In a 1937 essay on abstract art, Schapiro opposed Alfred Barr’s account of modernism. Barr, who was then director of the Museum of Modern Art, seemed to have absorbed the ahistorical notion that abstract art displays the “autonomy and absoluteness of the aesthetic,” that in abstraction, “finally, was an art of painting in which only aesthetic elements seemed to be present.”[1] This position prevented Barr from developing a full explanation of the emergence of abstract art and of the changes in and diversity of styles within abstraction. Schapiro writes: “although Barr sets out to describe rather than to defend or criticize abstract art, he seems to accept its theories on their face value in his historical exposition…In places he speaks of this art as independent of historical conditions, as realizing the underlying order of nature and as an art of pure form without content…Hence if the book is largely about historical movements, Barr’s conception of abstract art remains essentially unhistorical…no connection is drawn between the art and the conditions of the moment. He excludes as irrelevant to its history the nature of the society in which it arose, except as an incidental obstructing or accelerating atmospheric factor. The history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent process among the artists; abstract art arises because, as the author says, representational art had been exhausted” (Schapiro, 1937:187-8).

[1]. Meyer Schapiro, “Abstract Art” [1937] in Modern Art-19^th and 20^th Centuries (Collected Papers, Vol. II) George Brazillier, 1978 pp. 185

The End of Art and Aesthetics: Musings on Hegel