If Cézanne is right, then I must be right," said Henri Matisse, succinctly alluding to what united and to what differentiated the two men in their respective struggles to create new forms of painting. In acknowledging a debt to Cézanne, Matisse, who died in 1954, was more generally acknowledging his debt as a modernist to the 19th-century movement with which Cézanne had been associated. That movement is the subject of a new book by the late Meyer Schapiro.
Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions is an expansion of six lectures Schapiro gave at Indiana University in 1961. A long-time professor at Columbia, regarded as America's leading art historian until his death in 1996, Schapiro was, in the account of those who had an opportunity to hear him, a great teacher. Impressionism makes it very clear why he was so renowned. The experience of reading his transcribed words--Schapiro was famous for speaking extemporaneously, which allowed him to approach with renewed freshness the pictures he was planning to discuss--is one of pure pleasure. In these dense and richly rewarding essays, Schapiro addresses his subject with such lively and sympathetic understanding, and with such attentiveness to the needs of his audience, that one feels from the first an intimate and profound connection both to the man and to his scholarship. -- Commentary, Steven C. Munson

Few scholars of art history have written as insightfully on Impressionism as Meyer Schapiro (1904-96), one of the most brilliant art historians of the 20th century.... In Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, an expansion of six lectures ... Schapiro takes a refreshingly unorthodox approach to his subject.... This is a lucid and engaging book. -- The New York Times Book Review, Andrea Barnet

Not a word is wasted. And the words are rich; Schapiro's prose possesses an unequaled power to wake up the reader's eye. This is probably the only book ever to relate Impressionism to Egyptian sculpture, Roman wall paintings, Chinese landscape scrolls, Immanuel Kant, Karl Heinz Helmholz and Gustave Flaubert, as well as to Pollock. Yet Schapiro never displays his learning as if he's waving a flag; he quotes and refers only to strengthen the reader's visual experience. What makes this book so compelling, though, is his depiction of Impressionism as a way of life as well as of art, an embrace of one's sensual experience and of the people and places that arouse it