(being of a heritage and era where exact birthdates were often obscure). I loved Joe Shapiro, his passion for life and art, and the obvious sustenance he drew from art. I even loved his undisguised delight in and appreciation of “the fairer sex” (which disturbed many) and felt it was a privileged view on a courtly time that was fast disappearing rather than some sort of rude affront to my gender. Joe did not disguise that he loved to lunch with “his harem,” mostly curators and other museum people — female of course — at those dreary sorts of middlebrow restaurants that sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s, i.e. The Homestead in Oak Park. Very few of these places exist today and thus can exist in some sort of rosy glow of nostalgia. In reality they were pretty awful. When invited, however, I always attended, and when I had business with Joe, as I often did, I would bring along other female MCA staffers who had not heard his repertoire of humorous stories which would slowly wind into the realm of bawdy jokes if his listener(s) seemed comfortable. Of course it wasn’t so much that he enjoyed the food at these restaurants. It was the company and conversation that he craved, and it was as much sustenance to him as the daily special. He was an esthete who could converse on the highest levels about art, yet what really tickled him was to author an advice column for the MCA staff newsletter titled “Joe Sez” (which was compiled, incidentally, into a bound volume and presented to Joe, who is often called the “father” of the Museum of Contemporary Art in appreciation for all he did).
The books are not fancy, fine editions. They are all fairly ordinary: the cloth covers and brittle, acidy paper of the commercial press. Many are paperbacks. Somewhat to my surprise, they are not adorned with bookplates, tho’ many are signed as gifts from dear friends, including artists. A Modern Book of Esthetics, Rader, copyright 1935, is adorned, rather, with pencil marks and notes in Joe’s hand, especially the essays by Jung (‘Psychology and Literature’) and Hume (‘Of the Standard of Taste’). Another example is The Meaning of Modern Sculpture by R.H. Wilenski (?), published in 1932, with the subtitle ‘An essay on some original sculpture of the present day together with some account of the methods of professional disseminators of the notion that certain sculptors in ancient Greece were the first and the last to achieve perfection in sculpture’ that makes me realize Chris Ware is probably reading the same sorts of books as Joe did. There was James Thrall Soby’s Modern Art and the New Past, (1956), an anthology of the critics writing first published in the Saturday Review, another dusty relic of times gone by. And a Modern Library edition with the price tag of $2.50 penciled inside the cover (a used book perhaps?) of Philosophies of Art and Beauty, featuring ‘Selected Readings in aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger.’ (Ah, to have aesthetics stop with Heidegger, what an opium dream….) And then Lionello Venturi’s (?) History of Art Criticism, E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., New York, 1936, with the tattered dust jacket folded up and stuck between the final pages and the back cover.
I don’t know what I was looking for when I picked up this book and decided that rather than relegate it to the “book sale” pile, I would bring it home and read it. But upon flipping through it, toward the end of the book, I came across these passages:
"The opinion that in the nineteenth century there was not an art so great as in the preceding centuries is a stupid one…at least eight painters of the nineteenth century were of supreme greatness: Goya, Corot, Daumier, Manet, Renior, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh. These are enough to give us assurance that art is not dead; that our aspirations, our ideals of yesterday have found their perfect pictorial expression. And they direct us to what is produced of authentic art at the present time.The thought that there is no history, only chronicle, without deep knowledge of and authentic reconsideration of the past (and let’s definitely not make the mistake of using the word “history” here as a synonym for the past) fell on particularly receptive soil. It is something I think about a lot, but recently I have been thinking about this very thing in regards to Chris Ware, as I am doing a show of his work at MCA that opens in May. Mr. Ware does not claim to be an artist, but that does not disqualify him from making art, as Joe Shapiro himself might have intoned in his unique voice, breathy, and rather high for a man of his size, for he was tall, especially for his generation. I have been trying to grapple with the fact that Chris Ware’s work affects me so deeply, given that I am hardly in what might be thought of his ‘demographic’ (being old enough, as Joe Shapiro might have quipped, to be his older sister who was well out of the house by the time he came along). I even have wicked thoughts like, Is Chris Ware merely the Saul Steinberg of the current contemporary art scene? for, looking to Joe and his contemporaries who formed the post-war generation of arts patrons, one found Saul Steinberg cartoons in virtually every collection. And then I come to my senses and go, “Nawhh.” For one thing the ‘hip’ collectors are not really hip to Chris Ware. Thank goodness, as Magritte might say, for the Wonders of Nature.
It is evident that so long as we refer to information of sources…without re-living them, without transforming them in our thought, without having reduced them to present life, there is no history but only chronicle." (p. 312)
Excuse my cynicism. I don’t mean to imply that Saul Steinberg suffered by being collected by collectors like Joseph Randall Shapiro. He didn’t. It is only his reputation, not the works themselves, that twisted about to become the guy who did “those spiky, weird,
beloved illustrations, er, artworks,” in the minds of the general art world, where things like reputations are as slippery yet important as earthworms are to healthy soil. Chris Ware’s works are bullets to the heart. Saul Steinberg’s are diversions that went well with the books in the library, whether they be tattered utilitarian volumes like Joe Shapiro’s or an untouched set of leather-bound classics from the Franklin Mint (which incidentally got out of the book business in 2000; I guess the desire for leather-bound classics can be met by the resale market via eBay). Let me say it again: Without a deep knowledge of and reconsideration of the past, there can be no history. There can be only chronicle. A chronicle is a perfectly fine thing, but a history makes life worth living. A chronicle would be a listing of all Joe Shapiro’s acquisitions and when he made them, how much they were worth, and how much they got at auction when he sold some of them because he thought his beloved wife Jory would certainly outlive him and needed to be taken care of (she passed several years before he did). A history is that Joe loved his wife Jory more than anything, even those many considerable paintings that he thought of as his children, and one of his proudest possessions was a portrait done of her when she was young by an obscure local painter. He would never fail to point it out when yet another first-time visitor was given “the tour.” He would challenge the visitor to identify the painting. Usually there was panicked silence. This certainly wasn’t a Delvaux or a Balthus. A sly, delighted smile would gradually spread across Joe’s face as the visitor continued to sputter and squirm. “That’s my girl,” he would finally say in his breathy, gentle voice, “That’s Jory.”
More later,
Lynne.
Well Lynne, you, in your discussion of Joe Shapiro inadvertently for me conjure up the central conceit in the realist short novel The Death Of Ivan Ilych/Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy -which consists of the idea that, 'the facts ain't the truth'......all of which leads to any number of discussions when it comes to considering the level of esthetic discourse that informs todays art world - and may lend to some kind of explanation as to why it is that most people involved with art today are so amazingly ....vapid in their understanding of...say, what is meant (or at least should be meant) when talking about painting for instance.... anyway, not to worry Lynne, esthetic development did end with Heidegger- just take a look around at this months version of 22 year old art stars and the curators that promote them for verification-
Lynne your piece gave me a rosy glow of nostalgia. He did have a passion for art and shared it with everyone. I grew up two doors down from Mr. Shapiro. Every so often he would have an open house and for $3.00 you could walk through, gaze, then stop in the dining room for cookies.
This is a great article for the fact that i am a great nephew of joe and jory. i love to here and read about them on the net. their house was amazing in oak park as i remember visting growing up. it is pretty neat to have been around most of this art in person. i am looking for some copys of their art collection book( the mr. and mrs. joseph randall shapiro collection) for reasonable prices. theres one online for $38.86 but that well overpriced. if anyone knows of any for a better price please email me im trying to get copys for other family members.