MEYER SCHAPIRO AND GERMAN AESTHETIC DEBATES IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
Meyer Schapiro’s work has had a greater impact upon the development of radical art history in the anglophone world than that of any other Marxist art historian. His often essayistic contributions have influenced later studies on medieval sculpture, Courbet and mid-nineteenth-century French Realism, Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism.1 Schapiro was a ‘Western Marxist’ in that he rejected the positivistic Marxism of the Second International and the vulgar philosophical orthodoxies of the Soviet Union, aligning himself instead with a more expansive and critical approach to the Marxist tradition. In keeping with the thesis of British historian Perry Anderson, Schapiro – like other Western Marxists in a period shaped by working-class defeats – became increasingly more concerned with questions of philosophy and aesthetics, as opposed to more explicitly political and economic ones.2 Many of the ideas and themes in his writing were developed in tandem with those of European Western Marxists, particularly those associated with the classic German debates of the 1930s and 1940s who would later be collated in the celebrated volume Aesthetics and Politics.3 He was influenced by the theoretical and historical framework developed by Georg Lukács, even if he ultimately inverted his aesthetic judgments; had a friendship with Bertolt Brecht while he was in New York in 1935–6 and afterwards; admired the work of Walter Benjamin, whom he visited in Paris in 1939 in a failed attempt to get him to come to the United States; and had a friendship and somewhat ambiguous intellectual relationship with Theodor W. Adorno, alongside whom he published in the Zeitshrift für Sozialforschung in 1938.4 With this in mind, I want to tentatively sketch out an analysis of Schapiro’s thought as being formed in some kind of conjunction with the central figures responsible for these classic debates, and with Lukács in particular.
I want to begin with what is undoubtedly Schapiro’s most celebrated essay, ‘Nature of Abstract Art’ of 1937, and the paper of the previous year with which it is nearly always counterposed, ‘The Social Bases of Art’. Both of these texts have been the subject of critical attention from, among others, Serge Guilbaut, Thomas Crow and T. J. Clark, all exemplars of the social history of art. Each argues that there is a marked shift between the two texts. For Guilbaut, these supposed differences in Schapiro’s position played a pivotal role in the move from the communist-led Popular Front to Trotskyism and thereby the ‘art for art’s sake’ that triumphantly followed.5 Crow characterizes the first essay as the kind of leftist art history that dismissed ‘all avant-garde claims to a critical and independent stance as so much false consciousness’, while the second instead ‘offered a qualified apology for modernism’.6 And Clark dismisses the voice of the first essay as ‘any old Stalinist in full cry’, one that, moreover, produces ‘false alternatives’ (and that ‘the same could be said of Lukács, largely’), whereas the second essay represents little more than an ‘inconsequential hedging of bets’.7 As Andrew Hemingway has made clear, however, the differences between the two texts are overstated and perhaps more the product of their respective contexts and functions.8 ‘The Social Bases of Art’ was delivered to the first American Artists’ Congress Against War and Fascism in New York – which Schapiro helped to found and organize – and was therefore in part a polemical call-to-arms; ‘Nature of Abstract Art’ was a review of Alfred H. Barr’s catalogue to the 1936 show ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, which Barr had curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, published in Marxist Quarterly – a journal devoted to Marxist scholarship, of which Schapiro was an editor – and it was therefore more dispassionate and theoretical in tone.
Contrary to the interpretations of Guilbaut, Crow and Clark, rather than disparaging modern art in his earlier 1936 paper, Schapiro merely argued that it was just as ‘social’ as the art that preceded it: ‘The preponderance of objects drawn from a personal and artistic world does not mean that pictures are now more pure than in the past, more completely works of art. It means simply that the personal and aesthetic contexts of secular life now condition the formal character of art, just as religious beliefs and practices in the past conditioned the formal character of religious art.’9 While the very conception of artistic individualism becomes homologous to bourgeois individualism via the mediations of the art market, and is in this sense therefore predicated upon the exploitation of the working class under capitalism, Schapiro argued that ‘the social origins of such forms of modern art do not permit one to judge this art as good or bad; they simply throw light upon some aspects of their character and enable us to see more clearly that the ideas of modern artists, far from describing eternal and necessary conditions in art, are simply the results of recent history’.10 And, as befitting a paper written for an audience of artists radicalized by the economic crisis of the 1930s, Schapiro finished with the rallying cry that it is only by ‘recognizing the dependence of his situation and attitudes on the character of modern society’ that ‘the artist acquires the courage to change things, to act on his society and for himself in an effective manner’, to produce one in which ‘all men can be free individuals’, to the extent that individuality will lose ‘its exclusiveness and its ruthless and perverse character’.11
