a series of interviews (july 15, 1992-january 22, 1995) · pdf file7/15/1992 ·...

A series of interviews (July 15, 1992-January 22, 1995)

MEYER SCHAPIRO and LILLIAN MILGRAM SCHAPIRO with DAVID CRAVEN

Introduction

From July 15, 1992, until October 1, 1995, I

interviewed Meyer Schapiro and his wife Dr. Lillian

Milgram about fifteen times. The longest of these

interviews, those at their homes in Rawsonville, Vermont

and on West 4th Street in New York City, lasted about

six hours. The shortest of these interviews (by telephone) lasted only between twenty minutes and an hour. In July 1992, I first arranged to meet with the Schapiros for an

interview and visit, after having been invited by Richard

Wrigley to be the guest editor of a special issue of the

Oxford Art Journal that would pay homage to Meyer

Schapiro in 1994, the year of his 90th birthday. As a consequence of the trust and friendship that

developed between the Schapiros and myself through these interviews, they allowed me in May 1993 to

consult the unpublished "Personal Papers of Meyer

Schapiro" at his home in New York. This permission was

granted in order to help me to clarify or amend various

points about his views on art and politics in the art

historical literature. The highlights transcribed here from

this lengthy series of interviews disclose much that was

not previously in print about Meyer Schapiro's lifelong commitment to social justice in tandem with vanguard art. I am much indebted to the late Meyer Schapiro and

Lillian Milgram for sharing their rare time and numerous

unpublished documents with me.

David Craven

Interviews with Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram

Schapiro (1992-1995)

David Craven: It has been suggested by some people that

you were involved behind the scenes in the Erwin Ranofsky/ Barnett Newman debate that took place in the pages of Art

News in 1961. Could you confirm or refute this claim?

Meyer Schapiro: Yes, I was in Israel in the Spring of

1961 when I read Panofsky's letter in Art News. I sent

Barnie one letter, with the understanding that my counsel

be kept confidential, in which I pointed out that Panofsky was wrong. I told him to check a large Latin Dictionary and he would see that both "sublimis" and "sublimus"

are acceptable, as demonstrated by their appearance

together in Cicero's citation of a passage from Accius.

Both bits of advice appear in the first letter. Everything else in those two letters was contributed by Barnie himself.1

DC: What type of relationship did you have with the

philosopher John Dewey?

MS: I was a student of John Dewey, whose classes I

very much enjoyed. Dewey asked me to do a critical

reading of Art as Experience in manuscript form.2 The

book is important, of course, but it is marked by a

tendency to treat humanity and art as extensions of

nature, as products of nature, without dealing with how

humanity reshapes and remakes nature, hence also

itself. This lack of emphasis on mediating nature, on

humanity using craft and art to redefine itself, is a

problem of the book.

DC: Did you ever meet the Marxist theoretician Karl

Korsch when he was in the U.S.?

MS: I admire his work very much, but I only met him once or twice. His critique of the Stalinist misuse of

Marx's thought is of fundamental importance.3

In September 1996, Dr. Lillian Milgram kindly read my

transcription of the interviews, in order to corroborate the accuracy of

its content and to make some scholarly editorial suggestions.

1. The letter by Panofsky initiating the debate appeared in the

April 1961 issue of Art News. Newman's response, in the May 1961

issue of Art News, did include the above noted information supplied

by Schapiro. The September 1961 issue concluded the exchange with yet another letter by Panofsky along with a fine response by Newman to it.

2. John Dewey, Artas Experience (1934; reprint, New York: G. P.

Putnam's Sons, 1980). In the Preface, Dewey wrote: "Dr. Meyer

Schapiro was good enough to read the twelfth and thirteenth chapters and to make suggestions which I freely adopted."

3. See Karl Korsch, "Leading Principles of Marxism: A

Restatement," Marxist Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1937):356-378. As one of

160 RES 31 SPRING 1997

Figure 1. Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram, August 1991, Rawsonville, Vermont.

Photograph: Susan Raines.

Schapiro, Milgram, and Craven: Documents 161

DC: How often did you see Diego Rivera and

Frida Kahlo when they were in New York City in the

early 1930s?

