Meyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro CC '24 LittD (hon. caus.) '75 was the personification of Art History at Columbia in the early 20th century. After graduating CC, he began his doctorate, only to quit when he began teaching four years later, in 1928. He remained a faculty member until 1973. Among Schapiro's accomplishments were the inclusion of art history in the Core Curriculum even before the formal establishment of an Art Hum course; an early essay of his appeared on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus during the 1930s.
In 1975, he was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Medal, and in 1978, the chair of Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History was established in his honor. In 1995, his brother Morris Schapiro donated a million dollars to endow another chair, the Meyer Schapiro Professorship of Modern Art and Theory, in Meyer's memory.