As already mentioned, the later paper, ‘Nature of Abstract Art’, was written as a critique of Barr’s ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’. While, for Schapiro, Barr’s catalogue essay may have provided a precise chronology of the development of abstract art, it nevertheless ‘excludes as irrelevant to its history the nature of the society in which it arose, except as an incidental obstructing or accelerating atmospheric factor’.12 In opposition to such formalism, and in line with historical materialism, Schapiro instead insisted that ‘the banal divisions of the great historical styles in literature and art correspond to the momentous divisions in the history of society’, a thesis that he then demonstrated in an analysis of a series of modern movements from Impressionism onwards.13 On the mutability of realism and abstraction, Schapiro is again clear that both ‘affirm the sovereignty of the artist’s mind, the first in the capacity to recreate the world minutely in a narrow, intimate field by series of abstract calculations of perspective and gradation of colour, the other in the capacity to impose new forms on nature, to manipulate the abstracted elements of line and colour freely, or to create shapes corresponding to subtle states of mind’.14 So that ‘as little as a work is guaranteed aesthetically by its resemblance to nature, so little is it guaranteed by its abstractness or “purity”’.15 For Schapiro then, ‘Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.’16
In this sense, there is more continuity in the two essays than has generally been acknowledged, their differences being more about context than shifts in Schapiro’s politics. Nowhere in the earlier text does Schapiro reduce avant-garde art to ‘false consciousness’ tout court, or present ‘false alternatives’ between realism and modernism. As he said in an interview years later: ‘My essay on the social bases of art was never meant to be a blanket condemnation of modern art, but only a criticism of some aspects of it. I was never interested in any position that forced you to choose between social realism and modern art.’17 That this was the case was also suggested by an essay entitled ‘Rebellion in Art’ that he wrote as late as 1950 on the subject of the 1913 Armory Show as part of a series of lectures on the theme of ‘America in Crisis’.18 For Schapiro, whereas the more naturalistic art of the past was formed within the institutional confines of the Church, aristocracy and the state, and therefore ‘remained in all its innovations within the bounds of widely accepted values, and continued to express feelings and ideas that had emerged or were emerging within these institutions’, modern artists wishing to paint comparable works of broad human content for large audiences were denied such opportunities.19 Instead, they had little alternative ‘but to cultivate in their art the only or surest realms of freedom – the interior world of their fancies, sensations, and feelings, and the medium itself’.20 Despite the harsh political climate of McCarthyism, Schapiro still managed to inflect these developments politically in that, while the new art may seem to be ‘a fulfilment of an American dream of liberty, it is also in some ways a negation’.21 As in the focus upon the individual, the modern artist is isolated ‘from activity in the world’ and thereby ‘confirms the growing separation of culture from work and ideal social aims’ – that is, an emancipatory politics that constituted the framework of these debates in the 1930s.22
As Crow has noted, Schapiro’s two earlier essays were clearly marked by a close reading of Marx’s interpretation of the 1848–51 crisis in France: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Schapiro himself acknowledged the importance of Marx’s ‘brilliant’ essay, as well as his The Class Struggles in France, in a footnote to his ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery’ of 1941.23 Schapiro was convinced by Marx’s theory that the forcible exclusion of oppositional groups from the political process between 1848–51 necessitated a kind of cultural suicide on the part of the republican bourgeoisie, the willed destruction of its own democratic institutions, values and expressive forms under Bonapartism. As Marx eloquently put it, after the events of 1848–51 the bourgeoisie fully realized that it ‘had to destroy all its instruments of defence against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute’.24 For Schapiro, as for Marx, this political acquiescence necessitated a renewed conception of individual autonomy outside of the official public sphere; hence the first flowering of consumer culture in the newly constructed spaces of individuated leisure that were pictured in Impressionist painting under the Second Empire. It was this bourgeois retreat from the public sphere, and its conceptualization within Marx’s analysis, that also underpinned Benjamin’s unfinished study of Baudelaire, a point made clear in his claim that ‘the theory of l’art pour l’art assumes decisive importance around 1852, at a time when the bourgeoisie sought to take its “cause” from the hands of writers and poets’.25 So that, for Benjamin, Baudelaire ‘owed his enjoyment of this society as one who had already half withdrawn from it’. 26
This is, of course, also the main premise of Lukács’s theory of realism in the bourgeois novel and its decline after the political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century. For him, the period from 1789 to 1848 was one in which the European bourgeoisie heroically pitted itself against political absolutism and aristocratic society, and in the process produced a rich culture of literary realism that was the heir to the great classical and humanist traditions of the past – from Shakespeare and Cervantes through to the nineteenth-century novels of Scott, Stendhal, Goethe, Dickens and especially Balzac and Tolstoy. Following Marx, Lukács defined realism as a literary mode in which the lives of individual characters were portrayed as part of a narrative that situated them within the entire historical dynamics of their society. That he could include the renowned royalist Balzac in his pantheon of great realist writers set his theory squarely against the more reductive one of the Second International, which, with Georgi Plekhanov and Franz Mehring, reduced art works to the political ideology of their authors. After the revolutions of 1848, the bourgeoisie ceased to be a progressive class, but one instead intent on consolidating its power over both a vanquished ancien régime and a revolutionary proletariat. For Lukács, this produced a corresponding shift in culture as realism was superseded by naturalism, and the evocation of the social totality was replaced by the relativized voice of the author and the various psychologies of his characters. In naturalism, which for him was the precursor to modernism in general, the world is reduced to static situations with fetishized objects described in only isolated, fleeting, subjective impressions.27