MS: We met with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

several times. Diego was very entertaining and on one

occasion he railed with great emphasis against color

reproductions of artworks.

Lillian Milgram: Frida was quite taken with Meyer. She gave him gifts a few times, including a pre Columbian figurine that we still have.

DC: On October 6, 1977, the French philosopher

Jacques Derrida gave a presentation at Columbia

University, in which he responded to your refutation of

Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh's 1886 oil

painting of shoes that is now in the Van Gogh Museum

in Amsterdam.4 This presentation by Derrida would later

appear in a longer version as "Restitutions" in his book

La V?rit? en Peinture (1978).5 Derrida's paper is

surprising because of how the whole tenor of the piece becomes so shrilly ad hominem.

Yet on the one occasion when I had a chance to talk

with Derrida up close, in April of 1983 when he was

speaking at Cornell University, I found him to be quite

approachable and unpretentious, even though I was

taking issue with some things that he had said in his

public talk about Western Marxism.6 He welcomed this

exchange and was much more put off by the

sycophantic behavior of some other people in

attendance. This is why I find Derrida's reaction to you so surprising and perhaps uncharacteristic. What

happened at his presentation in 1977?

MS: He was challenged strongly by many people in

the audience. I was abrupt with him, because he neither

understood nor cared to understand the nature of my criticism. Furthermore, I discovered later that Heidegger

changed his interpretation of the Van Gogh painting when he did an annotated commentary of his own essay and that he ended up admitting that he was uncertain

about whose shoes they were. This material will appear in volume 4 of my selected writings.

. . . One of

Derrida's obvious shortcomings is that he entirely

disregards artistic intention in his analysis.7

DC: How well did you know the remarkable school

of political economists who edited the Monthly Review, which was started in 1949? I am thinking especially of

Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, the latter of whom

praised your editorial help in one of his most well

known books.8

MS: I knew Leo Huberman well in the 1930s, but we

lost touch after that. I never met Sweezy, but I know and

respect his writings.9

DC: Were you harassed by the U.S. Government

during the McCarthy Period?

MS: The F.B.I, visited us in the 1950s to ask whether or not certain students of mine were "reds." They visited

us again in the 1960s to ask me whether or not J. J.

Sweeney was a "red," since he had once invited Leger to the US !!

the founding editors of this journal, Meyer Schapiro was among those

responsible for the publication of this essay by Korsch. For a sustained

discussion of the theoretical links between the two, see David Craven,

"Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, and the Emergence of Critical Theory," Oxford Art Journah 7, no. 1 (1994):42-54.

4. Meyer Schapiro, "The Still Life as a Personal Object?A Note

on Heidegger and Van Gogh" (1968), in Selected Papers of Meyer

Schapiro. Vol. 4, Theory and Philosophy of Art (New York: George

Braziller, 1994), pp. 135-142.

5. Jacques Derrida, "Restitutions," in La V?rit? en Peinture (The

Truth in Painting), trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (1978;

reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 255-282.

6. Derrida only recently published an excellent defense of a

certain reading of Marxism, specifically what he termed a critical

"spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce." See

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York:

Routledge, 1994), pp. 88-92.

7. The text of Heidegger's handwritten revision of his position in

his own personal copy of "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," is

published in Meyer Schapiro, "Further Notes on Heidegger and Van

Gogh," in Selected Papers of Meyer Schapiro. Vol. 4, Theory and

Philosophy of Art (New York: George Braziller, 1994), p. 150.

8. See Leo Huberman, Man's Worldly Goods (1936; reprint, New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1952). In the Preface to this book, Huberman thanked "Dr. Meyer Schapiro, for his critical reading of the

manuscript and stimulating suggestions." 9. Even before becoming a founding editor of Monthly Review in

1949 (he had taught economics at Harvard until 1946), Sweezy had

made his name in 1942 in the field of economics with a celebrated

book, The Theory of Capitalist Development. A revised edition appeared in 1970 through Monthly Review Press. As period remarks on the cover

of the book declare, "Since its first publication in 1942, this book has

become the classic analytical study of Marxist economics." For a very fine discussion of the contribution of the Monthly Review School of

political economists to the emergence of Dependency Theory in the

Americas, see Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez Soto, Fire in the

Americas (London: Verso Press, 1987), pp. 35-37.


