Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro

Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) trained as a scholar of Romanesque and Early Christian art, publishing seminal articles on subjects ranging from the ancient world to twentieth-century art. His writings on iconography, theory, and the semiotics of visual art were especially influential, and his interests included film, photography, psychology, sociology, and social criticism, as well as various kinds of visual art.

Schapiro’s evolution as an acute observer and defender of art history was informed by his exploration of formal analysis, Marxist interpretations, psychoanalytic critiques, and semiotics, and was integral to the collective artistic and intellectual struggles that took place during his own time. Schapiro was as comfortable in his study as he was in artists’ studios and cafés, conversing with friends and colleagues from different disciplines in the arts and humanities. His longtime friend Sir Isaiah Berlin once said, “Meyer possesses [the] lucid mind of a classic hedgehog while maintaining [the] sensuous body of a cunning fox. But any time, at will, he can swiftly turn the latter into a thinking body, and the former into a feeling mind.”

I met Meyer Schapiro and his wife Lillian in the summer of 1986. They became my close friends and mentors until his death in 1996 and hers in 2006. After our customary weekly walks—which were followed by dinners at their home in the West Village—I met their vast circle of friends and colleagues, including Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Annalee Newman, William Rubin, Barbara Rose, Allan Kaprow, Wolf Kahn, Emily Mason, Barbara White, Charles Rosen, Robert Bergman, David Shapiro, and L.S. Asekoff, among others. Most of our conversations reflected how members of this community supported each other in their shared struggle. While each individual held onto his or her desire to be a part of the dialogue of American life, they all remained at odds with conformity. They inevitably created an ideological and communal unity that could resist any political or aesthetic dogma.

In addition to being a writer, Schapiro created works of visual art, compelled by the idea, as he once wrote, that “style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the overall outlook of a group are visible.” This exhibition is a testament to the community that Schapiro and his colleagues forged together, which, in turn, gave birth to The Brooklyn Rail in October 2000. 

Singing in Unison, Part 13 features a selection of works by Schapiro alongside works by artists with whom he shared relationships at various times throughout his long and productive life.