Schapiro comes closest to a Lukácsian position in the essay on Courbet when he convincingly demonstrated how the artist’s ‘taste for the people’ was ‘nourished and directed by the artistic and social movements of his time’.28 Schapiro emphasized the fact that whether the artists and authors associated with the movement were from a peasant or lower-middle-class background, they were, nevertheless, filtered through the capital where ‘they encountered a higher culture and consciousness of social life’.29 He therefore focused upon the artists, authors, poets and critics who gathered around Courbet in Paris, and examined how the precise nature of their political commitments varied and were transformed by ‘the broader shifts within the class politics of the period’ – that is to say, he studied ‘the stratification of peasants and small proprietors, of factory workers and artisans, the first group attached to its soil, conservative, often religious; the others, without possessions, brought together in work and more apt to independent resistance and struggle’, and, moreover, how Bonapartism rested upon the support of the former at the expense of the latter.30 For Schapiro this produced a bifurcation in culture. Whereas Courbet remained committed to revolutionary politics and joined in the Paris Commune twenty years later, the poet and critic Champfleury – ‘often identified as the apostle of realism’ – nailed his colours to the mast by accepting the Legion of Honour from the emperor himself in 1867.31 According to Schapiro, ‘In proposing two arts, a traditional, popular art and a more realistic urban art, one conservative and didactic, the other reproducing the spectacle of modern progress, Champfleury satisfied perfectly and in the language of an official adviser the requirements of the regime of the third Napoleon by whom he had just been decorated.’ Bonapartism rested upon both support of the peasantry and the economic expansion and prosperity of France between 1850 and 1870, and for Schapiro, ‘The latter assured the final triumph of realism, not in its plebeian or insurgent aspect, but as a personal aesthetic tendency toward the representation of the privately experienced and matter-of-fact world which culminated in Impressionism; the former determined the taste for the arts of the static peasantry and primitive cultures which in the crises and social pessimism at the end of the century could replace realism as models of a personal style.’32
As for Lukács in literature, so for Schapiro in painting then: the events of 1848–51 had destroyed any utopian impulses or democratic aspirations in cultural production. The attempt by Courbet to reach a working-class and peasant public was ultimately crushed under the weight of political reaction, and Realism was surpassed by the privatized and subjective world pictured in Impressionism – a view consonant with Schapiro’s earlier essays, as well as lectures that he gave in the 1940s and 1950s.33 But here the two men part. If Lukács remained forever welded to a now outmoded form of literary realism, denouncing everything that broke from its strictures as mere formalism, then Schapiro would find some progressive value in formal experimentation, even as he might condemn the limited horizons of its class origins and allegiances. Despite his admiration for Balzac, Stendhal, Courbet and Daumier, Schapiro inverted Lukács’s position in that for him, as Hemingway makes clear, ‘realism in the visual arts was an essentially nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetic, and his interest in it was as the forcing ground of the more radical culture of modernism’.34 There is an echo here of his two groundbreaking essays on Romanesque sculpture and manuscript illuminations of 1939 in which the ‘discoordinate’ composition of the sculpture at the Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain was interpreted as the expression of class antagonisms between ecclesiastical and secular authority, between spiritual conformity and freedom; and the secular motifs in the abbey church at Souillac in France were similarly understood as heralding an accommodation of religious art to lay preferences, on a historical trajectory of social progress leading away from the dogmatic affirmation of church authority in the latter part of the twelfth century and beyond.35 As Otto Karl Werckmeister has argued, in this way ‘Schapiro ventured into an interpretation of Romanesque art by analogy to modern art, where prevalence of aesthetic form and expression of individual sentiment are linked’ – in the former, tied to a forward-moving progressive bourgeois class, and in the latter, a now backward and reactionary one.36
In discussing 1930s American painting years later, Schapiro made it clear that he was not enamoured with the type of nineteenth-century naturalism produced by the Soyer brothers, Moses and Raphael, with whom he had studied at the National Academy of Design while an undergraduate at Columbia. Indeed, the only social realist artist he professed to admire was Philip Evergood, who produced a more strident political art using techniques partly derived from German Expressionism.37 Such preferences distance Schapiro from the vulgar sociological critiques of modernism, and also the crude label of being a Stalinist, the charge that Clark makes against him and Lukács. Indeed, the materialist theories of culture pursued by Schapiro and Lukács, and the debates around realism and modernism – in particular German Expressionism – were circumscribed by similar arguments over the relative merits of the Popular Front as a political response to fascism in Europe and the United States. Yet whereas Lukács’s theory of literature was congruent with the Popular Front, in fact preceding it by several years, Schapiro’s hostility to this tactical turn by the communist movement was never in doubt. This is not the place to discuss Lukács’s strategic membership of the Communist Party under Stalinism – what he described as his ‘entry ticket into history’ – but the charge against Schapiro is unfounded on both political and aesthetic grounds.38 Like many of the ‘New York Intellectuals’ with whom he associated, Schapiro was radicalized by the Depression and became a fellow-traveller, publishing in communist magazines such as New Masses. Yet, unlike