Meyer Schapiro

« Go to College! » clame le magazine Life en 1940.
Alors que l’Europe sombre dans le chaos, les États-
Unis s’évertuent à assurer la production internationale
des savoirs et à promouvoir un idéal alternatif de
démocratie éclairée. Au même titre que toute la
population, les artistes sont encouragés à converger
vers les universités pour participer à la fondation d’un
nouveau rêve américain, porté par la recherche.
Revenant sur ce projet politique méconnu, L’Artistechercheur
retrace l’émergence d’une figure de l’artiste
dont l’activité bascule soudainement dans le champ
universitaire.
Pour comprendre cette mutation, Sandra Delacourt
suit la trace de Donald Judd, artiste minimaliste, qui
dans la deuxième partie du XXe siècle fut désigné
ambassadeur d’un « art éduqué ». À travers lui,
l’auteure nous invite à suivre l’évolution, non linéaire,
d’un nouvel imaginaire pour l’art et pour la recherche,
et expose la manière dont différentes générations
d’artistes s’en sont emparées ou l’ont rejeté.
Alors que depuis quelques années la recherche
créative fait l’objet d’un nouvel engouement, cet
ouvrage propose d’explorer les désirs antagonistes qui
ont conduit l’art et le savoir à pointer un horizon
commun.

تاب «خاستگاه هنر انتزاعی» یکی از متون الهام‌بخش میر شاپیرو مورخ هنری آمریکایی و نظریه‌پرداز حامی هنر مدرن است. شاپیرو در این متن، تحلیل متفاوتی از ریشه‌ها و دلایل بروز هنر انتزاعی ارائه می‌دهد. از منظر او تولید هنر انتزاعی در ادامه روال طبیعی هنر نبوده، و حاصل تغییرات عمیق در شرایط مادی و روانی فرهنگ مدرن است. هنر انتزاعی برای شاپیرو، طغیانی بر جریان‌های پیشین نیست، بلکه پاسخی به تغییرات فن‌آوری است که رابطه انسان را با بازنمایی، دستخوش تغییر می‌سازد. مثال‌های تاریخی این کتاب جریان‌های مختلفی از امپرسیونیسم تا آوانگارد را دربر می گیرد و همچنین برای نشان دادن تحولات زندگی مدرن نزد هنرمند، نیات و ضروریات درونی او را نیز به بحث می‌گذارد.

Before he was an art historian, Meyer Schapiro trained as an artist. He visited museums and galleries of contemporary art in New York, always on the look out for the unusual and cutting edge. While his activity as an art student and his early interest in the art of his time are well-known, his simultaneous interest in African art, from a very early age, has not yet received critical attention. New resources, particularly his personal archive together with the publication of an important volume of his travel journals from his first research trip to Europe (1926-7), reveal that African art formed a touchstone, a point of comparison for Schapiro as he encountered medieval objects with which he was unfamiliar. The letters make his formative experience newly accessible and reveal the importance of African art for his early writings on Romanesque sculpture.

Of all the human endeavors of the more than one thousand years of Western medieval culture, no single aspect looms so large in the mind of modern man as that of medieval art.  Yet despite the vast number of studies that have been undertaken to explain one aspect or another of medieval art, very few have attempted to explain in a non-aesthetic or non-theological way that issue which is so fundamental to a complete understanding of the artistic complexities of the Middle Ages--the medieval attitude toward art.
In this book, I attempt to lay the foundation for just such an understanding, refracted through the greatest artistic controversy to occur in the West prior to the Reformation, and through the most important document of that controversy--indeed, the most important source we have for the medieval attitude toward art--Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia ad Guillelmum (1125).
Bernard of Clairvaux was the most articulate spokesman of the historical constant of the medieval opposition to the use of religious art (virtually all of the greatest art before the Late Middle Ages was religious).  In this study, I address a number of the more pressing artistic issues affecting frontline art of the early twelfth century as articulated in Bernard's Apologia.  As presented in this study--which is securely anchored in both the monastic literary tradition and contemporary political, social, and economic concerns--the discussion of Bernard's "things of greater importance" follows a sequence from the economic base of monastic art production (the investment in art to attract donations) to the artistic means by which this was carried out (the sensory saturation of the holy place), to the reception of excessive art on the part of the general public (the equation between excessive art and holiness), to external social objections (art as being in opposition to the care of the poor), and finally to the internal spiritual objections of monasticism (art as a spiritual distraction to the monk).  Central to this social theory of medieval art is the concept of the justification of art, the limits of acceptable art, and the question of just what actually constituted excessive art.  This study shows that art, the absence of art, or the degree of art in the Middle Ages should no longer be seen simply as the result of the ability to acquire or the desire to avoid art.  This book comprises the most thorough social-theoretical study of medieval art as it actually functioned in society, and its implications for the art of both the Romanesque and Gothic periods, whose transition Bernard's life spans, are significant.
This study is accompanied by an English translation and an extensive commentary on the Apologia.
      This formerly out-of-print book is now available again in print at: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1655.html