LM: When they visited us in the 1950s, they had first

asked all of our neighbors about Meyer's communist

affiliationsU

DC: What do you think of Serge Guilbaut's book How

New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art from ParisV0

MS: Not much. I never finished reading it. The title

alone is rather silly. All art is "taken" from other art.

DC: What of your relationship with Clement

Greenberg over the years? After all, his interpretation of

Abstract Expressionism is quite at odds with yours.

MS: In the 1940s we were on friendly terms, but I

grew increasingly disturbed by Greenberg's dogmatic formalism, by his refusal to grant artistic intention or

social context, much less iconography, any place in

analysis. . . . The problem is that Greenberg does not

know how to characterize a painting. ... In the early

1960s, I was asked to write a piece about Greenberg, which I did. But the essay was so negative that I decided

to withhold publishing it.

From an interview at the summer home of the

Schapiro's in Rawsonvi I le, Vermont, July 15, 1992

DC: What of your political involvements on the left

since the 1950s? This is a question that needs to be

asked because there are those who erroneously claim

that in the early 1940s you came to reject socialism and

the writings of Marx.11

MS: What are the political credentials of those who

say this? What type of activism have they engaged in? I

am still a member of the steering committee of the

Democratic Socialists of America and I am still on the

editorial board of Dissent, a socialist magazine. I was a

founding editor of the Marxist Quarterly and I continue

to recommend that people read Marx as a way of

discovering conceptual tools for grappling with an

analysis of art and society. I am, like Irving Howe,

against all slogans and labeling. Our views of socialism

often overlap.12

DC: Were you active in the anti-war movement in the

1960s and 1970s?

MS: Yes, I was always opposed to the war. In 1968 I

spoke at Columbia's largest anti-war rally, along with a

professor in physics.13 I worked in the anti-war

movement and the democratic socialist movement with

Michael Harrington.

From a telephone interview, August 20, 1992

DC: Were you and T. W. Adorno friends when he was

in New York City from 1938 to 1941 with other members of the Frankfurt School, all of whom were

affiliated with Columbia University?

MS: Adorno and I were close then. I saw him

constantly and he was very friendly with me. We usually discussed the political situation in Germany, which

disturbed Adorno greatly. He lived on the Upper West

Side near Columbia, so he would drop in on me often.

While I was on the board of the Brooklyn Academy of

Music, I arranged to have Adorno give a talk on

Schonberg's music and also to have Walter Gropius

speak on the Bauhaus. Both of these talks were held at

the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1939. ... Of all the

members of the Frankurt School, Leo Lowenthal was the

one with whom I have had the longest relationship. We

have been friends since the 1930s. [He died in 1993.] His primary field was European, specifically German

literature, and he had a broad interest in theoretical

problems. In the late 1930s, he was the book review

editor for the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung. At a

10. Serge Gui Ibaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art

from Paris, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1983).

11. This is of course what Guilbaut, among others, claims (see

note 10), chap. 1.

12. For a moving tribute to Meyer Schapiro's lifelong commitment

to democratic socialism, see Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 237-238: "From the start

[in 1954], Meyer Schapiro, the art historian served as an editor [for

Dissent] ... we were happy to have so eminent a mind ready to stand

by us. . . . It mattered much that Meyer Schapiro attended some board

meetings, speaking in his passionately lucid way about socialism as

the fulfillment of Western tradition."

13. For a thoughtful and insightful look at Schapiro's relation to the

anti-war movement, see Francis Frascina, "Meyer Schapiro's Choice:

My Lai, Guernica, MOMA, and the Art Left, 1969-70," pts. 1-2,

Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995):481 -511, 705-728.


