Schapiro, Meyer

"Meyer Schapiro (1904-96), renowned for his critical essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, also played a decisive role as a young scholar in defining the style of art and architecture known as Romanesque. And, appropriately, when he was invited to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, he chose Romanesque architectural sculpture as his topic. These lectures languished unpublished for decades. Linda Seidel has expertly transcribed and edited them, presenting them for the first time to an audience beyond the lecture hall." "In editing the lectures, Seidel closely followed the recordings of the originals. Sentences are rendered as Schapiro spoke them, affording readers a unique opportunity to experience the legendary teacher as he rarely appears in print: forming his thoughts spontaneously, interrupting himself to develop related ideas, and responding to the audience's interests by introducing humorous asides. Nonetheless, these lectures are carefully constructed, demonstrating Schapiro's commitment to the originality and value of artistic production and affirming his lifelong belief in artists' engagement with their cultures. Amply illustrated with many key works and augmented with Seidel's introduction, this volume will delight students and scholars of art history."--Jacket.

"This volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates as wide a range of artistic styles as any in the history of art? In His first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences.". "In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important and radical innovations in science and art of the early twentieth century: Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and Braque and Picasso's Cubism at the end of the same decade.". "In the final essay, Schapiro shows that, although the greatest political work of art of the twentieth century, Guemica nevertheless embodies many of Picasso's artistic obsessions. Painted in the course of one month (May 1937) to memorialize the bombing of a rural town during the Spanish Civil War, Guemica reflects Picasso's fantasies of himself and his family; it contains analogues of his own rage, anxiety, and feelings about death, as well as his awareness of the place of the work in the history of art."--BOOK JACKET.

This fourth volume of Professor Meyer Schapiro's Selected Papers contains his most important writings - some well-known and others previously unpublished - on the theory and philosophy of art. Schapiro's highly lucid arguments, graceful prose, and extraordinary erudition guide readers through a rich variety of fields and issues: the roles in society of the artist and art, of the critic and criticism; the relationships between patron and artist, psychoanalysis and art, and philosophy and art. Adapting critical methods from such wide-ranging fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, biology, and other sciences, Schapiro appraises fundamental semantic terms such as "organic style," "pictorial style", "field and vehicle," and "form and content"; he elucidates eclipsed intent in a well-known text by Freud on Leonardo da Vinci, in another by Heidegger on Vincent van Gogh. He reflects on the critical methodology of Bernard Berenson, and on the social philosophy of art in the writings of both Diderot and the nineteenth century French artist/historian Eugene Fromentin. Throughout all of his writings, Meyer 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 both critical thinking and creative independence.

Describes the life and work of the French Post-Impressionist artist, who tried new ideas in painting to express his love of nature.

199 p. : 24 cm