Meyer Schapiro’s “Race, Nationality and Art” originally appeared in the March 1936 issue of Art Front. The magazine had only recently shifted from a tabloid-style publication of the Artist’s Union to a more serious art-critical one. The painter Stuart Davis served as editor, and he conceived of it as consistent with the general aims of what the CPUSA was coming to call the Popular Front.1 Other contributors included Harold Rosenberg and Charmion von Wiegand. In 1936, Schapiro published two major essays in Art Front. “Public Use of Art” was later republished in Worldview in Painting.2 For reasons that are not clear, “Race, Nationality and Art” has never been reprinted. The time is ripe for it to reenter the public sphere. Schapiro’s claims are in part contentious, but the target is clear. Art and the study of art cannot and should not take seriously any claims for race as a significant factor in current emancipatory struggles nor, indeed, in the interpretation of past art. Likewise, nationality serves little or no purpose except if understood in its broadest sense of a culture. The persistence of both categories—race and nationality—in art and art historical discourses suggest the impact of Schapiro’s argument has not yet been fully felt.

For Schapiro, race was a powerful political weapon whose purpose was to distract, divide, and divert attention away from the central “antagonism of worker toward capitalist.” As he defines it, race is construed as “an unchangeable heritage rooted in [one’s] blood and native soil.” Within a few years anthropologists like Ashley Montagu were redefining race as a social “construct,” an idea meant to undermine the dominant biological account of race.  After eighty years of thinking of race as a social construct, race is still presumed by many to be a fixed reality in our lives. In other words, whether biological or social, race continues to be understood as broadly “unchangeable.” (Consider, for instance, how Ryan Coogler, director of Sinners, on a “research” trip to South Africa came to the conclusion that childhood experiences in Richmond, California that were called “being hood … was [actually] being true to what we’ve been for thousands and thousands of years.”)3 It makes no difference whether race is declared to be fixed or unfixed,  constant or changeable—it always works against class.

Whether social or biological, the point of race, as Schapiro argues, is to provoke “powerful divisions within the masses of the people” at the moment when workers are beginning to organize around “demands for a decent living and control over their own lives.” For those “economically frustrated citizens,” race provides capitalists with a tool to divert their “blind rage” away from them and towards “innocent and defenseless minorities.” If the central battle was between worker and capital, then the invented battle between “races” diverts the conflict “into channels of racial antagonism, which weakens and confuses the masses, but leaves untouched the original relations of rich and poor.” The latter claim is striking and worth underscoring. No matter how “racial antagonism” is resolved, it has nothing to do with addressing the class divide. The point is worth underscoring because it points to the ways in which there is no path from race (from racism or anti-racism) to class. There is no path because, as Schapiro argues, race itself is a class formation whose entire purpose is to justify “oppression as an economic and cultural necessity.”

Because race is a diversionary class project, the view of race as a matter of superiority and inferiority is largely beside the point. Here Schapiro takes aim at liberal writers on race and nationalism. Even those liberals who “reject nationalism” still tend to adhere to beliefs in “fixed racial or national characters in art.” Anti-racist liberals still tend to accept “distinctions between Negro, Italian, German and French art” as a matter of “permanent psychological traits.” Liberal writers might “denounce the view that Negroes and Jews are inherently inferior” and yet persist in thinking that race is real. But the problem is, as Barbara and Karen Fields put it, that the “first principle of racism is belief in race.”4 In other words, questions of white supremacism and black inferiority, questions of racial hierarchy and racial difference, are expressions of a primary commitment to race as an idea.5

Schapiro addresses three core problems with notions of nation and race in art. It is the third critique, engaging the “very concept of race,” that bears some discussion here. While Schapiro concedes some ground to various contemporary ideas about race (“sub-races,” for instance) his aim is to show how the “community of language and customs is constantly mistaken for a community of blood or physical characters.” Race, in other words, is a politically motivated way of making cultural differences—changing sets of beliefs and practices—into fixed physical and psychological categories. Schapiro rightly notes how three Jewish artists—Pissarro, Soutine, Pechstein—share no “pervasive quality” in common, and why should they? Schapiro’s aim throughout the essay is to give primacy to shifting ideas of culture over fixed properties of race and nationality. Thus, his central example of the Impressionists is to show that whatever their putative racial and national differences what they actually share is a “common culture,” and that is the only issue that matters.

For Schapiro, writing in 1936, nationality stood uncomfortably close to race. Partly this had to do with the obvious reactionary politics of the moment. A nation was increasingly defined by the claims of a “people,” bound by blood and soil, for a land. A “particular people,” as JD Vance might put it.6 Nazi Germany offered an obvious point of reference, but Schapiro’s readers probably had in mind such racist immigration policies as the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act as well. No surprise, then, that Schapiro takes art history to task for playing into the conjunction of race and nationality, or more precisely of racism and nationalism. He notes that for a reactionary like Thomas Craven, the problem with Alfred Stieglitz is that he is “a Hoboken Jew without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical American background.”7 And the general bankruptcy of modern American art can be seen in the total absence of “fine old American families”—no “scions of colonial aristocracy” to be found at the Armory Show!8

Although it may now seem absurd to conceptualize an account of American art centered on Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, art history as a discipline originated from such assertions. As Eric Michaud has shown, art historians in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries persistently sought to distinguish national schools in terms of the biological makeup of a people, the hereditary “national character,” which resulted in a kind of “ethno-differentialism.” The persistence of classical art resulted from the legacy of the ancient Roman peoples; Gothic art was the product of the Germanic peoples. In modern times, France and Germany stood opposed on similar grounds. For Schlegel and de Staël alike, the difference was racial. And for art historians as disparate as Winckelmann, Viollet-le-Duc, Riegl, Wölfflin, and Focillon, “individual objects were determined by ‘styles,’ styles were determined by peoples or nations, and nations by their racial components.”9 Not coincidently, all this was consistent with the emergence of scientific racism in the work of Arthur de Gobineau, whose greatest concern in his 1853 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was the biological distinction between the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean peoples in France. None of this was mysterious in 1936. It was textbook (art) history.