them, by the 1936 presidential elections he was voting not for the Communist Party candidate, but the Socialist Party one – Norman Thomas – in line with the Trotskyist Workers Party, who also rejected the Popular Front as an accommodation with capitalism and the abandonment of revolutionary principles. While he never described himself as a Trotskyist, he supported the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, headed by his mentor John Dewey; he published in the reconstituted Partisan Review in the late 1930s during its period of identification with Trotsky; he was one of the first to sign up to the statement issued by ‘The League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism’ that appropriated the demand for the ‘complete freedom for art’ made in the ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ of 1938 written by Trotsky in collaboration with André Breton and Diego Rivera; and it was Schapiro who led the walkout of the American Artists’ Congress in 1940 after the Nazi-Soviet Pact.39
Yet, despite the fact that Schapiro had broken with the Communist Party after the first round of the Moscow Show Trials in 1936, his criticism of Stalinism was perhaps most pronounced in his critique of Soviet Socialist Realism, as it had to be for Brecht, who, like Lukács, strategically remained within the Communist Party, even if at a distance from Moscow, first in Scandinavia, then America, and finally in East Germany. In a lecture given as early as 1938 entitled ‘Social Realism and Revolutionary Art’, Schapiro declared that: ‘There is a vast body of painting dedicated to the glorification of the government and especially of Stalin’, one that, moreover, ‘corresponds to the emergence of a labour and bureaucratic aristocracy that is plebeian and enjoys a petty bourgeois leisure’.40 That Schapiro still subscribed to the original aims of the Bolsheviks is intimated in the fact that he argued that those paintings in which Stalin appeared ‘are notoriously falsified historically, being based on recent textbooks, which supplant the accounts published shortly after the Revolution’.41 This art is also, for him, aesthetically retardaire for, after the liquidation of the Soviet avant-garde, they are painted ‘in a dull literal style that continues the native historical painting of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a painting based on the academic salon art of the 1870s and 1880s in Paris and Munich’.42 And, he finished with a swipe at his former comrades in the United States by asserting that the ‘sympathisers in capitalist countries who echo these doctrines or tacitly accept the present state of Russian art as a model for their own countries do socialism the greatest disservice’.43
It is this combination of a purportedly radical art in outmoded forms that drove Brecht’s critique of Soviet Socialist Realism also, and of the figure that he considered to be its main spokesperson and most sophisticated theoretical defender, Lukács. As Brecht notoriously said of him (and other Soviet cultural theoreticians) to Benjamin: ‘They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.’44 Like Schapiro, Brecht was deeply critical of the idea that nineteenth-century novelists, essentially bourgeois writers, could be held up as the model for the proletarian avant-garde of the present, a different and antagonistic class altogether. Turning the debate on its head, Brecht charged Lukács with formalism and, parodying him, demanded: ‘Be like Tolstoy – but without his Weakness! Be like Balzac – only up-to-date!’45 For Brecht, as for Schapiro, modernist formal devices represented yet another technical means that could be used alongside existing, more traditional ones in the creation of a vanguard art produced to radicalize the masses. As such, they were aligned in their resistance to both the fetishization of artistic form and the type of technological determinism that, for the pair of them, had become crystallized under Stalinism in the reactionary style of Soviet Socialist Realism.46
Such a combination of modernist formal devices with traditional techniques of artistic production was a significant component of the mural practice of Rivera, whom Schapiro counted as a friend, and whose art he described in a review of Bertram Wolfe and Rivera’s Portrait of Mexico, published in Marxist Quarterly as ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’ in 1937, as ‘the nearest to a modern epic painting’.47 After returning to Mexico in 1921 to paint the revolution, Rivera fused the formal techniques of Cubism that he had learned in Paris with a renewed commitment to history painting in the traditional medium of fresco. Schapiro’s designation of Rivera’s murals as ‘epic modernism’ was later taken up by David Craven, who argued that the term was most probably deployed by Schapiro in relation to the concept of Brechtian ‘epic theatre’.48 To support this claim, he makes a point-by-point comparison between the main tenets of Brechtian theatre and a reading of Rivera’s National Palace mural completed between 1929 and 1935, highlighting most significantly: (1) the deployment of an open narrative over and above a closed one; (2) the desire to provoke the spectator into action rather than passive contemplation; (3) the construction of a human agency that is malleable rather than fixed; (4) the use of montage over linear narrative; (5) and the appeal to reason as opposed to emotion.49 For Craven, Rivera used the techniques of modernist montage in his mural to produce a collage of various moments in Mexican history that, in its lack of linear development, standard plot or easy resolution, placed the viewer ascending the staircase in the middle and actively at the centre of interpretation.50