Derrida's discussion of 'Pointure' sets in place a three-way  philosophical encounter. This paper uses the principle of "Pointure' to consider the interpenetration of persons in the tradition of the Trinity. It raises some questions about the three-in-one, in a consideration of the aesthetic implications of the shift from a medieval to an Albertian aesthetic practice in the West, and the significance for models of Personhood.

The essential problem for the study of Bernard’s Apologia ad Guillelmum (1125), the most important document pertaining to the medieval attitude toward art, has been that scholars have felt it does not specifically name one monastery or monastic order as a subject of the criticisms contained in it. Although Bernard–one of the most influential men of his time–quite clearly and repeatedly addressed his admonitions to William of Saint-Thierry’s “order,” scholars have known that William was a friend of Bernard and therefore have believed that this address must have been a front for an indirect attack upon someone else. At the same time they have assumed that the Apologia was aimed at Cluny in particular. Undoubtedly from the earliest times a major factor in this conception has been the similarity of Bernard’s Letter 1 and the Apologia. Yet crucial distinctions between the two have not been noticed. These are that Bernard never hesitated to repeatedly mention Cluny by name in Letter 1, and that there is no criticism of the art of Cluny in the same letter. The problem of clarity of address was solved by prefixing to the Apologia, on inconclusive evidence, a certain letter of Bernard’s. This letter, in recounting an earlier one of William’s, did mention the Cluniacs. However, when the text proper was quoted either extensively or without the aid of the spurious preface, later scholars felt that it was necessary to interpolate the word “Cluniac,” as Bernard did not sufficiently use that word to accommodate their conception of the treatise. As a result, attention focused on Cluny as the major, or even sole, recipient of the Apologia.

Many scholars have thought that if it were Cluny that Bernard had complained about in his treatise, it must also be Cluny that he had described in his chapters on art. Therefore theApologia was substituted for historical evidence in their reconstruction of the art program of that abbey. The use of Bernard’s denunciation of the worst aspects of excessive art as a catalogue of the artworks as they were believed to have existed at Cluny in 1125 has led to an image of Cluny as bent on a program of excessive art. This image was compounded by a somewhat misleading comparison with Cîteaux when Cîteaux was at its financially most impoverished level. Such a polarization of the two most visible representatives of contemporary monasticism has contributed to a rather limited understanding of the monastic controversy in the early twelfth century. The inflexibility of this view has also had as a consequence the impression that excessive ornamentation was somehow distinctively Cluniac, and to be consistently found throughout the Cluniac Congregation.

As to an analysis of what Bernard actually said about art, scholars have tended to concentrate their attention on two main aspects of Apologia 28-29: Bernard’s censure of art as a spiritual distraction and his recognition of the utility of a secular religious art. The first point has, in the most thorough work, received a certain amount of recognition. But although Bernard’s comments on secular religious art were only made in passing, they have been dealt with by some as a major tenet of the Apologia. In short, these authors have fixed on to what may be termed the artistically positive aspects of the Apologia, rather than on to the more prominent negative criticisms of art.