Figure 2. Meyer Schapiro, drawing of architectural components of Notre Dame de la

Couture, Le Mans, late 1920s. Pen and ink. Photograph: Karen Berman.


memorial ceremony in 1967 at the Goethe House in

New York City for Siegfried Kracauer, Lowenthal and I

were the two main speakers.14

DC: What of your famous article on Santo Domingo de Silos?15 Did it mark a fundamental shift in your

approach to analyzing art? Was it influenced by Soviet

thought, specifically by Mikhail Lifshitz's 1938

interpretation of Marxism and art?16

MS: I have never read the book by Lifshitz, nor am I

interested in doing so. The conceptual framework for my 1939 Silos article was first used in my 1929 dissertation

on Moissac. The third part of this dissertation, which has

never been published, uses a Marxist concept of

history.17 Originally, after the first part of the dissertation

appeared in the 1931 Art Bulletin, I planned to revise

the second part on iconography and then to publish this

plus the third part on the historical context for Moissac.

For various reasons, I never found the time to complete the revision of this second part, so the last two parts have never appeared in print.

... In 1927, I was a guest of the monks at Santo Domingo de Silos. Much of my article was conceived then and it was written long before it was published in 1939.18

Figure 3. Meyer Schapiro, drawing of sculpted figures at the Cathedral of Saint Andre, Bordeaux, late 1920s. Pen and ink.

Photograph: Karen Berman.

DC: There is a certain reading of your 1936 essay "The Social Bases ofArf that has led to the belief that

you had been opposed to modern art before a dramatic

change of perspective in 1936-1937.19 How would you

respond to this claim?

MS: My essay on the social bases of art was never

meant to be a blanket condemnation of modern art, but

only a criticism of some aspects of it. I was never

interested in any position that forced you to choose

between social realism and modern art. In fact, members of the Communist Party and of the John Reed

14. As Professor Martin Jay, a longtime friend of Lowenthal at

Berkeley, informed me in a telephone interview of May 13, 1993, "Leo

Lowenthal had immense admiration and respect for Meyer Schapiro. Lowenthal acknowledged having been given sound advice by Meyer

Schapiro while Lowenthal was reviews editor for the Zeitschrift fur

Sozialforschung." The Lowenthal-Schapiro correspondence is now in

the Archives of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany.

15. Meyer Schapiro, "From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos," in

Selected Papers of Meyer Schapiro. Vol. 1, Romanesque Art (New York:

George Braziller, 1977), pp. 28-101.

16. Karl Werckmeister speculates about such an influence in his

well known essay on Schapiro's Silos article. See O. K. Werckmeister,

"Review Essay on Meyer Schapiro's Romanesque Art," Art Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1979):214.

17. John Plummer, the Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the

Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York City and a student as well as

associate of Schapiro's from 1945-1955, observed in an interview with

me on May 20, 1993, that, "There is always a set of Marxian values

submerged in Meyer's approach, however topical the article might seem. ... He is a masterful dialectician. Kuspit's article on this aspect of his approach is excellent." See Donald B. Kuspit, "Dialectical

Reasoning in Meyer Schapiro," Social Research 45, no. 1

(1978):93-129.

18. For an accessible reprint of section one of his dissertation, see

Meyer Schapiro, The Sculpture of Moissac (New York: George Braziller,

1985).

19. Meyer Schapiro, "The Social Bases of Art" (1936), reprinted in

Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists'

Congress (New Brunswick: Rutger's University Press, 1986), pp. 109-114.


Club, especially during the Burkewitz controversy of

1931, accused me of being against "art for the people/' because I said that with one or two exceptions the

social realists were bad artists from whom the people stood to gain little.20

From a telephone interview, February 19, 1993

DC: From how many languages have you produced translations for publication?

MS: From German and French, as well as from Latin

and Italian. One of these articles was by an eighteenth century German physicist named Lichtenberg, who

wrote on Hogarth's work. ... He stated in his essay on

philosophy: "In all languages, the verb "?o be" is

irregular, hence metaphysics/' I also translated and

introduced an essay by Diderot.21

DC: What about twentieth-century French thinkers?

Did you ever meet Jean-Paul Sartre?

MS: I read Les Temps Modernes when it first came

out in 1945. And although I was unable to meet Sartre

when he came to the U.S. in 1946, I subsequently met

with him in the late 1940s.

DC: What about Merleau-Ponty?

