Meyer Schapiro: Portrait of an Art Historian

Helen Epstein

жні 2019 · Plunkett Lake Press

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This is the only profile available of art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996). A polymath, revered for his extraordinary scholarship and teaching, he championed medieval studies, modern masters like Matisse and Picasso and artists of his own time. His lectures at Columbia and the New School attracted overflow crowds of students and artists. "Sometimes he was so brilliant that he seemed almost insane to me; he seemed to see more than there actually was — he heard voices," Anatole Broyard recalled in his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage. Some of Schapiro's art history essays are available to students but, for decades, he refused to be interviewed.

In 1982, Milton Esterow, editor of ARTnews was able to persuade the reticent art historian to sit for a portrait. The result was this two-part profile that appeared inARTnews.

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Born in Prague in 1947, Helen Epstein grew up in New York City, where she graduated from Hunter College High School in 1965. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post. She became a university correspondent for that newspaper while still an undergraduate. Subsequently, she studied at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times.

Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks that, like Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From, has been translated into several other languages. She herself is the translator of Heda Kovály's Under A Cruel Star and Vlasta Schönová's Acting in Terezín. Her biographies of Joseph Papp and Tina Packer grew out of her journalistic work. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues in Europe, and North and South America. She blogs for The Arts Fuse, a New England cultural web site.