The same inclination is seen in efforts to explain the impetus behind Apologia 28-29. The premium set on medieval religious art by nineteenth-century Church enthusiasts compelled them to denounce Bernard’s criticism of art as personally motivated, rather than on monastic or social grounds. The approaches to Bernard’s personal attitude toward art have been varied and contradictory, with some authors suggesting that Bernard’s rejection of art indicated a revulsion, and to others a very strong attraction. In the end, this has detracted from seeing any more historically or politically based impetus to Bernard’s actions, which scholarship has only just begun to look at. Possibly because of the emphasis on personal stimulus, no direct connection has been made between the Apologia and the discontinuation of heavily ornamented manuscripts within the Cistercian Order. In any event, Bernard’s relation to Cistercian art and legislation on art has not been put into proper perspective. While a very few authors have noted similarities between his views and those of earlier Church fathers, Bernard’s position within a non-iconoclastic movement against religious art in his own time has been largely neglected.

Ultimately, there has been no thorough analysis of the Apologia with the exception of Vacandard’s ground breaking effort. The tendency has been to isolate various passages ofApologia 28-29, rather than to coherently analyze the whole, especially in relation to the rest of the Apologia, Bernard’s other writings, the artistic evidence of Cluny and Cîteaux, and the political conditions of both Cîteaux and monasticism in general. The literature has established a rather inflexible and restricted view of the Apologia. But at the same time, questions have at least been raised on most major issues which, when developed, will lead to a more significant understanding of the part played by Bernard’s treatise in the controversy over monastic art in the twelfth century.

Years ago, Madeline H. Caviness defined the visionary mode as a distinct mode of expression characterized by a preference for geometric forms, for compositions highly ordered and hierarchical where disorder, as embodied in the contorted figures that inhabit Hell in Last Judgement Portals, fitted in with an aesthetic of contrast. What I want to contend here, focusing into the aesthetics of movement and subversion which permeates Romanesque and Early Gothic visionary discourses, is that visionary imagery rebels, more than occasionally, against the “Divine Order”. Formal artifices envisioned to create the illusion of movement, designs intended to evoke the transubstantiation of matter and imagery decorating architectonic elements that make them figuratively rebel against their function animate capitals, columns, arches, ribs and bosses in the three- dimensional scenario that is the medieval West End of Santiago cathedral, in such a way that they seem to challenge well-established traditions. But Compostela is the final step of a path that can be traced back in the portal of Saint- Pierre of Moissac, on the bosses of La Madelaine de Vézelay, or on painted vaults like those of Saint Chef et Saint Théudére-en-Dauphiné and San Pietro al Monte in Civate, in Lombardy

Contents: Introduction, Amanda Boetzkes and Aron Vinegar Part I Between Ontology and Ethics: The return of discrete, autonomous artworks: Heidegger, Harman, and algorithmic allure, Robert Jackson The interior void of things: Heidegger and art of the 1980s and 1990s, Ileana Parvu (translated by Shane Lillis) Giovanni Battista Moroni, portraiture, and the ethics of early modern conversation, Bronwen Wilson. Part II Techniques of World-Making: Heidegger. ";From the dark opening...", Michael J. Golec Art, materiality and the meaning of being: Heidegger on the work of art and the significance of things, Philip Tonner 'Leaning into the wind': poiesis in Richard Long, Diarmuid Costello. Part III Heidegger's Unthought History of Art: Shapes of time: melancholia, anachronism, and de-distancing, Matthew Bowman The gaze of 'historicity' in Schongauer and DA rer, Michael Gnehm 'A dwelling place': sensing the poetics of the everyday in the work of Pierre Bonnard, Lori Nel Johnson. Part IV Making Claims and Aesthetic Judgment: Reluzenz: on Richard Estes, Aron Vinegar Interpretation and the affordance of things, Amanda Boetzkes Sein und Zeit im Raum: perspective as symbolic form, Whitney Davis Index.