While Schapiro may well have had Brecht in mind in terms of his designation of Rivera’s art as a form of ‘epic modernism’, I feel that there is in fact a more suggestive correspondence to be made between this description of the murals and Lukács’s conception of Tolstoy’s work as a form of ‘epic realism’. Lukács followed Lenin in describing Tolstoy as the ‘poetic mirror of the peasant revolution’ that lasted from 1861 to 1905.51 For Lukács, the reason that his novels deserve the designation of ‘epic realism’, and represent the culminating moment in realist literature in the period following 1848–51, is because Tolstoy ‘lived in a country in which the bourgeois revolution was still the order of the day’, so that the ‘social conditions which favoured realism and which determined the development of European literature from Swift to Stendhal were still in existence’.52 From his Hegelian and pre-Marxist The Theory of the Novel onwards, epic narration – the first stage in Greek literature – was possible for Lukács only when there was an organic unity in everyday life, when it felt meaningful and immediately comprehensible in all its minutiae.53 Once this had been sundered, it fell upon the novel, and in particular narrativity, to produce this lost wholeness once again, a sense of the totality that – following Hegel – had become even more obfuscated by the processes of industrialization. For Fredric Jameson, it is Lukács’s seminal History and Class Consciousness that marks the shift from a metaphysical to a historical analysis of the social totality, one that is already latent in the passages on Tolstoy in the earlier work, and one that would become central to his later fully Marxist readings of the bourgeois novel.54 For Lukács then, ‘Tolstoy’s great and truly epic mentality … aspires to a life based on a community of feeling among simple human beings closely bound to nature’ – that is, the peasantry under what Lenin referred to as a form of ‘Asiatic’ capitalism within pre-revolutionary Russia.55
In his ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’ essay, after describing Rivera’s murals as ‘pervaded by a sincere hatred of oppression and by sympathy with the masses’, Schapiro made a strikingly similar claim for them being examples of ‘epic modernism’:
If Mexican art after 1920 is really fertilised by the revolution – at least more than the art in Russia or any other country in the world – it is partly because the movement was a bourgeois revolution enlisting the support of almost the entire cultured stratum of the country in the struggle against the great landholders and foreign imperialists. The backwardness of this colonial country with no film industry and general illiteracy, the positive survival of native arts, gave to monumental painting an importance it could hardly win in more developed cultures.56
As mentioned, this monumental wall painting combined the age-old medium of fresco with cubistic compositional techniques that Rivera had learned while in Paris in the teens. Hence, yet again, Schapiro adopted the same historical, political and economic coordinates of Lukács’s analysis of bourgeois culture, but ultimately inverted them to celebrate the ‘epic modernism’ of Rivera over the ‘epic realism’ of a writer such as Tolstoy. In this, instead of following Lenin, Schapiro once again concurred with Trotsky, who in a letter published in Partisan Review the following year wrote: ‘In the field of painting, the October Revolution has found its greatest interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico’, with 1917 being the catalyst for Rivera’s ‘power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection’.57 It therefore came as no surprise that Schapiro was one of the first to endorse the ‘Statement of The League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism’ that was published in Partisan Review. Following the ‘Manifesto’ produced by Trotsky, Breton and Rivera, Dwight Macdonald argued that ‘if art and science are to be true to the revolution, they must first be true to themselves’.58
For Crow, this enthusiasm for modernism in the visual arts culminated in Schapiro’s ‘anodyne celebrations of abstract painting in the 1950s’, and here he refers to his 1957 defence of Abstract Expressionism, ‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art’.59 Yet this essay is related to the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, if only under distinctly different historical conditions. As the editors of Aesthetics and Politics make clear, one of the key axes of these exchanges was ‘the relations between “avant-garde” and “commercial” art under the dominion of capital’, ‘the one subjectively progressive and objectively elitist, the other objectively popular and subjectively regressive’.60 Schapiro had made such a distinction himself in his Courbet essay. And even earlier, in a little-known essay entitled ‘Public Use of Art’ published in 1936 in Art Front – the paper of the Artists’ Union – Schapiro had questioned the very efficacy of high art, monopolized by the bourgeoisie, in a culture pervaded by the mass media. Like Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Schapiro called for a fusion between the means of technical reproduction developed by the mass media and the relatively archaic realm of high art: ‘To make art available to everyone the material means for diffusing the degraded contemporary art, the printing presses and the admirable techniques of reproduction, must become the vehicles for the best art.’61 Yet for Schapiro, unlike Benjamin perhaps, the techniques of mechanical reproduction were not, in and of themselves, enough to revolutionize life. Real cultural democratization was possible only on the condition that ‘art embody a content and achieve qualities acceptable to the masses of the people’, and that ‘the people control the means of production and attain a standard of living and a level of culture such that the enjoyment of art of a high quality becomes an important part of their life’ – that is, only under socialism when the working class actually owned the ‘means of production’ was a thoroughgoing and pervasive cultural democracy ever really possible. 62
