C. Oliver O’Donnell, Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern Mind, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 2019, 253 pages, hardback, ISBN 9780271084640, £79.95

Abstract

This review contends that the recent publication of C. Oliver O’Donnell's book Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern Mind represents a welcome addition to the growing intellectual history of art history, a discipline in desperate need of serious accounts of the lives and writings of many of its architects. Schapiro is one such architect, and O'Donnell tames the enormity of his contribution to art history by pursuing an intellectual history that neatly divides into eight ‘critical debates’.