FOR MEYER SCHAPIRO
Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929, with a doctoral thesis on the sculpture of the abbey of Moissac. He taught art history, theory, and methodology at Columbia from 1928 to 1973. Although his main field of expertise was Romanesque sculpture, he saw strong visual parallels between medieval and modern art. He influential articles on Courbet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne and others were published in 1978 as the fourth volume of his complete essays.
To mark his 70th birthday and his recent retirement from Columbia, in 1974 a group of 11 artists contributed 14 prints to a portfolio entitled For Meyer Schapiro. The proceeds from the sale of the edition of 100 endowed a professorship in art history at Columbia University in honor of Schapiro. The artists included Alexander Liberman, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Stanley William Hayter, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly (seen above), Robert Motherwell, and André Masson.