In the context of 1950s America, Schapiro’s utopian belief in the emancipatory potential of technology and the mass media had, understandably, withered. The postwar boom in the United States was predicated upon the wholesale generalization of Fordism and the ideas of scientific management. The trade-union militancy of the 1930s had been tempered by Taft-Hartley and the purging of its most militant members under McCarthyism.63 Automation had led to deskilling and the driving down of wages, both at home and abroad, as the ever-increasing militarization during the Cold War period ensured that the United States had access to foreign markets and their cheap raw materials. The burgeoning entertainment industries – Hollywood, TV, radio and the commercial press – were mobilized to ensure acquiescence, political quietism and a willing submission to such conditions.64 The subject became a staple of mainstream American sociology in the period with works such as C. Wright Mills’s White Collar and The Power Elite being perhaps the most celebrated examples.65 This is the context for the Frankfurt School’s analysis of administered capitalism with its pessimistic prognosis for human emancipation – best captured in Horkheimer and Adorno’s earlier, yet prescient, Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its withering critique of ‘positivism’, which, they argued, had produced a situation in which ‘thought finds itself deprived not only of the affirmative reference to science and everyday phenomena but also of the conceptual language of opposition’.66 This is also the context for Schapiro’s defence of postwar American abstraction.
For Schapiro, the generalized division of labour characteristic of postwar American industry had ensured that there was ‘a separation between the individual and the final result’, no longer any ‘bond between maker and user’.67 As a consequence, few people ‘were fortunate enough to make something that represents themselves, that issues entirely from their hands and mind, and to which they can affix their names’.68 The process of alienation was only reinforced by the mass media, which produced ‘a world of social relationships that is impersonal, calculated and controlled in its elements, aiming always at efficiency’.69 In opposition to the coercive manipulation of the entertainment industry, ‘The experience of a work of art, like the creation of the work of art itself, is a process ultimately opposed to communication as it is understood now.’70 In such a depersonalized and technocratic society, abstract painting had a critical edge in that it symbolized ‘an individual who realises freedom and deep engagement of the self within his work’.71 Yet Schapiro emphasized the importance of gesture over abstraction per se, ‘the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance in paint itself … all signs of the artist’s active presence’ – painterly techniques that had become synonymous with Abstract Expressionism.72 Thus these works, ‘the last hand-made, personal objects within our culture’, represented, for Schapiro at least, an ‘affirmation of the self or certain parts of the self, against devalued social norms’.73 Under the dehumanizing conditions of postwar capitalism then, gestural painting thereby assumed a progressive quality as ‘a means of affirming the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing’. 74
Rather than Schapiro’s essay being a crass paean to Abstract Expressionism, Francis Frascina has argued that it was ‘a product of a Marxist intellectual writing to support a critical version of the avant-garde in the face of the great traumas of Stalinism, the Holocaust and McCarthyism’.75 These were the same historical coordinates of Adorno’s work in exile, which also sought to defend, what he considered to be, an embattled subjectivity under the administered conditions of postwar American capitalism. Like Schapiro, Adorno found it in the most esoteric forms of high art; and like Schapiro, the autonomous art work was counterposed to the reified world of mass culture in its potential to resist appropriation. Indeed, Craven points to the similarity of Schapiro’s assertion in his text on Rivera – ‘The fact that a work of art has a politically radical content therefore does not assure its revolutionary value. Nor does a non-political content necessarily imply its irrelevance to revolutionary action’ – to Adorno’s claim, just five years after Schapiro’s defence of Abstract Expressionism, that ‘politics have migrated into autonomous art, and never more so when they seem to be politically dead’.76 But here the similarities end. As with Benjamin, Schapiro ultimately had a more discriminating view of popular culture and a clearer sense that the rarefied objects of high art – like the paintings that he sought to defend in the 1950s – could, as Jameson reminds us, be used ‘to embellish the splendid new structures of the great insurance companies and multinational banks’.77 Schapiro himself pointed to the contradictory nature of the autonomous art work under capitalism, its ‘value as an investment, its capacity to survive in the market and to symbolise the social quality of the owner’, at the same time that he was arguing for its potential liberatory qualities.78 Nowhere does Adorno seem as concerned, to continue with Jameson, ‘That Schoenberg’s Hollywood pupils used their advanced techniques to write movie music.’ 79
Unlike Adorno, Schapiro was never really convinced by Lukács’s conception of reification, or the necessary negative moment in dialectical materialism. While Schapiro was no positivist, as Hemingway has made clear, he was far too attracted to empiricism and the ‘scientific model’ derived from the natural sciences to renounce the enlightenment project as resolutely as Adorno and Horkheimer.80 It was this that underpinned Schapiro’s continuing belief in Marxism as a source of knowledge and the working class as the potential agency of emancipation – something that is entirely absent in the writings of Adorno. And ultimately it was this scepticism towards the explanatory power of the dialectic that prevented Schapiro from fully embracing Trotskyism, despite his long-standing admiration for the Russian revolutionary leader from an early age. While the dialectic may have had some explanatory value for Schapiro, he was rightfully suspicious of the way in which it had become appropriated, traduced and ossified into dogma under Stalinism.81 Indeed, for Schapiro modern science and modern art were analogous in their potential for human liberation, so that by the late 1950s the tension in his writing between his desire to keep realism and modernism in some form of equal and productive relationship was finally decided in favour of the latter. Yet unlike Adorno, Schapiro had a greater belief in the affirmative role of art over and above its capacity for negation, and the artists he most admired – whether they be Courbet, Rivera or Brecht – always orientated their work towards a wider and more inclusive audience. It is for these reasons that Schapiro’s writing is more closely related to the heritage of classical Marxism.
