- Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected PapersOur PickBy Meyer Schapiro, Adrienne Baxter Bell
- Romanesque Art: Selected PapersBy Meyer Schapiro
- Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton LecturesBy Meyer Schapiro, Linda Seidel
- Vincent van GoghBy Meyer Schapiro
- CézanneBy Meyer Schapiro
- The Unity of Picasso's ArtBy Meyer Schapiro
- Impressionism: Reflections and PerceptionsBy Meyer Schapiro
- Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and SocietyOur PickBy Meyer Schapiro
- Worldview in Paining - Art and Society: Selected PapersBy Meyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro and Important Artists and Artworks
Portrait of Chocquet (1875)
In an excerpt from Schapiro's book on Paul Cézanne, he writes in reference to Cézanne's Portrait of Chocquet: "And as in [Cézanne's] landscapes, we follow the action of the brush everywhere, spirited and frank in creating a thick fleshy paste of pigment, rich in flicker, direction, and tone."
A Pair of Shoes (1885)
There is an interesting story concerning Schapiro and this peculiar still life by Vincent van Gogh. In a heated exchange with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom Schapiro sharply disagreed on many topics concerning art, they discussed the origins of van Gogh's A Pair of Shoes. Heidegger believed that the boots once belonged to a peasant, thus, the portrait was meant to reflect the state of peasant life. Schapiro, on the other hand, saw something of the artist himself in this work, and argued that "the idea of the shoe as a symbol of [van Gogh's] life-long practice of walking, and an ideal of life as a pilgrimage." Schapiro was able to find deeper meaning, a reflection of the artist's life in the portrait. Furthermore, since van Gogh painted many still lifes of shoes, it's still up for debate as to which portrait the two men were discussing.
Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901)
In his famous lecture, 'The Unity of Picasso's Art,' Schapiro wrote: "Picasso enters the scene of European painting with an astonishing diversity of practice." According to Schapiro, Picasso had no singular style, but a mastery of nearly every style. In Evocation (one of several paintings devoted to his recently deceased friend Carles Casagemas), the artist employs some elements of European religious art and combines them with provocative imagery (nudes and prostitutes, for example). Schapiro pointed out that it contains a "unity" and "disunity" unfolding at once and is symptomatic of the artist's work as a whole, "for one cannot help but notice also in Picasso's work that at the very same moment he is able to paint and to draw in several different styles, he is not bound to a particular way of working at a moment."
Influences and Connections

- John Graham
- Georg Hegel
- Karl Marx
- Hannah Arendt
- Whittaker Chambers
- Clement Greenberg
- Leo Steinberg
- John Russell
- Saul Bellow
- Robert Goldwater