Miriam Schapiro.
Shrine: Collage with Lautrec
1964
Lithograph
Framed: 50 13/16 in. x 12 3/4 in.
Gift of Leonard & Ruth Bocour
Miriam Schapiro was born in Toronto, Canada but mostly lived in New York. Both her father, Theodore Schapiro, and her husband, Paul Brach, were artists. She preferred her studio to be in her home because she thought that if it was not, it would take away from her role in the family.1 Schapiro and Brach each had a room in their home for their own studio. Her studio eventually spread into their dining room and it would embarrass Brach because at the time women artists were often considered hobbyists rather than serious practitioners. She had to claim the dining room as her studio because it was a space for women, although later she did get her own studio.2 Schapiro is best recognized for her abstract and feminist artwork. These include her gestural paintings, the Shrine series, geometric abstract paintings, decorative fabric collages, and autobiographical figural compositions.3 She was involved in the Pattern and Decoration movement in the 1970s.4 She was also a co-founder of the feminist art program at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania during this time.5 But before this, she created the Shrine series in the 1960s, one of her earliest groups of work that also acted like an autobiography.6 Each piece in the series, which contains both paintings and prints, is meant to be self-reflecting.7 She does this with the symbolism in some of the works that are composed of multiple square or rounded compartments. Each compartment contains an aspect of being a woman artist and a part of Schapiro’s own story.8
The Fine Arts Collection at St. Mary’s has a lithograph fromt his series entitled Shrine: Collage with Lautrec. The shape of the piece is odd, but purposeful. The arch and the gold color at the top symbolize aspiration. The second compartment is different for each work in the series. This compartment shows her desire to link herself with a historical context, yet still remain symbolic to her own identity. These differing images let her explore and discover new aspects of herself. The second compartment is possibly the most important part of this series because each is different and shows a new side of Schapiro. The image in the work in the collection of the College is a reproduction of a work by nineteenth-century printmaker and painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and refers to Schapiro’s own work and life.9 The image shows a printing workshop with a man creating a print while a woman checks the finished proofs. The third compartment is an egg, which represents the female presence and is present in many of the works in this series. The eggs in each Shrine work are also different colors, along with border of the sections. The last compartment is a silver square which is meant to be seen as a mirror. The ‘mirror’ is where “she [the artist] looks at herself “to find images for the future.”10 These mirrors are the same color in each of the shrine series but have a different texture to them. This work was the starting point for the more feminist work in Schapiro's future. The entire series allowed Schapiro to find and define herself as a woman artist.
1. Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Miriam Schapiro, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1999), 24↩
2. Ibid, 21-25↩
3. Ibid, 13-15↩
4. Ibid, 31↩
5. Ibid, 32↩
6. Ibid, 56↩
7. Ibid, 51-52↩
8. Ibid, 31↩
9. "Shrine II, 1964," Norton Simon Museum. 26 Oct. 2016. <https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/P.1966.07.033>↩
10. Gouma-Peterson and Schapiro, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life, 32 ↩
-Morgan Beahm