Letter to the Editors

Abstract

Dear Editors, I write to correct some factual mischaracterizations of my monograph, Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates, in the recent review by Jaś Elsner. Most specifically, on page 566 of the Fall 2020 issue of this journal, Elsner writes that Schapiro’s “intellectual engagements beyond art history and the theorists that informed it ( like Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Saussure) are not present” in my book. But this is not true. For instance, my book’s eighth chapter, which concerns Schapiro’s famed criticisms of Martin Heidegger, is largely dedicated to Schapiro’s extensive appropriation of the theories of the neurologist Kurt Goldstein, a figure whose clinical research on aphasia remains well outside of art history indeed. And, to choose but one other example, the book’s third chapter dramatically punctuates its explanation of Schapiro’s shifting Marxist commitments by way of his friendship with Whittaker Chambers, that infamous Cold War poster child of anticommunism who was Schapiro’s close friend. Why Elsner overlooks, in fact denies, these and other “intellectual engagements beyond art history” that are fundamental to my book is unclear, though the decision is evidently connected to his lament that I did not paymore attention towhat he calls the “full humanity” of my subject. By this Elsner implies that he wants a full psycho-biography of Schapiro the man. While we could all certainly benefit from a proper biography of Schapiro, as is self-evident frommy book’s title and as I explain explicitly in the introduction, my book is not a biography. Were Elsner to pursue such a project, he might be able to demonstrate some or more of the various speculative and counterfactual hypotheses that he posits about the interrelation between Schapiro’s life and thought. To my knowledge, however, Schapiro had no insight into Emanuel Löwy’s sexuality, and did not link Löwy’s ideas to Freud’s or vice versa. And Schapiro’s drawing of Icarus, which my book publishes and interprets for the first time, likely dates from much later than 1929, as does the vast majority of Schapiro’s archive. The drawing’s color scheme and abstract composition is notably comparable to other modernist treatments of the same theme, for instance, Picasso’s UNESCO mural of 1958.