In his famous article on the aesthetic attitude in Romanesque art, Meyer Schapiro refers to Arnold of Bonneval's description of the construction of Clairvaux II, seeing it as a straightforward account of "technical enterprise."  In fact, it seems that the account of the rebuilding of Clairvaux II by Arnold--while historically probable, perhaps even true--is far from being a straightforward description of this contemporarily important architectural undertaking.
In this paper, I analyze the miraculous stories of building that have traditionally been treated as little more than pious legends, and certain seemingly factual presentations that have been seen as straightforward accounts.  In this effort I have found that not only could the complete spectrum of the building process be presented in terms of miraculous incidents that were intended to justify an architectural outcome that was in some way excessive, but the tradition of the building-miracle as a literary topos was so strong that it permeates even the seemingly factual presentations, whether positively or negatively.
Without going into detail let me say that as the individual cases demand, this study takes up building accounts of such leading institutions as Cluny, St-Denis, and Clairvaux in light of the controversy over art of the early and mid-twelfth century, the overall social situation, local historical conditions, liturgical reform, the introduction of foreign artistic styles, the disintegration of the international economy of the Roman Empire, the change from a natural economy to a money economy, changing power structures, internal and external community response, and the re-urbanization of Western Europe.  In the end, I show how these accounts typically follow very precise literary topoi of authoritative origin and how their messages were expressed not through claimed historical veracity, but rather through claimed association with venerable and widely recognized precedent.  That is, these miracle stories, while acting as pious stories on the popular level, acted on the polemical level to justify architectural undertakings which for one reason or another the author felt it necessary to defend.

Art historian Meyer Schapiro was a skilled drawer. His archives, preserved at Columbia University, contain thousands of pages dedicated to the study of medieval and modern art. In this paper I analyse a group of drawings devoted to romanesque art (Moissac), neo-impressionism (Seurat) and twentieth-century art (Picasso, Pollock…), in order to reveal their various epistemological uses (documentary, analytical, phenomenological, heuristic...).

This paper analyzes Meyer Schapiro’s unpublished essay "On Liberal bourgeois art-criticism", held in his archive at Columbia University and dated generically to the Thirties. Through the crossed study with an article by Thomas Craven first and after with another one by Schapiro himself, this paper tries to give it an accurate date and to put it in the context of the debate, still in progress in the Thirties, among artists and intellectuals about the definition of a genuinely American aesthetic. Despite its brevity, "On Liberal bourgeois art-criticism" offers many stimuli for research, representing a precious contribution to the understanding of Schapiro’s role in this debate.

Hubert Damisch and Meyer Schapiro have maintained a friendly and intellectual relationship of rare intensity for nearly forty years. Their many letters bear witness to this: from art history to psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, sociology or literature, they have exchanged ideas in almost every field of the humanities and social sciences. Focusing on the years 1972-1973, a period during which Damisch spent a long time in the United States and met, in addition to Schapiro, Michel  Foucault , Max Black, Mike H. Abrams and Norman Malcolm, this introduction seeks to put into perspective the forty-four letters and the various essays devoted to the Freud-Signorelli case gathered in the special issue "Damisch/Schapiro", October, 167, (Winter) 2019

