The Faith of a Modernist
Selected Papers.
by Meyer Schapiro.
Braziller. I. Romanesque Art. 368 pp. $30.00. II. Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. 277 pp. $20.00. III. Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval Art. 414 pp. $25.00.
Over the past few years three volumes of historical and critical writings by Meyer Schapiro have been published under the daunting title, Selected Papers; a fourth and final installment, on the theory and philosophy of art, is due in about a year. One of the acknowledged masters of academic art history, a man who can be mentioned in the same breath as E.H. Gombrich or Erwin Panofsky, Schapiro, during his over fifty years in the art-history department at Columbia University, has acquired a considerable reputation for eloquence and wisdom, though never before has he made his writings available to the general public.
The designation “papers” is a bit misleading, for though many of Schapiro’s writings collected here are highly erudite and hard for the layman to follow, others are full-blooded essays, with all the richness, rigor, and sense of expectancy that the essay shares with the sonata. And if they have been conceived in two different manners of expression, the papers also deal with two widely separated periods, the medieval and the modern. This may at first seem odd, until we observe what Schapiro has chosen not to study, namely, the vast epoch falling roughly between Mantegna and Ingres, the age in which the naturalism of a perpetually rediscovered antiquity reigned supreme. The exclusion of that age suggests that Schapiro is chiefly interested in those styles of Western art that have largely escaped the influence of classicism—not such an unusual choice for a modernist intelligence.
What is unusual about Schapiro is his position at the confluence of several streams of creativity. A man long celebrated in university circles, he has also been the friend of young artists still at the margin of society. (Willem de Kooning, the painter who confessed that his pictures were “never finished, only saved from disaster,” was once persuaded by Schapiro that a certain canvas had already been worked to salvation and might soon be worked to death; to this vigilant sympathy we perhaps owe the preservation of a masterpiece.) And in addition to these activities, Schapiro has also made himself known as a critic. John Pope-Hennessy, chairman of the committee that awarded him the Mitchell Prize in Art History for Modern Art, was sounding a familiar theme when he declared that “of all living critics who have exercised a formative influence on our attitude to the art of the immediate past, it would be generally conceded that the most influential was Professor Meyer Schapiro.”
Indeed, it is by now common to hear Schapiro described as our “most influential” art critic. Yet the description gives one pause. For in what sense can an art historian who has never to my knowledge written any reviews, who has never had to stand empty-handed before brand-new art and explain it to a bewildered public, be called a critic? And how great is his influence in the area where it would generally be thought to count most—in the galleries and salesrooms of the art trade?
We may legitimately call Meyer Schapiro a critic if by criticism we mean, in his case, not the day-today exercise of judgment on recent work but rather the broader function of examining and explicating a visual culture. He is a critic as Pater and Fromentin were critics, and in this sense even his studies of medieval art constitute a sort of criticism. The question of how influential his ideas have been in the working art world is another matter, harder to address; but a brief account of his aesthetic sympathies may perhaps provide part of an answer.
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Schapiro’s readers can readily find a summation of his critical position in the four general essays on modern art in the volume of that name. This is perhaps unfortunate, for these essays are to my mind overly abstract, even wearisome, and often dated—the projected fourth volume on the theory of art may offer more concrete insights. In the meantime, however, it is to the two volumes on medieval art that one must turn for most of Schapiro’s hard visual analysis. Perhaps that is as it should be: because he is a man of reasoned sympathies, his writings about medieval art would have broad implications for contemporary criticism even if he had never written about modern art.
For over a hundred years, the reexamination of medieval art has been a crucible of modern sensibility: Ruskin, Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Mâle, Focillon, even Proust—all of them passed this way. In the early decades of this century most people who thought about the Middle Ages at all regarded the great medieval churches as products of a pious, communal way of creating in which every artist or artisan humbly fulfilled his organic role. Schapiro found himself unconvinced by this view: was all medieval art necessarily devotional? Of a carved pier at Souillac, the Romanesque abbey church near Périgueux, he wrote that it was “a passionate drôlerie, brutal and realistic in detail, an elaboration of themes of impulsive and overwhelming physical force, corresponding to the role of violence at this point in the history of feudal society.”
One recalls, reading these lines, that Schapiro was an outsider, an American and a non-Catholic in a field dominated by French Catholics, and that the year was 1939. By 1947 his intuitions had cohered into a full-blown conception of Romanesque aesthetics, and he was able to write of “a sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art.” The 19th-century belief that the medieval period had borne the modern spirit in its womb was thus retained, but in transmuted form: for the visual values that Schapiro discovered in the old churches prefigured, as it seemed to him, not evangelical Victorian niggling but secular Parisian modernism.
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The demonstration that much medieval art did not express religious feeling could probably have been accomplished by sound antiquarian technique; but it took a subtle eye, conditioned by keen observation of recent art, to remark something of still greater significance. Schapiro’s scholarly predecessors, however warm their sympathy for the Romanesque style, had tended to judge it with standards imported from antique, high Renaissance, or Gothic art. These standards had congealed into a canon of Tightness or good taste denoted by the French word poncif. Poncif means conventional, obvious, casually conforming to nature or to an idealized version of it, satisfying expectations generated by repetition, symmetry, stylized asymmetry, or an underlying geometrical schema. Schapiro discerned in this canon a “mechanical Platonism,” a sort of rigid template against which Romanesque art was always found odd, at worst falling off from the antique, at best striving toward Gothic. Studying the carvings at Souillac and Moissac (another great Romanesque church) he came to reject this prejudice, and set out to show that the sculptors’ departures from natural shapes had, as he put it, “a common character which is intimately bound up with the harmonious formal structure of the works” and is “subordinate to an essentially dynamic expressive end.”
