Doren and Franz Boas , he became an assistant professor in 1928, before he had completed his dissertation on the Romanesque monastery of Moissac in 1929 . In 1952 he received a full professorship at his alma mater. Schapiro's early focus was on modern art , including books on Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne . In 1939 he wrote two fundamental essays on Romanesque sculpture and medieval Spanish-Arabic art. In 1950 he was at the side of Barnett Newman , whom he secretly supported with learned arguments against his adversary Erwin Panofsky , involved in the so-called Vir Heroicus Sublimis controversy .

Meyer Schapiro showed in his works that the artistic style can not only be used to identify artistic periods, but also as a concrete means of investigation. According to Schapiro, the style of a work of art is not only given by its formal and optical qualities, but also provides information about the social and economic conditions under which the work was created. A work of art thus also reveals a society's cultural ideas and normative values. Furthermore, the type of description of works of art also provides information about our own time. The way historians write about works of art allow conclusions to be drawn about their own cultural context. Schapiro is an art historian who asks questions before making any claims , stated Werner Hofmann in his laudation on the award of the Aby M. Warburg Prize.

Throughout his career, he was accused of his Marxist views, not just the art-historical revolutionary analysis of the change in style in sociological terms, but his convictions. The New York art critic Barbara Rose , a student of Schapiro, admired his political straightforwardness. Schapiro was one of the very few who did not turn away from socialism, as one had to do in the 1950s. She calls him a lifelong Marxist (without fanaticism).

Honors

Trivia

On his 70th birthday in 1974, twelve artists donated graphics to finance his endowed professorship ; this bears his name in his honor. These twelve artists were: Jasper Johns , Ellsworth Kelly , Alexander Liberman , Stanley William Hayter , Roy Lichtenstein , André Masson , Robert Motherwell , Claes Oldenburg , Robert Rauschenberg , Frank Stella , Andy Warhol and Saul Steinberg .

On the 90th birthday of Meyer Schapiro, his brother Morris Schapiro donated 1 million dollars to receive the "Meyer Schapiro Professorship of Modern Art and Theory".

literature

  • The Language of Forms: Lectures on Insular Manuscript Art . Foreword by Charles E. Pierce, introduction by Jane E. Rosenthal. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-87598-140-2 .
  • Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society , Braziller, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-8076-1356-8 .
  • Modern art - 19th and 20th centuries , DuMont, Cologne, 1982. ISBN 3-7701-1180-X .
  • Paul Cezanne . New York 1952. German translation Cologne 1956.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See article Vir heroicus sublimis of the English Wikipedia
  2. ↑ Petra Kipphoff: The inter-man. The American art historian Meyer Schapiro received the Aby M. Warburg Prize in Hamburg. Die Zeit , April 19, 1985, accessed December 4, 2018 .
  3. ^ I admired his uncompromising character and his political stance. (Barbara Rose). Amy Newman: Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974. Soho Press, New York, 2000, p. 57.
  4. ^ A life-long Marxist with a small m . Amy Newman (2000), p. 57.
  5. ↑ Member History: Meyer Schapiro. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 27, 2019 .
  6. ^ Members: Meyer Schapiro. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 24, 2019 .
  7. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 28, 2020 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Schapiro, Meyer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American art historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Schaulen , Kovno Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1996
Place of death New York City , United States