MS: I spent more time in Paris talking with

Merleau-Ponty, whose Ph?nom?nologie de la

perception (1945) I found to be impressive. Merleau

Ponty's thought was close to my own. His work on

Cezanne and on the nature of perception shared a lot with my concerns.22 No other philosopher seemed to know as much about the material process, the concrete techniques for making art or about the

complexity of perception.

LM: We knew Jacques Lacan also, because he was

Andre Masson's brother-in-law. We heard him lecture and read his books.

DC: Did you have any interchange with Bertolt

Brecht when he was in the U.S. during the mid-1940s?

MS: I saw Brecht several times in this period. Once, we went with Brecht to dinner at the house of Max

Wertheimer [of the Gestalt Psychology School].

Wertheimer, who was more conservative than Brecht,

pressed him about the legitimacy of violent insurrection on behalf of bread. Brecht responded by saying, "In fact, if I had time, I would write a play called A Piece of

Bread!' Through such a play, Brecht said he could go from looking at the struggle over bread to an

examination of the production of bread to a

consideration of the general structure of society. At this

time Brecht was somewhat at odds with the members of

the Frankfurt School over their criticism of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

DC: But of course you were even more critical of

Stalin than were the members of the Frankfurt School?

MS: That is true.

From an interview at the home of the Schapiros on

West 4th Street in New York City, April 3, 1993

DC: When did you first read Rosa Luxemburg's work?

MS: I first read her in the early 1930s and I admired her letters from prison a great deal. . . P Paul Mattick, a

friend of mine, was a Luxemburgian thinker of

importance.

DC: On the cover of Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art (1951 ) are favorable comments by you and by Thomas Mann, the great German novelist.24 Could you elaborate on this?

23. See Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or Marxism! (1904), trans.

Integer, in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism! (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). 24. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols., trans. Stanley

Godman (New York: Vintage Books, 1951). On the bookcover of each

volume, Meyer Schapiro is quoted as follows: ". . . the most serious

and comprehensive work of its kind that I know, a book based on

great knowledge of both the arts and history. I have found in it many

original, penetrating observations."

20. For a fine discussion of this article by Schapiro, see Andrew

Hemingway, "Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s," Oxford Art

Journal 17, no. 1 (1994):20-22. 21. See Meyer Schapiro, "Diderot as Art Critic," Diderot Studies 5

(1964):5-11.

22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1947), in Sense

and non-Sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1964), pp. 9-25.


Figure 4. Meyer Schapiro, Abstract Landscape, 1950s. Oil on canvas board. Collection of Lillian Milgram.

MS: I wrote a prepublication discussion for the

publisher of Hauser's book, whose wealth of knowledge and range I admired. Nonetheless, I had serious

reservations about the study, since it was not sufficiently

grounded in history. During the 1950s, while H?user

was teaching at Brandeis, he visited me in New York and

we had a pleasant conversation about art.

DC: In your writings there is a conception of

historical meaning as something that emerges from a

dynamic interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, with

neither one being the final determinant of truth value.

One looks in vain for any traces of the type of

epistemological realism that often marks the claims to

complete objectivity or so-called "value-free" inquiry by orthodox Marxists and those Western scientists who are

positivists. Could you say something about this?

MS: What is a fact? According to most languages it is

a product of labor. Consider the word for fact in

German, "Tatsache," which means "thing done"; in

French, "fait," which means "made"; or even the Latin

base for the English word "fact," which is the word

"factum" and is related to manufacture, which means

"made by hand." . . . What is the truth? The truth is what

is made. There is an important letter in this regard by the

scientist Galileo to the painter Cigoli, in which Galileo

spoke of the truth as a synthesis of the technique of the

artisan plus the knowledge of the artist.25

From an interview at the home of the Schapiros on

West 4th Street in New York City, May 20-22, 1993

DC: Did you have much interchange with Claude

Levi-Strauss when he was in New York during the war?

MS: I knew Claude Levi-Strauss very well. We talked

often during the mid-1940s. We also met with each

other in Paris, as, for example, in 1952. He gave lectures

at the New School of Social Research from 1942 to

1945. Once at least, he wrote a letter asking for my

opinion on an anthropological point concerning an

issue in folklore.26

At Columbia, Lillian and I studied anthropology with

Franz Boas. Margaret Mead, who was Boas's assistant,

subsequently marked Lillian's exams.

