Meyer Schapiro’s contribution to our understanding of Impressionism has had an importance that goes well beyond his actual written contribution to its study. If we exclude his work on Cézanne, that contribution has consisted of scattered passages in articles and published lectures and, more focally, less than a dozen paragraphs written in the 1937 essay “The Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly 1 (1937); reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers [New York: George Braziller, 1978]). These paragraphs—more precisely, two among them—have been stimulating for social historians working in the field: they begin: “Early Impressionism . . . had a moral aspect. In its unconventionalized, unregulated vision, in its discovery of a constantly changing phenomenal outdoor world of which the shapes depended on the momentary position of the casual or mobile spectator, there was an implicit criticism of symbolic social and domestic formalities, or at least a norm opposed to these.” T. J. Clark singled them out as the starting point for his The Painting of Modern Life (1984); Robert Herbert dedicated his large-scale study of Impressionism and Parisian society (1988) to Meyer Schapiro; and Thomas Crow’s extended essay on “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts” (1983) analyzes the views offered in the two paragraphs as marking a key stage in Schapiro’s own development and relates them to the writings of others—Mallarmé, Greenberg, and Adorno—concerned with Impressionism’s appropriation of popular cultural forms and leisure activities. Those tantalizing fragments have long driven the hope that Schapiro would someday bring his ideas on Impressionism together in book form. The present volume, published one year after his death, is therefore welcome.

Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions is a hybrid of sorts. It is both old and new—new in that we have not had it before and old in that the main substance of its text was presented in 1961 as the Pattin Lectures at Indiana University. The six lectures were revised and embellished by Schapiro over the years and edited for publication by his former student James Thompson. I never heard Meyer Schapiro lecture and find myself almost embarrassed to admit it because I am of a generation that could—even should—have heard Schapiro the fabled lecturer present his material to classes and larger audiences during the 1950s and 1960s. I wish I had been present in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1961 and had Schapiro’s book at the outset of my professional career. My understanding of Impressionism would have been jump-started in ways that I cannot now calculate. As it is, it took me four decades to catch up with him.

But what kind of book is it now after the passage of forty years? This period has seen intense scholarship on all aspects of Impressionism: studies of the group and its exhibitions; numerous monographs and catalogues raisonnés on individual artists; correspondence; long articles and hefty exhibition catalogues by the dozen; deep and extended interpretation from a variety of critical, theoretical, and technical perspectives. If one looks in Schapiro’s text for any acknowledgment of that scholarship or for new documentation or comprehensive coverage, one will be disappointed. Individual artists, save for Monet, “the exemplary Impressionist,” are barely discussed, although Degas gets brief play for his portraits and because his eccentric compositions accord with Schapiro’s observations about randomness and mobility as liberating factors in Impressionist society. The names of Morisot and Cassatt do not even appear in the index. Although Schapiro continued to work on his material over the years, the notes barely reflect this; only a smattering of citations take us past 1960. What the book does offer are Schapiro’s insights, deepened by vast reading and long, attentive looking into the nature of Impressionism as a movement, a form, and a technique alive to its place in history.

The text is divided into twelve chapters plus an Introduction, entitled “The Seer, the Seeing, and the Seen,” which brings us an immediate sense of his dynamic notion of Impressionism as open to a range of visual and sensory awareness in which the experiencer (whether painter or viewer) and the experienced are linked in vital interchange. The key chapters that follow are devoted to “The Concept of Impressionism,” “The Aesthetic and Method of Impressionism,” “Nature and Environment,” “The Crowd, the Stroller, and Perspective as Social Form” (the last two elaborating, but without the same note of ambivalence, the hints supplied in the 1937 essay), “Impressionism and Science,” “Impressionism in History,” and “Impressionism and Literature,” with the last three offering a dazzling display of erudition and intellectual probing across a variety of fields. For a book about visual experience it is remarkable how great an emphasis Schapiro gave to touch in the form of the emphasized stroke, the trace of the brush, and the color patch. The brushstroke is the improbable protagonist, the counterintuitive agent, whose materiality serves as the vehicle for capturing on canvas what Merleau-Ponty called the invisible—light, shadow, atmosphere, flicker, vibrancy, and the ephemeral and evanescent in nature. The brushstroke for Schapiro is the material analogue for the impression or sensation, the elementary stimulus that marks the individual’s primitive contact with the external world (Chs. 1–2). In its small scale and flexibility, the stroke conveys the qualities of randomness, mobility, informality, and freedom that had emerged as social reality, at least among a broad spectrum of the middle class in the world the Impressionists inhabited (Ch. 3 and pp. 223–225). The palpability of the pigmented strokes yielded a new conception of the canvas as an “object for the eye [whereby] the painterly substance as a fabric of colored strokes revives for the imagination qualities of the artist’s original experience” (84). One is reminded, even if one cannot conjure up the voice and address, that the starting point for each chapter was in the lecture hall. Schapiro evidently took the live occasion to riff—in a serious, wide-ranging manner—on various and multilayered dimensions of the subject at hand. His purpose in Chapter 1, “The Concept of Impressionism,” is not to confine its key terms—impression and sensation—but to explore aspects of their history in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and physiology as well as their use with related terms among the Impressionists and their precursors. Discussion of “impression” and “sensation,” as attempts to pin down their precise meaning for the Impressionists, are necessarily hampered by the near total silence of the painters themselves and the consequent uncertainty about just how much weight to give to such inquiry. Yet Schapiro is not fazed; he begins his next chapter, “The Aesthetic and Method of Impressionism,” by broadening the impression’s reach, calling it “a summary term for a way of thinking and feeling as well as perceiving.” For the painters, he affirms, the impression was a “prized experience,” a “fertile ground of art that they opposed to analytical thought and observation, to fantasy and memory as traditional sources of art” (44–45). The Impressionists developed in effect a new mode of seeing for which the colored patch became the effective sign; they focused in their examination of nature on surfaces and intervals and zones or emanations of color freed in perception from their localization in objects. The result was the discovery of “a new set of signs for features of the world that had not been closely observed before: the various modalities of light and atmosphere” (48). Schapiro proceeds to concentrate on the relationship between materiality and evanescence, between the thick reality of the painted surface and the impalpable qualities of nature the Impressionists sought and between the restricted materiality of the flat canvas and the expansive immateriality of the world as they saw it. Those dyads are more or less commonplaces of formal analysis and remain key terms for Schapiro. But at one point, in discussing a view of Argentheuil by Monet, he speaks of the “suspension of the image in the substantive material web of strokes” (59). I find this an especially helpful formulation because it takes us beyond the mechanics of surface and depth, the palpable flat canvas and the scene out there. In this metaphor, the depicted world is suspended in a liquid gel; it is made more vibrant and multidimensional in that image, and the web of strokes is freed momentarily from its surface mooring and given a breathing, spacious, and capacious existence.