These words bring to mind some of the early propagandists for Cubism. But Schapiro was more rigorous than they in his exploration of an art based on freehand designing and subject to the pressure of spontaneous feeling. If one learned to look for “expressive wholes”—he used the term again and again-one could sense how the medieval artists had fitted archaic representation and remembered images to more naturalistic modes, how they had ignored poncif expectations, how they had harmoniously inserted different styles into the same work, how they had stretched perspective and scale in response to their aesthetic needs. From the lintel in Moissac’s west front, a carved slab borrowed by the Romanesque master-mason from an earlier, non-Romanesque building, “we learn that the analogy of elements in a work of art is not necessarily pervasive or complete, and that stylistically unlike forms may coexist within a coherent whole.” Clearly Schapiro himself had already learned this lesson, specifically from Cézanne’s Plaster Cupid with its “abstract” lower left corner, and from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon with its juxtaposition of African and Iberian elements. From the masterpieces of modern art he was extrapolating a general way of seeing.
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This is not to say that Schapiro’s writing can be reduced to mere advocacy; most of his work has, after all, been of an objective, historical nature. Yet even in the scholarly work a hint of advocacy persists: thus, the creators of the late antique Beth Alpha mosaics in Israel “must,” as he writes, “seem ignorant,” unless we “forget the prejudices of classic style”; in considering medieval Irish art we are to lay aside the “dogmatic norm of naturalism”; over and over again Cezanne is invoked as the hero of an art “without rhetoric and convention” and rooted in a “firm faith in spontaneous sensibility, in the resources of the sincere self.” This faith Schapiro clearly shares.
On one of the rare occasions when he has said what he does not like, Schapiro writes that
randomness as a new mode of composition . . . has become an accepted sign of modernity. . . . It is alluring in the same degree that technical and aesthetic features in figurative art . . .—microscopic minuteness of detail, smoothness of finish, virtuoso rendering of textures—. . . could satisfy in mediocre paintings a taste which was insensitive to relationships of a finer order.
This idea, that taste can be mature or immature, bears the imprint of developmental psychology; and though he rarely mentions it, it is in this field, one suspects, that Schapiro has found the strongest confirmation of his sensibility. In Modern Art he quotes the neurologist Kurt Goldstein: “The sense of order in the patient is an expression of his defect, an expression of his impoverishment with respect to an essentially human trait: the capacity for adequate shifting of attitude.” What is meant here by “the sense of order” is something like what we ordinarily call “compulsiveness.” This is regarded as the symptomatic manifestation of a psychic weakness: the patient, sensing his vulnerability, compensates for it by clinging to an exaggerated orderliness or repetitiveness.
Of course few artists or art lovers are mental patients or even particularly compulsive people. But in citing Goldstein, Schapiro seems to imply that immature taste, though not of course pathological, is functionally analogous to a personality disorder. In other words, just as a neurotic may repeat the same action over and over to suppress anxiety, so an artist may become fixated on some stylistic trait, like microscopic detail or huge size, that helps him dodge the real task of expression. Such an artist has a benign version of the neurotic’s complaint, and his work will probably strike perceptive viewers as curiously dull.
Schapiro’s distrust of regularity in modern art—and randomness is a form of regularity achieved by relying on probability—stems from his intuition that it is an unhealthy masking of feeling rather than an expression of it. This aversion to modular composition is another inheritance from certain 19th-century medievalists, but once again it has been creatively transmuted. Ruskin, for example, disliked Perpendicular, a late-medieval English building style characterized by graph-paper-like decoration, largely because it looked machine-made—he called it “businessman’s Gothic.” Schapiro’s fondness for spontaneous design has nothing to do with such nostalgia for the picturesque, but rather reflects a post-Freudian sensitivity to the workings of the psyche. Art can be symptom as well as expression.
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Thus simplified, Schapiro’s aesthetic position may seem obvious, even commonplace; that is only because it has come to command such wide respect. Still, there is something immoderate in the claim that he as a critic has exercised a “formative” influence on our attitude to the art of the “immediate” past. Of all the artists who have achieved recognition in the past forty years, Arshile Gorky is the only one discussed (and rather briefly at that) in Modern Art. And though Schapiro puts the case for sincere and spontaneous sensibility exceptionally well, this sensibility was clearly embodied in the works of the great Parisian modernists and explicitly championed by them in words. Picasso: “Have you ever really done what you planned to do? On leaving your house do you not often change your route without thinking about it? Do you cease to be yourself on that account? . . . I want nothing but emotion given off by my work.” And while Schapiro has written some of the best Cézanne criticism, the master of Aix no longer compels automatic admiration. At the time of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1978 exhibition, “Cézanne: The Late Work,” one writer noted “the resentment his painting has generated among so many denizens of the New York art world. . . . Off the record a surprising number of them confessed that the show at the Modern left them dazed, depressed, annoyed. . . . The great man is not living up to certain expectations. . . .”
Finally, one should perhaps note that the values Schapiro espouses have been at an increasing discount for some twenty years, and that very few collectors are any longer concerned with seeking out new works of art that exemplify a “faith in the resources of the sincere self.” There are no doubt many explanations for this. The simplest may be that Schapiro has himself kept aloof from the business of reviewing. Yet it is unlikely that even a critic of Schapiro’s stature could stem the decline of faith in spontaneous sensibility—on the assumption that there is any sense to such a task. For if the core of modernism is to be taken as the union of spontaneity and sincerity, then the enterprise is doomed from the start; the awareness of purpose defeats both these qualities. This is perhaps one reason why, in our confusion at the imperative to be spontaneous, we find ourselves moved by the sculptors of ancient Aquitaine. They at least, when they engraved upon their porches the lilies of the field, knew them for the sign of a fixed truth.