The illuminated copy of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job made at the famous reform monastery of Cîteaux in Burgundy around 1111 is one of the most familiar but least understood illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.  It is so well-known because of its striking illuminations of seemingly gratuitous violence and daily life.  It is poorly understood because these have largely been taken at face value.  This lack of comprehension has come about because of an unawareness on the art theoretical level of exactly how spirituality and politics operate in the artistic process in this particular manuscript and how this specific form of spirituality legitimized a very intimate and, at first glance, undisciplined attitude on the part of the artist toward his subject.
A copy of one of the most widespread and influential texts of medieval monastic culture, the Cîteaux Moralia has also been used by such scholars as Meyer Schapiro as evidence for the claim that the monstrous imagery of the Middle Ages was an imagery of "unbridled, often irrational fantasy," entirely independent of the text and of any specific meaning.  Unbridled and irrational its images may be.  But they are not independent of either the text or specific meaning.  The brilliance of these illuminations and an undercurrent of thematic consistency that may be detected in them cry out from hiding, as it were, that, like an obscure event from Scripture, there is potentially another level of meaning beyond what has so far met the eyes of modern viewers.
Close analysis of these illuminations reveals a gradual transformation from conventional and textually unrelated images of the beginning of the manuscript (the famous frontispiece is an exception, having been added later) to largely unique and textually based ones further on, something that indicates a change in attitude toward the illuminated initial on the part of the artist only after production had begun, by no means part of the original conception.
More specifically, what seems to have happened was that after initially illuminating this patristic work in a conventional and unexceptional manner in the illuminations of the prefatory matter and Books One through Three, the artist began in the initials to Books Four through Seven to internalize Gregory's exegetical attitude--although only in a visually and conceptually incipient way.  This happened, significantly, only after an important methodological statement in the opening passage of Book Four, the culmination of similar statements in Gregory's prefatory letter and Books One and Two: "He who examines the literality (textum) and fails to recognize the sense (sensum) of the holy word provides himself not so much with knowledge as he confuses himself with ambiguity."  In Books Eight through Thirty-five the artist introduced visual complexity into his expressions of the literality and sense of the text, and combined this with an effective visual vocabulary of violence and daily life, both of which are in deep response to the text and the direct result of the artist's assimilation of Gregory's exegetical method into his work.
Indeed, the fundamental dynamics of the manuscript's conception and character indicate how the scenes of seemingly gratuitous violence and seemingly straightforward daily life are in fact the product of Gregory's demand that one "become" what one reads--in this case, the artist internalizing the exegetical method of Gregory himself.  In the same way that Gregory found it acceptable to analyze a line or even a word of text out of context, according to modern sensibilities, so the artist was quite willing to do the same, often with reference to the contemporary monastic polemics of reform.  The end result was the exegetical spiritualization of the first generation experience, the visual expression of Gregory's exegetical method.  It is in this sense, that of Gregory's methodology--his urging the reader (in the Cîteaux Moralia, the artist) to go beyond the text to the "truer" sense of what was being read and to become what one reads--that one must view the initials of the Cîteaux Moralia.  However, since the creative process is not to become but to cause to become, in using the Moralia in Job as a spiritual exercise the artist--or rather the monk-artist, a person who was one of the potential specialized readers of this text in a way that was typically not the case for secular artists at the time--transformed what he had read into artistic expressions of his own spiritual struggle and daily life, recognizing both "what was monstrous and what was beautiful," what pertained to the animal and what pertained to the human, and what pertained to both as embodied in the figure of the semihomo that is so common in the pages of the manuscript, semihomines being creatures that are part human and part beast and that are central to concept of spiritual violence that imbues the illuminations of the Cîteaux Moralia.
More than a straightforward analysis of these illuminations, this study also reveals a great deal about a number of art historical questions common to many other medieval artworks, shedding its light on such issues as the question of meaning in some monstrous and violent imagery of a seemingly ornamental character, the supposed direct observation of nature and daily life for their own sake, the apparent intrusion of the secular upon the sacred, and, inevitably, the role of the artist in all this.  It does this despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that iconographically it is largely a unique work.  And this leads to the issue of how a unique illuminated manuscript like this might have come about in the first place: in this case the result of an unusually intimate relation between text and image, or more precisely, between text, artist, and image, that was fundamentally conditioned by contemporary monastic politics and polemics--the latter being gone into in detail and with very specific application to the initials.  These issues, together with the questions of what, individually, the illuminations of the Cîteaux Moralia mean and why, as a whole, they appear in the text of this particular patristic work at this particular time of monastic reform constitute the core of this study.
Finally, the imagery of the Cîteaux Moralia is analyzed in light of medieval theories of lectio divina, meditatio, and progressing levels of spiritual advancement--securely placing it within this theoretical framework in a way that both reveals the basis of its conceptual attraction and its ultimate spiritual/political failure in the context of twelfth-century monastic polemics and artistic culture.
The key to understanding the illuminations of the Cîteaux Moralia consists primarily of three things, without even one of which it could never have taken its present form: the explicit and implicit methodology of the text of the Moralia in Job itself; the general vocabulary of violent spiritual struggle and the polemics of contemporary monastic culture; and the idiosyncratic element of the individual who responded to the first in the visual vocabulary of the second.  The result was a series of initials of a creativity and exuberance not often found in manuscript illumination before or since.  Perhaps the most violent illuminated manuscript of Romanesque monastic culture, it presents a visual exegesis of Gregory's text that is intimately bound up with Cistercian reform politics and polemics, and that provides an intriguing view into Cistercian self-conception at a decisive moment in their history.

