Meyer Shapiro: Works of Art 1919–1979

Meyer Schapiro, the preeminent art historian of this century, has taught and written about art over the past 60 years. All the while, little known to most of his students and his public, he also created artworks. Next month, at Columbia University, his academic home throughout his distinguished career, his original paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture will go on public exhibition for the first time.

This exhibit of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery will present more than 60 works in various media by the revered scholar, providing a rare glimpse of a side of Meyer Schapiro that has, for the most part, remained private. On view will be works created over a 60-year span that range in subject from intimate portraits of family and friends to landscapes, abstracts, and allegories.

A legendary teacher, lecturer, and scholar whose writings are widely regarded as art history classics, Professor Schapiro is credited with shaping the thinking of generations of scholars and critics around the world, particularly in the areas of his special concentration, medieval and modern art. Known also as a champion of the art of his time, he has not only written about contemporary art but has been a friend of countless artists, including Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Wolf Kahn, Jan Muller, and George Segal.

"His writings always have had a quality of sustained, detailed observation, and original insight that has prompted a number of painters to tell him, 'But you are one of us, you must be an artist,'" wrote the late art critic Thomas B. Hess in 1978 in an issue of the journal Social Research devoted to Meyer Schapiro. The article, along with an essay by Wolf Kahnis, is included in a brochure on the exhibit.

In a commentary written for the opening of the exhibition, Professor James Beck, chairman of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, said: "Passionate viewing and passionate thinking are collaborative opposites of Meyer Schapiro's methodology. The entire fiber of his scholarly approach is indivisible from the visual arts which constitute, in essence, the tools for structuring his world view."

Meyer Schapiro was born in 1904 and was 15 when he entered Columbia as a freshman in 1920. He earned three degrees at the University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1929, and began to teach art history in 1928, rising to the rank of full professor in 1952. He was named University Professor, Columbia's highest academic rank, in 1965 and has held the title of University Professor Emeritus since 1973. He has received over the years the highest honors from universities and nations around the world, and his collected writings are being published in four volumes. The first two, "Romanesque Art" and "Modern Art," appeared in 1977 and 1978. Other major publications include "Van Gogh" (1950), "Cezanne" (1952), and "Words and Pictures" (1973).

While he is best known as one of the most brilliant thinkers of the century, his insight extended beyond the written and spoken word to the actual creation of works of art, which now number in the thousands. Although very few of his works have been included in previous exhibits, this is the first time that his work has been exhibited in New York City, where he has lived for most of his life, and the first time an exhibit has been devoted exclusively to his art.

Chronologically, the works on view in the Wallach Gallery range from a self-portrait made in 1919, shortly before he entered Columbia College, to a portrait of Thomas Hess made in the late 1970s. The show includes a series of studies of Professor Schapiro's wife, Dr. Lillian Milgram, whom he married in 1929, and their children and friends, many completed during the family's summers in Vermont. Landscapes and cityscapes, such as  "Riverside Park, New York" (1929) and paintings and drawings made in Rawsonville and Belmont, Vermont, document places important in their lives. Others, such as "War and Peace" (early 1940s), symbolize ideas, in this case, the futility of war.

Portraits of many of his contemporaries, such as Margaret Mead and Whittaker Chambers, both classmates at Columbia, are included. Works showing a deliberate reference to a particular period or artist, such as medieval mosaics, abstract and primitive art, and the work of Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse, demonstrate Professor Schapiro's intimate knowledge and response to art of the distant and more recent past. Several abstract works to be exhibited range widely in date (from the early 1940s to the 1970s), and in stylistic concerns. His abstract works often addressed formal issues of style relevant to the period in which they were made and were often of an experimental nature.