Worldview in Painting—Art and Society. - Review - book review

MEYER SCHAPIRO

fresh York: George Braziller, 1999. 256 pp; 26 b/w ills. $30

This collection of essays includes sum of two units discussions of "Philosophy in Painting" and various accounts, a certain number of dating as far back as the 1930 of art and society. Meyer Schapiro discusses the social functions of art, the futurity of the arts, the profession of the artist, and the responsibility of the artist. The essays upon painting and philosophy provide an erudite and exotic perspective upon issues recently much analyzed by means of Jacques Derrida and his commentators. one as well as the other philosophy and painting, Schapiro argues, give us facts about the world. His political commentaries reveal a great deal of about American leftist politics of the 1930 and 1940 He illuminatingly discusses familiar writers, and he also cites many figures unknown to me When, as in his luminous three-page discussion of Camille Corot, he revolves to visual art, the precision of his carefully crafted dull is amazing. His beautiful one-and-a-half-page description of the institution of walking, filled of humor and boundless erudition, contains as many insightful observati upons as some academic treatises. Going for a walk, he pay attention tos is both "part of a compound of personal activity" and "depend on social institutions" (p. 148). The analysis of this form of behavior, he exhibits can by analogy reveal abundant about how "the individualism of present art" also is "the fruit of a certain method of social relationship" (p. 149)

by the agency of a philosopher's worldview, Schapiro means a conception of things that he collisions and knows, close to his hold being and thoughts, or vexed questions or ideas for his reflections--in the same faculty of perception that a painter representing his experiences and emotions has a worldview" (p 76) The Germanic confine "worldview" is slightly archaic, and thus its presence in his title perhaps usefully transports the period style of a certain number of of Schapiro's concerns. What gives integrity to his meditation is his ability to consider a variety of perspectives, identifying the virtues of smooth those worldviews that he finds politically unacceptable or aesthetically unilluminating. Alois Riegl's volume on Dutch group portraits, he noted in 1943 although it contains absurd remarks about late political history, "should be translated into English" (p 241) Schapiro is smooth capable of being oddly self-effacing. "I think I've talked too abundant already," he writes near the extreme point of his lecture "C[acute{e}]zanne and the Philosophers" (1977) "and have not still so lved any problem" (p 102) Perhaps, then, the real point is that the relationship between C[acute{e}]zanne and philosophy can at no time be definitively identified. For Schapiro, talk itself has its be in possession of pleasures.

The brief preface by means of Schapiro's widow, Lillian Milgram Schapiro, says little about the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of these essays or the ways in which his cogitation developed. Nor does she explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason these particular essays were single outed for republication. We are given solitary the dates of the essays and a certain number of notes about revisions made later. And in the way that one naturally wonders whether elsewhere, in other perhaps unpublished materials, Schapiro dealt with these themes. Since "the decade from 1910 to 1920" he wrote in 1948 "there appear to be to have been no revolutions in art" (p 143) This is a greatest in quantity unexpected observation coming from a great friend of more [i]or[/i] less Surrealists and many of the Abstract Expressionists. There is no discussion in these writings of by what means Schapiro responded to the failures of socialism or to the changing mode of speechs of art making after Abstract Expressionism. Nor does he say anything about Jewishness. I was a little surprised to find no exhibition of the argument of his well-known essay upon Bernard Berenson. Schapiro was an art l above who believed that art could fetch moral values. He rejects the social thinking of his colleague the physicist I. I. Rabi, who present to views "signs of philistinism, narrowness, in a raw state conformity, and self-satisfaction; I have not ever known him to speak on the outside against ugliness or injustice" (p 160) Schapiro contrasts the agriculture of science to "modern liberal agriculture which is nourished by the arts, social awareness, and criticism, the moves to advance freedom and well-being" (p 160) What in part defines the distance between our period mode of expression and his is the felt reluctance of greatest in quantity present-day intellectuals to take of that kind a positive view of literary and visual culture

Schapiro's dominant regard in many essays is the survey for a socialist culture. below socialism, he suggests, "painting will become a private art, and architecture will be resolv in unblemished engineering" (p. 132). He is always highly critical of the USSR. The put in commotion with Russian Socialist Realism, he remarks, is that "this art contains nothing socialist and nothing realistic--a fact that we can proof by looking at the images, which exhibit little of the real relations of tribe of authority, and of oppression" (p 157) on the other hand he hoped, still, for an authentic socialist agriculture Now that Communism has largely disappeared as an alternative to capitalism, I am not fully convinced what remains of these touchs Schapiro is sympathetic to on the contrary also critical of American popular tillage Modern public art, he noted in 1936 includes "comics, the magazine pictures, and the movies...It may be a low-grade and infantile public art...but it is the art that the nation love..." (p. 176).