La presente proposta intende offrire una cornice teorica per interpretare alcune modalità con cui le sperimentazioni operate sull’oggetto-libro hanno influenzato le trasformazioni del linguaggio poetico nel contesto della poesia concreta e visiva (1960-1980). Il saggio sarà articolato in tre parti. Nella prima verrà problematizzata la definizione stessa di “libro d’artista”, chiedendosi se il libro d’artista verbovisivo non abbia inaugurato un’effettiva trasformazione mediale del libro: da supporto a vero e proprio oggetto poetico. Nella seconda parte verranno proposte, come strumento interpretativo, le riflessioni di Harold Rosenberg sul rapporto tra immagine e parola, sull’intermedialità tra le arti, e sulla predominanza della componente linguistica nella presentazione dell’iconotesto. Nella terza parte verrà riletto come caso di studio, alla luce di quanto delineato, l’itinerario evolutivo di tre libri pubblicati da Giulia Niccolai presso Geiger: "Humpty Dumpty" (1969), "Greenwich" (1971) e "Poema & Oggetto" (1974).

Between January 1972 and December 1973 French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro exchanged forty-four letters. During this short period, the two scholars discussed many issues concerning the state of art history and its relationship to semiotics and psychoanalysis. A recurring topic was Freud's famous lapse of memory concerning the name of the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli—what to make of the lapsus in art-historical terms and how to make use of it in analyzing Signorelli's cycle of frescoes at the Cathedral of Orvieto in Italy. Damisch was then beginning to work on a book devoted to the subject while Schapiro was writing a small essay on the topic.

French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro maintained an intellectual friendship of rare intensity for nearly forty years. Their many letters bear witness to this: From art history to psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and literature, they exchanged ideas in almost every field of the humanities and social sciences. The special issue which this text introduces focuses on the years 1972 and 1973, a period during which Damisch spent much time in the United States and met, in addition to Schapiro, Michel Foucault, Max Black, M. H. Abrams, and Norman Malcolm. “The Other ‘sch,’ or When Damisch Met Schapiro” seeks to put into perspective the forty-four letters gathered here as well as the several essays devoted to the Freud-Signorelli case.

This article sketches a strategy for teaching Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" ("Origin"). I illustrate how one can address Heidegger's Nazi affiliation while simultaneously engaging his philosophy of art on its own terms-goals that often work at cross purposes in the classroom. Like many, I read "Origin" together with Meyer Schapiro's critique of Heidegger's interpretation of a van Gogh still life of shoes, which figures so prominently in "Origin." My innovation is to pair the Heidegger/Schapiro dispute with Holocaust imagery of victims' shoes and personal effects. Such imagery serves to introduce historical and political context for the debate and to highlight methodological differences in their conceptions of the meaning, reception, and interpretation of artworks and images more generally. These differences raise big-picture questions about the norms that govern our engagements with art and the theoretical desiderata we want a philosophy of art to satisfy. The dispute between Heidegger and Scha-piro, read in conjunction with Holocaust imagery, lends these rather abstract questions a concreteness and urgency that greatly enhances classroom discussion.

Abstract

When art, from one side blesses the life; on the other, shows it obviously. The aim which we gain with presenting this text, over from Van Gogh’s shoes drawings, is commenting the interpretations made by Meyer Schapiro and Heidegger. As like in these both philosophers presented, the main problem in here is too, that who wore these shoes: a peasant or a townsman? The impressions in that context aim to show that; the works are inside the life, but also every livable background gave them another quality. Exactly for that reason, along present works, there will be an analyzing of Van Gogh’s style in other works, and finally going to be a try to reveal a new interpretation, especially over Bataille, for shoes.

