An expert on early Christian, Medieval and modern art, he explored periods and movements with an eye toward their works' social, political and material constructions.

An active professor, lecturer, student, writer and humanist, he maintained a long professional association with Columbia University in New York.

[2][3] In 1906, his father came to New York City and found a job as a Hebrew teacher at the Yitzcak Elchanan Yeshiva on the Lower East Side.

He grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he was first exposed to art in evening classes taught by John Sloan at the Hebrew Educational Society.

During summers, he worked as a Western Union delivery boy, a warehouse packer, an electrical-supply assembler and an adjustment clerk at Macy's.

Undergraduate classmates included Whittaker Chambers, Clifton Fadiman, Herbert Solow, Lionel Trilling, Henry Zolinsky and Louis Zukofsky, with many of whom he contributed to The Morningside literary magazine.

"A new sphere of artistic creation," Dr. Schapiro called it, "without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feelings that anticipate modern art.

B. Neumann, Isamu Noguchi, Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer, James Johnson Sweeney, Max Weber, George Biddle, Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood, Lorser Feitelson and Lewis Mumford.

[8] Schapiro and other dissenters, including Mark Rothko, Gottlieb, Harris and Bolotowsky, condemned dictatorships in Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain and Japan and founded a Cultural Committee which became the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

[9] Schapiro was a proponent of modern art, on which he published essays alongside books on Van Gogh and Cézanne.

He said style refers to the formal qualities and visual characteristics of a piece of art, and demonstrated it could be used as an identifier of a particular period and as a diagnostic tool.

It reflects the economic and social circumstances in which an artist works and breathes and reveals underlying cultural assumptions and normative values.

He wrote scholarly articles for a variety of socialist publications and endeavored to apply a novel Marxist method to the study of art history.

In his most famous essay on Medieval Spanish art, "From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos",[11] Schapiro demonstrated how the concurrent existence of two historical styles in one monastery was indicative of economic upheaval and class conflict.

[7] In 1995, his brother Morris donated $1 million to establish the Meyer Schapiro Professorship of Modern Art and Theory.

[15] In 1995, Schapiro received a special award for lifetime achievement from the College Art Association at its 83rd annual conference in San Antonio, Texas.