cover image Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society

Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society

Meyer Schapiro. George Braziller, $27.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-8076-1356-6

This fourth installment of Columbia professor emeritus Schapiro's selected writings reveals an erudite art historian of the first rank wrestling with basic issues. Sweeping from archaic art to classical, baroque, impressionist and modernist modes, he presents an analysis of artistic style as an embodiment of a whole culture. He brings a historical perspective to concepts of perfection, unity and beauty, and applies semiotics, the science of signs, to a discussion of figure-ground relationships from Stone Age cave paintings to Degas. Schapiro punches holes in Freud's interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, arguing that psychoanalysis gives too little attention to the social situation in which an artwork is created. More specialized essays include a rebuttal of Martin Heidegger's analysis of a Van Gogh painting, a retracing of French critic-painter Eugene Fromentin's 1870s tour of Holland and Belgium, and a pointed critique of Bernard Berenson's shortcomings as art critic. Illustrated. (Sept.)