Keywords: Van Gogh, Shoes, Townsman, Peasant


Özet

Sanat yaşamı bir yandan kutsarken bir yandan da açıkça sergiler. Bu metni ortaya koyarken edindiğimiz amaç, Van Gogh’un ayakkabı çizimleri üzerinden Meyer Schapiro ve Heidegger tarafından ortaya koyulan yorumları değerlendirmektir. İki düşünürde olduğu gibi, burada da sorun ayakkabıları kimin giydiğidir: bir köylü mü, yoksa şehirli mi? Bu bağlamda edineceğimiz izlenimler eserlerin hayatın içinde oldukları, ancak her yaşamsal arka planın onlara farklı bir nitelik kattığının sergilenmesidir. Tam da bu nedenle, mevcut eserlerin yanı sıra Van Gogh’un diğer eserlerinde ortaya koyduğu tarz da incelenerek nihayet ayakkabılara dair özellikle Bataille üzerinden yeni bir yorumlama ortaya koyulmaya çalışılacaktır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Van Gogh, Ayakkabılar, Şehirli, Köylü

Before he was an art historian, Meyer Schapiro trained as an artist. He visited museums and galleries of contemporary art in New York, where he encountered African art first as an art student and later as a graduate student at the newly founded Department of Art History at Columbia University. While his activity as an art student and his early interest in the art of his time are well-known, his simultaneous interest in African art, from a very early age, has not yet received critical attention. New resources, particularly his personal archive together with the publication of an important volume of his travel journals from his first research trip to Europe (1926-7), reveal that African art formed a touchstone, a point of comparison for Schapiro as he encountered medieval objects with which he was unfamiliar. The letters make his formative experience newly accessible and reveal the importance of African art for his early writings on Romanesque sculpture. I argue that these twin interests propelled Schapiro to be the first art historian to recuperate the term “primitive” for medieval and nonwestern art. Indeed, his early body of work uncovered the terms’ racial and political undertones, and explicitly worked against the kind of primitivism in vogue with modernist artists and critics during the 1920s and 1930s.

This article sketches a strategy for teaching Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" ("Origin"). I illustrate how one can address Heidegger's Nazi affiliation while simultaneously engaging his philosophy of art on its own terms-goals that often work at cross purposes in the classroom. Like many, I read "Origin" together with Meyer Schapiro's critique of Heidegger's interpretation of a van Gogh still life of shoes, which figures so prominently in "Origin." My innovation is to pair the Heidegger/Schapiro dispute with Holocaust imagery of victims' shoes and personal effects. Such imagery serves to introduce historical and political context for the debate and to highlight methodological differences in their conceptions of the meaning, reception, and interpretation of artworks and images more generally. These differences raise big-picture questions about the norms that govern our engagements with art and the theoretical desiderata we want a philosophy of art to satisfy. The dispute between Heidegger and Scha-piro, read in conjunction with Holocaust imagery, lends these rather abstract questions a concreteness and urgency that greatly enhances classroom discussion.

No creo ir este año a Pontigny, pero le agradecería me dijera cuando Vd. y Scheler estarán allí. No sería imposible que fuese a hacerles una visita y hasta les comprometiese a venir a España en rápida excursión de automóvil. Saludándole atentamente, quedo de Vd. afmo.,

Art historian Meyer Schapiro was a skilled draftsman. His archives, preserved at Columbia University, contain thousands of pages dedicated to the study of medieval and modern art. In this paper I wish to analyse a group of drawings devoted to romanesque art (Moissac), neo-impressionism (Seurat) and twentieth-century art (Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, De Kooning…), in order to reveal their various epistemological uses (documentary, analytical, phenomenological, heuristic...).

L’historien de l’art marxiste Meyer Schapiro terminait son article posthume « l’écrit dans l’image » qui examinait de l'Antiquité grecque à l'art moderne, l'intrusion paradoxale des mots dans l'œuvre peinte, en citant l’art conceptuel comme une résolution à un conflit de vingt siècles entre l’écrit et l’image. On sait qu’il avait enseigné à Columbia aux artistes tels que Robert Motherwell puis Allan Kaprow. Prenons le parti de retourner sa méthode et d’étudier en détail un de ses exemples, l’étonnant manuscrit de quasi-calligrammes de la British Library, comme si c’était une œuvre de Mel Ramsden (et vice-versa).

