Interfaces of art: Meyer Schapiro, Fernand Léger, and the role of the art historian in anachronistic artistic influence

Abstract

In the 1930s Meyer Schapiro introduced the modern painter Fernand Léger to a tenth-century Beatus manuscript (M.644) in the collection of the Morgan Library. This encounter inspired formal changes in Léger’s work during the 1940s, as evidenced by his series of paintings titled Divers and Acrobats. While this anecdote has been regularly related in the scholarship on both the Morgan Beatus and Léger’s work, it has never been seriously analyzed. This article looks at this episode in depth and argues that, by treating the mutual influence between the manuscript and Léger’s work as an essential part of the life of each of these artworks, we reassert the importance of art historians in mediating and influencing the course of contemporary art in their own time.

Keywords

• meyer schapiro
• beatus
• fernand léger
• morgan library
• provenance
• taxonomy
• apocalypse