1 For Schapiro’s influence on medieval sculpture, see Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘The Emmaus and Thomas Relief in the Cloister of Silos’, El románico en Silos: IX centanario de la consagración de la iglesia y del claustro (Abadía de Silos: Silos, 1990); on Courbet, Linda Nochlin, Realism (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1971); on Impressionism, Robert Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1988); and on Abstract Expressionism, David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
2 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso: London, 1979).
3 Theodor W. Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (Verso: London, 1980). Michael Denning characterizes Schapiro as one of America’s ‘equivalents of “western marxism”’. Michael Denning, ‘“The Special American Conditions”: Marxism and American Studies’, American Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3 (1986), p. 359.
4 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Review of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement’, Zeitshrift fur Sozialforschung, vol. 7, nos. 1–2 (1938), pp. 291–3.
5 Serge Guilbaut, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the “Vital Centre”, in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (Harper and Row: London, 1985), p. 154.
6 Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, Modern Art in the Common Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996), p. 18.
7 T. J. Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, in Serge Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), p. 224 and n. 89, p. 238. This rather disparaging dismissal of Schapiro’s 1937 essay seems surprising considering Clark’s acknowledgment elsewhere that ‘the few lines it devoted to Impressionist painting still seem to me the best thing on the subject, simply because they suggest so tellingly that the form of the new art is inseparable from its content’. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1984), p. 5.
8 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994), p. 20.
9 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Social Bases of Art’, in Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (eds.), Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1986), p. 123.
10 Schapiro, ‘The Social Bases of Art’, p. 126.
11 Ibid., pp. 126–7.
12 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Nature of Abstract Art’, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers II (George Braziller: New York, 1978), pp. 187–8.
13 Ibid., p. 190.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Meyer Schapiro, Lillian Milgram, and David Craven, ‘A Series of Interviews’ (July 15, 1992–January 22, 1995)’, Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997), p. 164.
18 The essay was delivered at Bennington College, Vermont, in the winter of 1950–1 and published as Meyer Schapiro, ‘Rebellion in Art’, in Daniel Aaron (ed.), America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in American History (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1952), pp. 202–42.
19 Ibid., p. 217.
20 Ibid., p. 241.
21 Ibid., p. 240.
22 Ibid.
23 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery’, Schapiro, Modern Art, op. cit., p. 83, fn. 126; originally published as Schapiro, ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïveté’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 1946), pp. 164–91.
24 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in David Fernbach (ed.), Surveys from Exile: Political Writings Volume 2 (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 190.
25 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism (New Left Books: London, 1973), p. 106.
26 Ibid., p. 59.
27 For an early and concise elaboration of Lukács’s critical distinction between the realist and naturalist novel published in 1936 in International Literature –and one that Schapiro could therefore have conceivably read – see Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe’, Writer and Critic and Other Essays (Merlin Press: London, 1978), pp. 110–48.
28 Schapiro, ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery’, op. cit., p. 54.
29 Ibid., p. 67.
30 Ibid., p. 68.
31 Ibid., p. 58.
32 Ibid., p. 71.
33 See the lecture Schapiro gave at Columbia University in March 1948, and again at Dartmouth College in May 1950, for a particularly strong restatement of this Lukácsian framework: Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Value of Modern Art’, Worldview in Painting and Sculpture: Selected Papers V (George Braziller: New York, 1999), pp. 154–6.
34 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’, in Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and Art History: From William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006), p. 140.
35 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Sculptures of Souillac’, W. R. W. Koehler (ed.), Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, Vol. 1 (Harvard University Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 1939), pp. 359–87; and Meyer Schapiro, ‘From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos’, Art Bulletin, vol. 21 (1939), pp. 312–74.
