Schapiro, Meyer (1904–1996)

Author(s):  
Cynthia Persinger

Art historian Meyer Schapiro was born in Šiauliai [Shavley], Lithuania, on September 23, 1904, but soon immigrated to the United States with his family in 1907. Schapiro grew up in the working-class, left wing, Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn. He graduated from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in fine arts and archaeology in 1935 (having completed his dissertation in 1929). He spent his career at Columbia, though he also taught regularly at the New School for Social Research from 1936 until 1952. While trained as a medievalist, Schapiro was an early proponent of modern art, and over the course of his career he taught courses, lectured, and published on both fields. Through his lectures and publications, Schapiro’s ideas shaped several generations of artists and art historians. Though he published several books including those on Post-Impressionist artists Paul Cézanne (1950) and Vincent van Gogh (1952), his most respected ideas on both medieval and modern topics were published in articles. Schapiro is known for his innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to art history; he explored new art historical methodologies through the use of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. He is also known for his essay "Style" (1953), a systematic consideration of past and current theories of style.

Tempo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (251) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Alona Keren-Sagee

Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943), the eminent Russian-American music theorist, teacher and composer, emigrated to the United States in 1928, after having served in high positions in some of the major music institutions in the Ukraine, Khar'kov, Moscow, and Leningrad. He settled in New York, where he taught music, mathematics, art history, and his theory of rhythmic design at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and the Teachers College of Columbia University. He formulated a philosophical and practical system of music theory based on mathematics, and became a celebrated teacher of prominent composers and radio musicians. Schillinger's writings include: Kaleidophone: New Resources of Melody and Harmony (New York: M. Witmark, 1940; New York: Charles Colin, 1976); Schillinger System of Musical Composition, 2 vols. (New York: Carl Fischer, 1946; New York: Da Capo Press, 1977); Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948; New York: Da Capo Press, 1976); Encyclopedia of Rhythms (New York: Charles Colin, 1966; New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).


Author(s):  
Samia Touati

A writer, an art advisor, and an artist, Yousef Ahmad has contributed significantly to the evolution of art in Qatar. Ahmad took upon himself the responsibility to document and archive the development of art in Qatar. Ahmad has developed an innovative style of calligraphic painting, whereby numerous letters and words are transformed into abstract signs and manifest abstract arrangements. Being more inclined to create large-scale works, Ahmad depicts Arabic words in their variety of shapes with a particular focus on the construction of his composition. In 1982, Ahmad traveled to the United States, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College, University of California. Following his return to Qatar, Ahmad taught art appreciation for more than twenty years at Qatar University, where he met His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani. Sharing an avid love for art with HE Sheikh Hassan, Ahmad has played an instrumental role in collecting a variety of artworks which constitute the major collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Orientalist Museum. He also acted as the first director for Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, then named the Museum of Arab Art.


Author(s):  
Lynne Conner

One of the first full-time newspaper dance reviewers in the United States, John Martin wrote for The New York Times from 1927 to 1962 and was often referred to as the dean of American dance critics during his 35-year tenure. Martin used his bully pulpit at the Times to launch a discourse within the dance community surrounding the aesthetics of modernism in dance as well as to educate and rally a new audience. In the process he helped to establish dance reviewing as a specialized field of arts reporting and commentary and not just a subgenre of music criticism, as it had been treated before 1927. A vocal defender of the legitimacy of an American modern dance as defined by New York-based practitioners such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, Martin was among the first theorists of it, outlining a poetics of its form and function while introducing a new vocabulary. His prolific output includes thousands of essays and reviews for the Times and other periodicals, seven books, and a series of highly influential lectures given at the New School for Social Research, Bennington School of the Dance, and in the latter part of his career at the University of California-Los Angeles.


2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 807-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan José Navarro

Abstract Camelot Project (1964–1965) emerged as a project for social research orientated to measuring, predicting and controlling internal conflicts within peripheral countries. Camelot appeared within the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of the American University, and was requested by the United States Defense Department to be applied in Chile within the next four years. This article explores the reactions of the Chilean left wing.


1961 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis J. Edinger

Voting has become truly an interdisciplinary object of investigation in recent years. Historians, statisticians, social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have focused their attention on electoral behavior, individually or in teams. Such studies have been principally the work of scholars in the traditional Western democracies—Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, the United States—and fall roughly into three patterns. One approach has been to analyze trends in group voting behavior on the basis of census and election statistics, and frequently poll data as well, in a search for meaningful correlations between voting trends and socio-economic factors. The work of Siegfried and, more recently, Goguel in France, of Heberle in Germany, Tingsten in Sweden, and Gosnell and Key in the United States belongs in this category. A second approach has been descriptive, identified in recent years particularly with Nuffield College at Oxford. The Nuffield studies of elections in Britain, France, Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Africa have focused on the efforts of candidates and parties to influence voters in a particular electoral campaign. They are intended primarily to be contributions to contemporary history and works of reference for future historians. Lastly, we have the investigations associated, in particular, with the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. These have focused on the political images and electoral behavior of individual voters and, particularly, on changes in their attitudes during a campaign and the reasons for such changes. They have relied, almost exclusively, on survey research methods which involve questioning a panel of representative voters at length before and after an election and, lately, even over a period of several years and elections.


Author(s):  
Sarah M. Miller

Berenice Abbott was a photographer, theorist, teacher, and inventor who first learned photography as Man Ray’s studio assistant in Paris. In 1926, she established an independent portraiture studio in Paris, attracting clients from international avant-garde circles. She befriended French photographer Eugène Atget and, after his death, acquired thousands of his prints and negatives with help from Julien Levy. Through her advocacy, Atget’s oeuvre became a touchstone for avant-garde and documentary photography in Europe and the United States. Returning to the United States in 1929, Abbott embarked on a study of New York City titled Changing New York (supported by the Federal Art Project 1935–1939), while developing unique theories of documentary photography and realism predicated on "communicative interaction". She taught photography at the New School for Social Research and was active in the Photo League, which comprised a number of New York photographers who had similar political, social, and aesthetic interests. Often collaborating with Elizabeth McCausland, she authored pioneering essays about the history and theory of photography including the pedagogical text, A Guide to Better Photography (1941).


Author(s):  
Brett C. Millier

The career of American poet Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) spanned nearly eighty years of continuous productivity and achievement. At the age of 95, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States, and was also a Guggenheim (1945), Pulitzer Prize (1959), and National Book Award (1995, at the age of 90) winner. Born on the older edge of a generation of American poets whose lives were saddened and cut short by mental illness and alcoholism (his friends Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell among them, as well as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz), Kunitz overcame early sorrow and personal disappointment and lived, writing poems up to the time of his death at the age of 100. His early work showed the influence of the Metaphysicals and was generally highly formal and intellectually abstract. He resisted the move toward looser, “confessional” poetry for a long time after his contemporaries had embraced it, but critics agree that most of his best work followed his first “confessional” volume, The Testing Tree (1971). From 1946, Kunitz taught literature and creative writing at universities including Bennington College, SUNY Pottsdam, the New School, the University of Washington, and Columbia University. After his retirement, he devoted himself to gardening, and to writing “visionary” poems of maturity and old age, some of the finest in the language.


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