Saturday, August 2, 2014

Art History and Holism Again: Meyer Schapiro

Alice Neel, Meyer Schapiro 1983 
Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 81.3 cm

The Jewish Museum, New York
Schapiro, then, acknowledges the relative and shifting nature of art’s history, and also the contingencies under which the discipline of art history operates: “The interpretation of the social contexts of art is conditioned by the aesthetic theory and social context of the interpreter.”[1]  So we are perhaps justified in calling Schapiro a “methodological holist” because he holds that the “explanation of individual actions…may often have to be given partly in societal terms…that link individual behavior with types of social conditions.”[2]  Again, we see here that methodological holism does not posit any agencies besides those embodied in actual persons, and so does not reduce the autonomy or minimize the uniqueness of the artist.  After all, we see that Schapiro rejects a strictly causal account of changes in style, which would reduce something as complex as the development of abstraction to an instance under covering laws, as well as ontologically supervenient wholes like race or spirit (Schapiro, 1937:189).  Schapiro, like Hegel and Margolis, seeks instead to locate the choices of individual persons within the matrix of the larger social and historical context, neither reducing nor reifying the greater whole.  The whole is an emergent property.



[1] Meyer Schapiro, “Art and Social Change” in 1999:113
[2]. W. H. Dray, “Holism and Individualism in History and Social Science” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. IV Paul Edwards, ed. Macmillain, 1967 p. 54

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