At first glance, it would seem Schapiro was as dismissive of nationality as he was of race as a category for advancing the cause of political emancipation or the interpretation of art. But in a reply to a letter to the editor, Schapiro hedges his bets. Jennings Tofel’s response to “Race, Nationality and Art,” appeared in the May issue of Art Front. Tofel was a painter. A little older than Schapiro, he had also been born in Eastern Europe, in Poland, and immigrated to the United States as a child.10 He changed his given name from Yehuda to Jennings in order to gain employment with an antisemitic bookkeeper. He began painting while studying at the City College of New York, and he soon became close to Stieglitz as well as to Katherine Dreier of the Société Anonyme. In 1926, he founded the Jewish Art Center in New York and wrote articles in English and Yiddish on a variety of topics. He joined the Artists Project of the WPA in 1934 and would probably have considered himself in strong alliance with the Popular Front, a fellow traveler, as it were. For all that, Tofel bluntly disagrees with Schapiro on the question of nationality. He writes, “I am not alone in thinking that nationalism can be a source of great good.” Of course, the Hitler and Mussolini version of nationalism is “an instrument of barbaric cruelty.” But Tofel objects to Schapiro’s implicit demand that oppressed peoples forget their “cultural and historical heritage” in the name of a universalist, anti-nationalist or anti-racist politics.11 He peroration is worth quoting: “Then let us frankly accord each artist this right he is enjoying nevertheless. Do not wish to take away from the artists of the minority peoples particularly, their own cultural heritage when you offer them yours, in the manner of religious missionaries. Tolerate but each one to develop his own in the open sight of all—and we shall perhaps all be the wiser for it in time.”12

As Schapiro’s response makes clear, Tofel simplified the argument rather dramatically. In fact, Schapiro claims, he has no problem with nationalism as an explanatory framework of understanding, as long as it is treated as a “culture,” a culture “conditioned by natural, social, economic, and historical circumstances” and not a “spirit rooted in the blood of a people.” Of course, as Raymond Williams once wrote, “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”13 And historical accounts of the economic circumstances of cultural production do not follow automatically from a rephrasing of nation as culture.

Schapiro’s greatest legacy as an art historian may nonetheless be his attempt to realize such an ambition. In the months that followed the exchange in Art Front, he wrote one of his most influential essays, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” which appeared in Marxist Quarterly in early 1937. Among other things, it sought to pry accounts of modern art away from an “unhistorical” explanation of change “presented as an internal, immanent process.”14 The risk of such formalism, for Schapiro, was that “a destiny rooted in the race or the spirit of the culture or the inherent nature of the art, has to be smuggled in” in order to explain away what should properly be understood as “impelling historical conditions.”15 The social history of art follows from this renunciation of the magical thinking inherent in race and nationality.

It is striking, of course, how little nationalism, like race, has changed in the last nine decades. This is not only to suggest that blood and soil nationalism are once again ascendent. It is also to suggest that art history has never really shed its core assumptions about nationality as a determining factor in the classification and understanding of art. How useful is it, for example, to know that Mary Cassatt’s Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly was made by an “American” while Max Ernst’s Un Ami empressé is “French”?16 Surely it would be just as meaningful to reverse that categorization. The presumption that birthplace, national origin, or citizenship matter to an artist’s project can sometimes be maddeningly puerile. The artist Carol Bove, who was born in Geneva but grew up in Berkeley, California, “has spent much of her life explaining to new acquaintances that she is not Swiss.”17 In the wake of the Russian invasion of 2022, a variety of museums took it upon themselves to recategorize the nationality of artists born in what is now Ukraine. At The Met, Ilya Repin is no longer Russian. At MoMA, Kazimir Malevich, Louise Nevelson, and Weegee are now Ukrainian-born. Under pressure to recognize the Ukrainian nationality of even more artists—Alexandra Exter was the case at stake—MoMA issued a statement: “Nationality descriptions can be very complex, especially when making posthumous attributions. […] We apply rigorous research best practices and approach the descriptions with sensitivity to the recorded nationality of the artist at death and birth, emigration and immigration dynamics, and changing geo-political boundaries.”18 Others were less hesitant. The Kyiv Post published an article on Sonia Delaunay under the title “(Un)celebrated Ukrainians Who Changed the Course of History.”19 For an artist born in a shtetl “well within the Pale of Settlement” of the Russian Empire, speaking Yiddish as her mother tongue, educated in Saint Petersburg and in Karlsruhe, married first to a German and then a French citizen, the reduction of Delaunay to the current political status of her place of birth serves no useful role in understanding her art.20 It might serve even less purpose in the struggle against blood and soil nationalism in the twenty-first century.