In elaborating the concept of the impression in Chapter 2, “Aesthetic and Method,” Schapiro suggests that the “occasions of impression and sensation became for art and also for moral and social thought the experiences believed to be most progressive and emancipating in society and personal relations” (45). In that liberating guise, the impression entered the world of Paris and its environs (Chs. 3–7). It is the society that Schapiro described only briefly in his 1937 essay, and he does not go much beyond that here. Now, however, his description is less edgy; he offers no “cultivated rentier” or bourgeois patron to take the moral edge off his celebratory message: “The subjects of Impressionist painting were in their time model occasions of freedom. They released spectators for a moment from constricting habit . . . and revitalized them through the stimulus of the novel beauties of the visual. . . . the urban subjects, above all, were attractive to minds that found in that changing environment a stirring symbol of modernity, and enjoyed . . . a mood of freedom and expansion” (80). The “impression” thrived in a milieu that was open to the possibilities for growth and pleasure in an arena of enhanced freedom and mobility—two cherished ideals for Schapiro that by 1961 he had come to feel had been realized in the France in which Impressionism emerged. In certain ways, it is a disappointing view, and we can be grateful to more recent scholars (Clark, Hollis Clayson, Crow, Herbert, Eunice Lipton, Jane Mayo Roos, Griselda Pollock, and Paul Tucker, to name but a few) who have worked to complicate it and bring it back to earth.

Where shall we locate the Meyer Schapiro of the Pattin Lectures of 1961? How does his view of Impressionism and society in this book compare to that in those brief paragraphs of 1937? Caught up in the factualism and intellectual turmoil that was especially strong in Left circles in 1936 and 1937, he attempted to establish an independent course that would permit him to reconcile his fixation on the aesthetic adventure of modernism with his deeply felt commitment to social amelioration through collective action (see, for example, the essays by A. Hemingway and P. Hills in Oxford Art Journal 17 (1994)). In “The Nature of Abstract Art,” he granted to Impressionism a certain equivocal existence as the enlightened critic of social orthodoxy and as an active participant in an aestheticized and pleasure-oriented individualism that existed on the edge of isolation or estrangement. But during the 1950s his view had become more sanguine. He had shifted, in effect and in spite of his continued allegiance to socialism, from Marx to Mallarmé, to the optimistic outlook (however hopeful and however unfounded) on Impressionism and society the latter had offered in the early years of the movement. The concluding paragraphs of Mallarmé’s essay on “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet” (reprinted in The New Painting (1986)) encapsulate the two main themes of Schapiro’s that I have stressed in this review. It is there that Mallarmé parallels the freedoms of technique, perception, and viewpoint offered in Impressionist painting with the advance of democracy in the infant Third Republic: “The participation of a hitherto ignored people in the political life of France is a social fact that will honour the whole close of the nineteenth century. A parallel is found in artistic matters, the way being prepared by an evolution which the public with rare prescience dubbed . . . Intransigeant, which in political language means radical and democratic” (33). And it is there, as well, in his closing paragraph, that Mallarmé seems to sum up and endorse in a few words Schapiro’s emphasis on the tache, the mark of the brush, as the natural sign in painting for nature’s fleeting, intangible qualities of light and atmosphere: “. . . that which I preserve through the power of Impressionism is . . . the delight of having recreated nature touch by touch.”