WHEN I FIRST telephoned Meyer Schapiro, his 91-year-old wife answered the phone. I was hoping to schedule an interview with him, but she told me he doesn't grant any. Schapiro himself then came to the phone. "Surely you can write your article without me," he said politely.
His reticence was a bit surprising: Schapiro, who turns 90 next month, has hardly led a reclusive life. A celebrated art historian, he has moved in the most elevated cultural circles of our time. He taught at Columbia University for half a century, and was a close associate of the New York intellectuals, that brainy, noisy clan that flourished in the years around World War II. In the late 30's, when Leon Trotsky wanted to learn more about Surrealism, he knew where to turn; he wrote to Schapiro, who sent along some essays by his friend Andre Breton, the poet who founded the movement.
This fall, the long-awaited fourth volume of Schapiro's "Selected Writings" will be published by George Braziller Inc. It has been 15 years since his last collection appeared, a virtual eternity in a field where junior art historians crank out thick treatises as if they were annual reports. A more literal monument to his accomplishments was put in place earlier this year, when the western portion of the Brooklyn Museum was renamed the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing. The tribute coincides with a $5 million gift from Morris Schapiro, a Wall Street banker born one year ahead of his professor-brother in Lithuania.
With a little prodding, Schapiro eventually agreed to be interviewed. He and his wife, Lillian Milgram, a retired pediatrician, live in Greenwich Village, in a red-brick town house they've inhabited since 1933. The house is comic in its disarray -- the very image of the scholar buried alive by his books. Schapiro greeted me in the living room, leaning on a cane and appearing almost defiantly upright compared with the sagging shelves around him. He has about 25,000 books altogether, enough to fill a small-town library. I brought him a new book on Picasso, and he fell into an appreciative silence as he eyed the pictures. Asked where he would put the book, Schapiro replied with a chuckle: "Where will I put myself? I'm out of room for myself."
In spite of his age, Schapiro is an imposing presence, a shaggy-haired scholar with a big cranium and leonine features. He suffers from diabetes and has difficulty walking, but in conversation roams far and wide, leaping across centuries and through different fields of knowledge with apparent ease. He is said to be a polymath; his friends claim his mind is such a perfect machine that he writes footnotes for his articles strictly from memory, without even looking up the page numbers. I'd been forewarned that he is incapable of small talk and can use his ideas as a barrier to personal exchange.
This became clear at the start of our conversation, when I asked him whether he had any regrets about his life. Without hesitation, Schapiro replied, "I regret the failure of Socialism."
But doesn't he have a more personal regret?
"I regret I don't speak Chinese," he said -- a real failing for a man who is said to have taught himself Arabic on his honeymoon.
Deborah Solomon, the art critic of The Wall Street Journal, is completing a biography of Joseph Cornell.
