Schapiro was born in Lithuania, then Russia, in 1904 and moved to New York City at age 3, where he grew up in a Brooklyn tenement. He started as a student at Columbia University in 1920 and essentially never left, later earning his doctorate and becoming a much-sought-after professor of art history there for most of the 20th century. Schapiro died in 1996, but 10 years before that, he and his wife, Lillian, met Phong Bui, then a 22-year-old art student from Vietnam.
Bui, who lives in New York City, went on to become one of today’s most influential curators. He cofounded the Brooklyn Rail in 2000 and is its publisher and artistic director; he also draws the arts publication’s signature portraits of its contributors. In 2022, Rail Curatorial Projects launched a series of exhibitions called “Singing in Unison,” of which the Brattleboro show is the latest, aimed at fostering dialogue and connection between different kinds of artists.
On a tour of the exhibition, Bui spoke lovingly of the Schapiros and their influence on him. “They adopted me like a Jewish grandson,” Bui said, introducing him to artists, poets and luminaries — such as Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin and Susan Sontag — in weekly visits and walks near their home in the West Village.
Schapiro was known for his ability to bring nonart ideas, such as principles of Euclidean geometry or psychoanalysis, into discussions of art history. Likewise, Bui described how he brought together different people, fostering the same kinds of interdisciplinary dialogue that made New York in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s ripe for the development of modern art. Bui described it as an “ideological community where writers, philosophers, poets, artists, academics worked together … There’s no division between labor and intellectual practice.”
Bui has mirrored that milieu with the works he’s selected for the exhibition, which are all by people Schapiro knew, wrote about or taught, spanning many decades of the 20th century and loosely grouped by theme. The Schapiros regularly visited southern Vermont in the summers, and several of the artists have connections to the state, including Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason, who settled in Brattleboro and for whom the museum’s main gallery is named, and Gandy Brodie, who lived in Townshend.
Bui successfully gives viewers a truly unusual sense of knowing someone through the people they find fascinating. There are works in this show by Art History 101 heavy hitters such as Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell and Arshile Gorky — though not Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, who were also associated with Schapiro but whose canvases require prohibitively expensive art insurance, according to museum director Danny Lichtenfeld.
But there are also paintings by first-rate outfielders — people who aren’t museum blockbusters but were just as important — such as Loran MacIver, the first woman in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection; Mercedes Matter, who founded the New York Studio School; and Bob Thompson, a Black painter in the 1950s and ’60s working figuratively against the prevailing abstract expressionism.
The show contains more standout artworks than I can even begin to describe. A small but intense view of a blocky couple in depressed shades of gray reveals itself to be an early Mark Rothko. Kurt Seligmann’s “Manticore” is a sort of surrealist horror-movie version of a portrait. Larry Rivers’ 1957 “Double Nude” seems to dissolve into shapes and then back into women; the work’s style is echoed in Lucas Samaras’ weird Polaroids from the early ’70s. Color succumbs to frenetic, compressed space in Alfred Leslie’s wall-size “Kurtz Station” but asserts itself vigorously in Mason’s expansive “Stillness Is Volcanic.”
Bui has taken one wall of the exhibition directly from his own apartment. It’s a collection of Schapiro’s own artworks and items he gifted to Bui, along with a large, central mirror. In all these objects, there’s a sense of searching — of creating art as a means of thinking. Colorful graphic experiments sit alongside etchings of cathedrals and Mexican folk-art figurines, these last a gift to Schapiro from Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Bui said. A painting of a barn brings Lillian’s voice into the show; a black-and-white photograph of the couple catches them mid-laugh.
In Bui’s wide-ranging discussion of the works, he emphasized Schapiro’s Marxism and his understanding of art as political. In a 1957 essay, Schapiro described abstract painting as being antithetical to direct communication: “The artist does not wish to create a work in which he transmits an already prepared and complete message to a relatively indifferent and impersonal receiver. The painter aims rather at such a quality of the whole that, unless you achieve the proper set of mind and feeling towards it, you will not experience anything of it at all.”
As Bui described in his talk, Schapiro believed that establishing empathy with others is an effective way to combat tyranny. As Schapiro writes, it is through an experience of art that “contemplativeness and communion with the work of another human being, the sensing of another’s perfected feeling and imagination, becomes possible.”
In other words: You don’t need to understand what modern art is saying. Just take the time to look, and to connect, and you’ll get it.
“Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro,” on view through February 15 at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. brattleboromuseum.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “Common Ground | Curator Phong Bui honors art historian Meyer Schapiro in Brattleboro”
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2 2025.
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