Art historian Meyer Schapiro was a skilled drawer. His archives, preserved at Columbia University, contain thousands of pages dedicated to the study of medieval and modern art. In this paper I wish to analyse a group of drawings devoted to romanesque art (Moissac), neo-impressionism (Seurat) and twentieth-century art (Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, De Kooning…), in order to reveal their various epistemological uses (documentary, analytical, phenomenological, heuristic...).

1. English: The article supposes a thesis on the iconography and the artistic expression of a figurative and narrative sculptural depiction that is represented on a Romanesque capital of the cloister of Moissac in southwestern France. This thesis refers to a detail of the capital about the miraculous draft of fish and the calling of the first Apostles according to the Gospel of Luke (capital n° 47 in the counting convention supposed by Schapiro 1931). In this detail (on the gallery side of the capital’s basket) three persons are represented: on the left is a fisherman wearing work clothes who is obviously jumping out of a boat, on the right is a haloed man in the habit of a philosopher from antiquity, and in the middle of the basket’s gallery side is a hesitant-looking man without a halo, who is also dressed like a philosopher from the ancient world. The thesis is that the diachronic sequence of three stages of one person’s individual development is simultaneuosly represented, with the metamorphosis of the fisherman Simon into Peter, who was the first Apostle and later the leader among the Apostles, in the middle of the basket’s gallery side. It is then explained in the article to what extent this thesis is due to the reception-aesthetic exploration of the subjects of the cloister’s capitals in recent literature. The thesis is being defended against conventional iconographic explanations. Furthermore the way the artistic creation of the scene points beyond the biblical source of its inspiration is shown. The delicate portrayal of hesitation expressed by the individual in the middle of the sculpted picture visualizes the great personal challenge posed by the required immediate transition from an honorable fisherman and paterfamilias into a follower of an itinerant preacher. While the theological interpretations of the biblical story explain that the willingness of the Apostles was proof and witness of divine power, this sculpted expression of human empathy with Simon‘s hesitation might even be seen as a token of religious heresy.
2. Français: Cet article présente une thèse sur l’iconographie et l’expression artistique d’une sculpture figurative et narrative d‘un chapiteau du cloître roman de Moissac, dans le sud-ouest de la France (fin du 11ème siècle). La thèse concerne un détail de ce chapiteau sur « la pêche miraculeuse » et la nomination des premiers disciples de Jésus selon l’Évangile de Luc (chapiteau n° 47, d’après la numérotation proposée par M. Schapiro, 1931). La face, côté galerie, de ce chapiteau représente trois personnages : à gauche, un pêcheur en tenue de travail qui, apparemment, saute de son bateau ; à droite, un homme nimbé, vêtu comme un philosophe antique ; au milieu, un homme non-nimbé, habillé, lui aussi, en philosophe antique, mais qui donne l‘impression d’hésiter. Cette face du chapiteau représente la séquence diachronique de trois moments de l’évolution d’un même personnage avec, au centre, la métamorphose du pêcheur Simon en Pierre, le premier apôtre. On explique également que cette thèse se doit à l’exploration de l’iconographie des chapiteaux du cloître d’après la théorie de la réception esthétique dans la littérature scientifique récente. En outre, la thèse de l’article est défendue contre les explications iconographiques conventionelles. Il est finalement démontré que la représentation artistique de la scène va au-delà de la source biblique qui l’a inspirée. La délicate figuration de l’hésitation manifestée par le personnage médian de l’image, exprime le grand défi personnel posé par l’exigence d’une transformation immédiate d’un honorable pêcheur, père de famille, en disciple d’un prédicateur itinérant. On pourrait même regarder cette image sculptée pleine d’humaine empathie, comme le signe d’une sorte de déviance religieuse par rapport aux interprétations théologiques du récit biblique de la nomination des apôtres et de leur zèle à y répondre, comme preuve et temoignage du pouvoir divin.