NEW YORK, July 10, 2008 Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library has received a two-year grant of $145,000 from The Getty Foundation in Los Angeles to arrange and describe the archives of Columbia University art historian Meyer Schapiro, a modernist, medievalist and theorist who died in 1996.

The Meyer Schapiro Papers are composed primarily of drafts of lectures, manuscripts, and published and unpublished articles. Schapiro’s lectures were given at major academic institutions, such as Columbia University, New York University, Harvard University and Oxford as well as fine arts museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Lecture and article topics include Seurat, Mondrian Theory, Matisse, Cezanne, Albert Einstein and Cubism, Abstract Art, Nazism and Jewish Art, Art and Politics, Impressionism, Romanesque Art, and Philosophy in Art. These drafts are often accompanied by corrections, notes, slide lists, and research photographs.

Also included in the collection is substantial correspondence with family members, arts institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MOMA, and the Jewish Museum, and other artists and intellectuals. Some of the more notable individuals include Marc Chagall, Nicola Chiaromonte, James T. Farrell, Jean Helion, C.L.R. James, Erwin Panofsky, Gershon Sholem, and Josef Sima. The papers come to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library as a bequest from Lilian Milgram Schapiro, Meyer’s late wife, and complement other Schapiro holdings in the RBML including hundreds of tapes of lectures given over his long career.

The papers come to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library as a bequest from Lilian Milgram Schapiro, Meyer’s late wife, and complement other Schapiro holdings in the RBML including hundreds of tapes of lectures given over his long career. See the announcement here.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is one of the top five academic research library systems in North America. The collections include over 10 million volumes, over 100,000 journals and serials, as well as extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps, graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are organized into 25 libraries and various academic technology centers. The Libraries employs more than 550 professional and support staff. The website of the Libraries at www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb is the gateway to its services and resources.

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library owns over 600,000 rare books in some 20 book collections and almost 26 million manuscripts in nearly 2,600 separate manuscript collections. It is particularly strong in English and American literature and history, classical authors, children’s literature, education, mathematics and astronomy, economics and banking, photography, the history of printing, New York City politics, librarianship, and the performing arts. Individual collections are as eclectic as they are extensive. For additional information about the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, please call 212-854-5153 or see: www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/rbml.

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