IMPRESSIONISM: Reflections and Perceptions.<i> By Meyer Schapiro</i> .<i> George Braziller: 360 pp., $50</i>

Meyer Schapiro belonged to the group of New York artists and intellectuals clustered around the Partisan Review in the 1940s and ‘50s. Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Phillip Rahv, Lillian Hellman and Delmore Schwarz were his contemporaries; like them, he had known poverty as a child and suffered as a young man from the anti-Semitism of genteel New York. They were formed in the caldron of the Great Depression and, as adults, tried to reconcile their fading hopes for radical social change with an abiding faith in high art. Unlike the others, Schapiro succeeded; he crafted an innovative, truly social vision of art.

Schapiro wrote about the history of visual art--all of it. He was equally at home discussing Egyptian sculpture and explaining Jackson Pollock. Erudition poured out of him like a volcanic eruption, hours and hours of it at a time; a lecture by Schapiro ended only when he realized you simply couldn’t take one more brilliant insight.

Like this century’s other great talker, Isaiah Berlin, Schapiro seemed to write little. Both in fact constantly labored over essays that they didn’t instantly publish, instead culling and refining the words that came so freely when they spoke. “Impressionism” is one of these hidden works. Schapiro, who was born in 1904 and died last year, had been writing about Impressionist painters since the ripe age of 24 and had been lecturing on them for decades. This book originated out of talks he gave at Indiana University in 1961, revised again and again in the following years.

The publisher’s blurb for “Impressionism” rightly calls this a “classic work.” Not a word is wasted. And the words are rich; Schapiro’s prose possesses an unequaled power to wake up the reader’s eye. This is probably the only book ever to relate Impressionism to Egyptian sculpture, Roman wall paintings, Chinese landscape scrolls, Immanuel Kant, Karl Heinz Helmholz and Gustave Flaubert, as well as to Pollock. Yet Schapiro never displays his learning as if he’s waving a flag; he quotes and refers only to strengthen the reader’s visual experience. What makes this book so compelling, though, is his depiction of Impressionism as a way of life as well as of art, an embrace of one’s sensual experience and of the people and places that arouse it.

“Impressionism” was coined in 1874 by the artist Louis Leroy, who was inspired by an exhibition of the works of Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and others, especially Monet’s painting “Impression, Sunrise.” Leroy thought Impressionism could be defined by the painter’s technique, the painting of light as color and the painter’s choice in subjects, ordinary people lunching, smooching, traveling in trains.

Looking back in time, Schapiro believes Impressionism is more than a label for paintings of light and pleasure, done in and around Paris in the 1870s. Impressionism, he writes, stands for the “authority of direct perception.” The painter working in this vein seeks sensual arousal and trusts how and what he or she sees: lunch on the bank of a river, .dthe blurred movement of a crowd, the play of light on a woman’s dress. The artist never doubts their reality even as he or she explores the variety of their appearances.

Impressionism is an art without irony about its objects. Schapiro wants to show that this trust in direct perception has consequences for the conduct of a life. In “Impressionism,” he focuses on the life of one artist, Monet, whom Shapiro calls the greatest member of the “Impressionist family.” If we think of Impressionism simply as an artistic style, Monet might also seem a limited figure because as a movement, Impressionism was short-lived. Ten years after Leroy coined the word, Renoir was trying to cut loose from its conventions; novelist Emile Zola attacked an art that seemed to him only about atmosphere; Toulouse-Lautrec started showing the human pain hidden behind the visual pleasures of the theaters, the crowded streets and the industrial suburbs that the Impressionists evoked in the 1870s.

Yet Monet persevered. The great youthful innovator kept on painting in his own fashion. Then, in late middle age, Monet took stock and reinvented his art, though still faithful to the precept of the “authority of direct perception.” He painted a single object, be it a haystack or a cathedral, over and over again, showing the changing of light through colors: skies become green, pink and brown in the course of a day; cathedrals change from gray to orange. Monet’s picture plane, which in the 1870s had extended horizontally in landscapes and street scenes, began to tilt upward so that by the time Monet painted his great series of water lilies in the early 1900s, the plants and water began to resemble a living wall.

