Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) was the leading American art historian of his generation and one of the few scholars to attempt to apply Marxism seriously to the study of art history. An enormously gifted scholar, he had wide-ranging interests that transcended the boundaries of traditional specializations.

Schapiro was born in Shavly, Lithuania, and raised in Brooklyn where he attended public school and studied painting with John Sloan at the Hebrew Educational Society. Graduating from Columbia College in 1924 with honors in philosophy and art history, Schapiro went on to write a ground-breaking doctoral dissertation, pubished in 1931, on the sculptural decoration of the romanesque monastery at Moissac.

Schapiro will no doubt be remembered for his brilliance, for the extraordinary range of his mind, but his legacy as a scholar belongs to those willing to engage his most profound and most challenging work, in particular the Marxist studies he produced during the 1930s. But he was also an amateur artist of some skill, and he kept in close touch with artists and often played a crucial role in furthering artistic careers, perhaps most notably in the case of the abstract expressionists.