Village Voice

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Meyer Schapiro, who died on March 3 at the age of 91, enjoyed an adulation that may in his later decades have been as taxing as it was rewarding. Intent younger art historians asked him time and again to recount the genesis of the extraordinary publications with which he began his career in the '30s; to rehearse his simultaneous commitments and interventions (in such journals as New Masses, Art Front, and Marxist Quarterly) in the politics of the Left during the Great Depression, Popular Front, and anti-Stalinist schisms; to recall his warm and abundant friendships with giants (and peers) in the realms of art, philosophy, social science, and literature. With his death, we are grateful now for these eager acolytes, who elicited from him precious additions to the public record of his career. For the wonder of Schapiro's reputation, given his achievements and experiences, is that he was not still more widely acclaimed - that the admiration he so unfailingly commanded was largely confined to the art world. I suspect that had he been a full-time literary critic, political pundit, or philosopher, there would already be a shelf of biographical and interpretative books devoted to him. As it is, he appears to merit only a walk-on part in the numerous studies of the New York intellectuals, while only a handful of scattered articles and reviews in scholarly publications begin to take the measure of what he contributed to the intellectual life of this century.

American intellectuals are famously obsessed and anxious about their links to the great figures of continental thought. With that in mind, it is all the more astonishing that Schapiro's activities at the close of the '30s have not become the stuff of legend across the humanities. Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, having transferred their Institute for Social Research from Frankfurt to New York, took a great interest in the young professor of art history, and he in them. (Adorno once asked him along to monitor radio broadcasts by Hitler, and Schapiro made some incisive drawings of the Institute's fellows as they gravely attended to the voice of the enemy.) As proponents of an independent …