In accounting Monet’s artistic journey, Schapiro wants to show that the artist kept faith not only with his own eye but also with a certain belief in the people and the places in which he lived; he trusted in them. This emphasis may seem to belong more to sociology than to art history; indeed, a lot of the art history written today emphasizes culture and theory but neglects the actual business of painting a painting. The greatness of Schapiro’s work is that he cares passionately about the artist in society and about brushes and canvases.

“The fury of the brush,” Schapiro says, is the physical basis of Monet’s art. That brushwork brings people and objects to life in a specially spontaneous way. Schapiro writes that, in Monet’s “Boulevard de Capucines” of 1873-74, “the crowd in the street appears as a dense aggregate of small staccato patches” made by brush-strokes that “could not be planned precisely in advance.” But as did Pollock, Monet had to discipline himself to let go expressively and look long and hard before seizing his brush. For Schapiro, this way of making a painting, this combination of spontaneity and discipline, is the essence of Impressionism. John Rewald, whose “History of Impressionism” is a kind of official Museum of Modern Art account of the movement written at the same time as Schapiro’s book, makes the same point about disciplined spontaneity. Schapiro goes a step further than Rewald by emphasizing that this is a desirable social value as much as it is an artistic practice.

Much of “Impressionism” is taken up with the Paris of Monet’s time, particularly in the 1870s, with its huge train stations, popular theaters, whorehouses, industrial suburbs and new bourgeois quarters in the city’s center. Schapiro celebrates painters like Monet, Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet because they depict crowds whose “chaotic movements and strident medley of colors and sounds would almost inevitably have appeared vulgar to a conservative taste and unsuited to the dignity of art.” Schapiro’s pages are suffused with a love of crowds rather than a fear of the masses.

Yet the crowd is not pure chaos. In Monet’s Paris, people smooch and drink rather than starve. What Schapiro shows is that they smooch and drink freely but with measure. The most impassioned pages of “Impressionism” revel in that ideal of city life, a sensual city without pretense; a popular and vivid place that is yet peaceful. Schapiro’s analysis of the brushwork that brings Monet’s canvases to life serves this critic also as a vision of Monet’s desirable Paris, its rhythm of the discipline of work and the release of pleasure, its focused contemplative sensuality.

Many critics before and after Schapiro have sought to ferret out in the modern city the secrets of its art, most notably the German essayist Walter Benjamin, writing a generation before Schapiro. For Benjamin, 19th century Paris was a place of vicious capitalist institutions combined with terrifying street life; the city stimulated fear and greed in equal measure; its spontaneity was dark, a threatening disorder. Schapiro never denies that dark reality; against it he balances the hope that people can live a more orderly, yet vivid, life of the senses. This is Monet’s revelation, Impressionism as a way of urban life.

After finishing “Impressionism,” I wondered how the book related to Schapiro’s experience of New York. The Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Union Square and Broadway in the 1930s, which formed the scenes of Schapiro’s youth, were visual cousins to Monet’s Paris. The city, which had developed by 1961 when he first developed his Impressionism lecture, was a different duller city. New York was launched upon the path it has followed to the present day; its center ever more filled with the monotonous doings of business, its popular quarters decaying or taking root in isolation far from the heart of the city. The spontaneous pleasures available to the urban eye have diminished in intensity and are experienced more by tourists than by natives. And concerning the sheer faith in vision that Schapiro celebrates in “Impressionism,” of course we know better. Modern art is typically too cunning to indulge visual pleasure.

Though Schapiro makes few connections between past and present, “Impressionism” is something more than the history of a great painter or a great period of art. His book is suffused with a faith in the senses, and it arouses what might be called city lust. Thanks to Schapiro’s immense powers as a writer and critic, these affirmations become compelling to his readers. One way to read this last work of a great scholar is as a vindication of the project of his generation of New York intellectuals. Schapiro recovers something of the social engagement that faded in his contemporaries, though not through any social agenda such as Marxism. He recovers it through the depth of impression people and places can make on the eye. “Impressionism” is, in that sense, a visionary book.