1. Olin, Margaret, “Violating the Second Commandment's Taboo: Why Art Historian Meyer Schapiro Took on Bernard Berenson,” Forward 98 (11 4, 1994): 23.Google Scholar

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.Google Scholar

3. Greenberg, Clement, “Kafka's Jewishness,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1965), 273.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 270.

5. Greenberg, Clement, “The Impressionists and Proust,” Nation 163 (08 31, 1946): 247Google Scholar. (Review of Proust and Painting by Maurice Chernowitz.)

6. Greenberg, Clement, “David Smith's New Sculpture,” Art International 8 (05 1964): 37.Google Scholar

7. Schapiro, Meyer, “Chagall's Illustrations for the Bible” (1956)Google Scholar, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 2: 133.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 121.

9. Schapiro, Meyer, “Cézanne” (1959)Google Scholar, in Modern Art, 40.Google Scholar

10. Schapiro, Meyer, “Mr. Berenson's Values” (1961)Google Scholar, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 4: 225.Google Scholar

11. Olin, , “Violating,” 23.Google Scholar

12. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 225.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 217.

14. Ibid., 222.

15. Quoted in Wiggershaus, Rolf, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 6.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., 4–5

17. Schapiro, Meyer, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” (1947)Google Scholar, in Romanesque Art, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 1: 8.Google Scholar

18. Schapiro, Meyer, “The Sculptures of Souillac” (1939)Google Scholar, in Romanesque Art, 104.Google Scholar

19. Schapiro, Meyer, “Nature of Abstract Art” (1937)Google Scholar, in Modern Art, 186Google Scholar

20. Schapiro, Meyer, “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957)Google Scholar, in Modern Art, 224.Google Scholar

21. Schapiro, , “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” 1.Google Scholar

22. Schapiro, , “Recent Abstract Painting,” 215Google Scholar. 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)Google Scholar, in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 78).Google Scholar

23. Schapiro, , “Nature of Abstract Art,” 193.Google Scholar

24. Schapiro, , “Sculptures of Souillac,” 104.Google Scholar

25. Schapiro, , “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” 22.Google Scholar

26. Schapiro, Meyer, “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naivete” (1941)Google Scholar, in Modern Art, 73.Google Scholar

27. Schapiro, Meyer, “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ The Symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 27 (1945): 185.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., 186.

29. Schapiro, Meyer, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I” (1931)Google Scholar, in Romanesque Art, 187–88.Google Scholar

30. Schapiro, , “Sculptures of Souillac,” 107, 113–14.Google Scholar

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], 11–12Google Scholar; and Vincent van Gogh [New York: Abrams, 1950], 19–22Google Scholar). 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]: 50Google Scholar). In “From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos” (1939)Google Scholar (Romanesque Art, 35Google Scholar) 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)Google Scholar and his essay on “Style” – Schapiro strongly resembles Alfred North Whitehead. In Process and Reality (New York: Humanities, 1955)Google Scholar, 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.Google Scholar

33. Schapiro, Meyer, in “An Illuminated English Psalter” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 [1960]: 183)Google Scholar, 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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Schapiro, , “From Mozarabic,” 83 n. 87.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., 30.

37. Schapiro, , “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” 26 n. 10.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 9.

39. Schapiro, Meyer, “Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting” (1978)Google Scholar, in Modern Art, 235.Google Scholar

40. Schapiro, , Vincent van Gogh, 29–30.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., 27, 22–23.

42. Schapiro, , Paul Cézanne, 27.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., 12.

44. Ibid., 18.

45. Ibid., 26.

46. Schapiro, , Vincent van Gogh, 8.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., 34.

48. Schapiro, , Words and Pictures, 48.Google Scholar

49. Schapiro, Meyer, “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art” (1932)Google Scholar, in Romanesque Art, 268.Google Scholar

50. Schapiro, Meyer, “Freud and Leonardo: An Art Historical Study” (1956)Google Scholar, in Theory and Philosophy of Art. See also, in the same book, “Further Notes on Freud and Leonardo” (1994)Google Scholar. 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)Google Scholar 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).Google Scholar

52. Schapiro, 's “Nature of Abstract Art”Google Scholar takes as its point of departure Barr, Alfred H. Jr's Cubism and Abstract Art (1936).Google Scholar

53. Schapiro, , “Nature of Abstract Art,” 222.Google Scholar

54. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 222.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., 227.

56. Schapiro, Meyer, “Diderot on the Artist and Society,”Google Scholar in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 206.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., 204.

58. Ibid., 205.

59. Ibid.

60. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 224.Google Scholar

61. Schapiro, Meyer, “Eugene Fromentin as Critic,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 105.Google Scholar

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.Google Scholar

63. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 212.Google Scholar

64. Ibid., 218.

65. Ibid., 219.

66. Ibid., 218.

67. Schapiro, , “On the Relation of Patron and Artist: Comments on a Proposed Model for the Scientist,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 237.Google Scholar

68. Schapiro, , “Mr. Berenson's Values,” 211.Google Scholar

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)Google Scholar. Harold Rosenberg notes a similar “fashionabilizing” of the avant-garde, in “The Avant-Garde” (1969)Google Scholar (Discovering the Present [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973], 86).Google Scholar