36 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Review of Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art’, Art Quarterly, vol. 2 (1979), p. 213.
37 Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., p. 17.
38 Quoted in Fredric Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 202.
39 Dwight McDonald, ‘Statement of The League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939), p. 127; and André Breton and Diego Rivera, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1938), pp. 49–53. See Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., for an overview of Schapiro’s political allegiances throughout this period; and Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Jugglers in a Monastery’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994), pp. 60–4, for the similarity between Schapiro’s position and that of the authors of the manifesto.
40 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Social Realism and Revolutionary Art’, Schapiro, Worldview in Painting and Sculpture, op. cit., p. 225.
41 Ibid., p. 223.
42 Ibid., p. 224.
43 Ibid., p. 226.
44 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations with Brecht’, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 97.
45 Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the Formalistic Character of the Theory of Realism’, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 76.
46 For an analysis of how Brecht, like Schapiro, inverted Lukács’s prescriptions for realism, see Steve Giles, ‘Realism after Modernism: Representation and Modernity in Brecht, Lukács and Adorno’, Jerome Carroll, Steve Giles and Maike Oergel (eds.), Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School (Peter Lang: Bern, 2012), p. 182.
47 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3 (October–December 1937), p. 463.
48 David Craven, Diego Rivera: As Epic Modernist (G. K. Hall & Co.: New York, 1997), p. 102. For one of Brecht’s best elaborations of what actually constituted ‘epic theatre’, see Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is Epic Theatre’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre (Hill & Wang: New York, 1964), p. 37.
49 Craven, Diego Rivera, op. cit., p. 123. It should be noted here that in ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, Schapiro does not make reference to Rivera’s National Palace murals, but instead those that at the Ministry of Education, Mexico City, and at the University of Chapingo, Texcoco, Mexico State.
50 Craven, Diego Rivera, op. cit., p. 112. For perhaps the most sophisticated reading of this mural scheme, see Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 86–137.
51 Georg Lukács, ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Realism’, Studies in European Realism (Merlin Press: London, 1972), p. 147; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution’, On Literature and Art (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1970), pp. 28–33; originally published in Proletary, no. 35 (11 September 1908).
52 Lukács, ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Realism’, op. cit., pp. 135, 147.
53 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971).
54 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1971), pp. 181–2; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press: London, 1971); and for a good example of Lukács’s later Marxist analysis of the novel, see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937) (Merlin Press: London, 1962).
55 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, op. cit., p. 145 and Lukács, ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Realism’, op. cit., p. 162.
56 Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, op. cit., p. 464.
57 Leon Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics in Our Epoch’, Paul N. Siegel (ed.), Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1970), p. 110.
58 McDonald, ‘Statement of The League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism’, op. cit., p. 127.
59 Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After, op. cit., p. 246. It should be pointed out here that Crow later omitted this rather crass assessment of Schapiro’s 1957 essay in a revised version of the text that appeared in the anthology of his collected essays. See Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, op. cit., p. 18.
60 Perry Anderson et al., ‘Presentation II’, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 66.
61 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Public Uses of Art’, Art Front, vol. 2, no. 10 (November 1936), p. 4. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1968), pp. 217–52.
62 Schapiro, ‘The Public Uses of Art’, op. cit., p. 5.
63 The Labor Management Relations Act, commonly known as Taft-Hartley, was a direct response to the postwar labour upsurge of 1946. Among other things, the legislation prohibited jurisdictional, wildcat, solidarity or political strikes; secondary boycotts; secondary and mass picketing; closed shops; and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits and empowered the federal government to obtain strikebreaking injunctions if it was deemed that an impending or current strike imperilled national health or safety.
64 David Craven provides a useful overview of these developments in his expansion of Schapiro’s 1957 essay, predicated upon the economic analysis of the ‘third technological revolution’ as theorized by Ernest Mandel. See both David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, op. cit., pp. 141–5; and Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (New Left Books: London, 1975), pp. 184–222.
65 C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford University Press: New York, 1951); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press: New York, 1956).
66 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944) (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2002), p. xv.
67 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art’, Art News, vol. 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957), pp. 36–42; and republished as Meyer Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, Modern Art, op. cit., pp. 213–26.
68 Ibid., p. 217.
69 Ibid., p. 223.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., p. 218.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., pp. 216–17.
74 Ibid., p. 218.
75 Francis Frascina, ‘My Lai, Guernica, MOMA and the Art Left, 1969–70: Part 2’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, no. 4 (October 1995), p. 717.
76 Craven, Abstract Expressionism an Cultural Critique, op. cit., p. 1; Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, op. cit., p. 465; Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Blackwell: Oxford 1978), p. 318.
77 Fredric Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, op. cit., p. 209.
78 Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, op. cit., p. 224.
79 Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, op. cit., p. 209.
80 Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., p. 24.
81 On Schapiro’s relationship to Trotsky and dialectical materialism, see Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., pp. 22–5; and Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’, op. cit., p. 138.