DC: Did you see Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner

much during the 1950s?

MS: Lillian and I saw Pollock, who was generally taciturn and drank heavily, on several occasions at the

home of Jeanne Reynal, who was the daughter of the

famous publisher, and her husband Tom Sills, who was

an African-American painter. Lee Krasner was more

approachable and sociable. On one occasion, at a

Pollock Opening at the Betty Parsons Gallery, probably in 1950 or '51, I asked Pollock if he had made the right

choice in using gold paint intertwined with other colors

in one of his large all-overs and Pollock became furiousl

25. On Galileo and Cigoli, see Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic

of the Arts (The Hague: Mouton, 1954).

26. Some major early essays by Claude Levi-Strauss date from his

stay in New York. See, for example Claude Levi-Strauss, "L'analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie," Word: Journal of the

Linguistic Circle of New York 1, no. 2 (1995). This essay appeared as

Chapter 2 of his book Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson

and Brooke Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1962). There is also a

fine essay by Levi-Strauss on New York City as he first came to know it

in 1941, entitled "New York post?et prefiguratif," in Le regard ?loigne

(Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 345-356.

For an incisive analysis of Levi-Strauss's view of New York City, see

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1988), pp. 236-246.


Figure 5. Meyer Schapiro, sketch of Siena, late 1920s. Pen and ink. Photograph: Karen Berman.

He was very volatile if ever questioned about a choice

he made while creating one of his works.

From a telephone interview, November 11, 1993

DC: Did you ever discuss anarchism with Mark Rothko?

MS: I knew he was an anarchist, but we did not

discuss his position at length. He was very inclined to

support workers and to value workmanship.

From an interview at the home on the Schapiros in New York City, June 5, 1994

DC: What is the source in your own analysis for the

concept of "state capitalism"?

MS: It means a situation in which the state, like

private capital, has a monopoly over the means of

production, so as to disallow workplace democracy. It

denotes an antidemocratic organization of the

workplace and of society in general. Ultimately it is a

critique of Leninism, as well as of capitalism. As for the

source, it goes back to Luxemburg and Korsch.27

DC: What of Robert Motherwell's claim in his 1944

article "The Modern Painter's World" that "The modern

states that we have seen so far have all been enemies of

the artist"?28

MS: This view is too extreme and historically reductive. It is a position typical of much anarchist

thought.29

27. See Karl Korsch, Three Essays on Marxism, introduction by Raul Breines (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

28. Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn 1, no. 6

(1944):9-14.

29. Elsewhere, Robert Motherwell wrote: "Society stands against

anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore treats him as an anarchist." See: Robert Motherwell, "Beyond


DC: You mean that Motherwell was insufficiently attentive to what was both progressive and reactionary about the state at any given historical moment?

MS: Yes. It is not merely a matter of the state's being the enemy or not. The secular state in the medieval

period was not only an institution of repression. This was

the case with the communes, which were sometimes at

odds with other states or institutions, specifically those

that were religious. The communes represented a state

formation that was quite important for creating a

space within which a type of artistic freedom could

begin to emerge.30

From a telephone interview, January 22, 1995

the Aesthetic" (April 1946), in The Collected Writings of Robert

Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1992), p. 38.

For a discussion of how Schapiro's values and his example influenced some of Motherwell's other views, see David Craven,

"Aesthetics as Ethics in the Writings of Motherwell and Schapiro," Archives of American Art Journal (forthcoming).

30. For more on this, see Meyer Schapiro, "On the Aesthetic

Attitude in Romanesque Art" (1947), in Selected Papers of Meyer

Schapiro. Vol. 1, Romanesque Art (New York: George Braziller, 1977),

pp. 1-3.

For two very fine and quite recent assessments of Schapiro's contribution to progressive art history, see Alan Wallach, "Meyer

Schapiro, 1904-1996: Marxist Art Historian," Against the Current 62

(1996):52; Thomas Crow, "Village Voice: On Meyer Schapiro," Artforum 34, no. 10 (1996):9-10, 122. Crow justifiably concludes that

Schapiro "almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the modes of

advanced interpretation that we know today."