The art historian Rosa Schapire was a central supporter of modern art in Germany, especially Expressionist art. The art historian, who came from Brody in Galicia and earned her doctorate in Heidelberg, lived in Hamburg as a freelance art historian from 1904. Schapire lectured and wrote books, articles and reviews, translating books from English, French and Polish (see e.g. Morris 1902; Chłe̜dowski 1910; Balzac 1923). Through the collector Gustav Schiefler, Schapire met the Expressionist artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff around 1907, to whom she felt a lifelong commitment, about whom she wrote, and whose art she collected, exhibited and recommended. Schmidt-Rottluff in turn painted Schapire and designed furniture for her Hamburg appartment at Osterbekstr. 43 in 1921 (Beiersdorf 2017, 215). During the First World War, Rosa Schapire co-founded the Frauenbund zur Förderung deutscher bildender Kunst (Women’s Association for the Promotion of German Fine Art), which acquired modern art to donate to museums (Vasanta 2017). In the 1920s, Schapire was a co-founder of two magazines, Rote Erde and Kündung, a literary member of the Hamburg Secession association and a supporter of younger artists such as Emy Roeder, Franz Nölken and Walter Grammaté, for whom she often wrote the first ever monographic texts (Wietek 1964, 122–124).

After 1933, Rosa Schapire was virtually unable to publish or give public lectures because of her Jewish background. In 1938, she spent an exploratory stay in London, where she met Gertrud Bing of the Warburg Institute, an institution that had existed as the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Hamburg until 1933 and emigrated to London. When a planned emigration to the USA fell through, Schapire wrote an “SOS letter” to Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute, asking him to support her temporary stay in England (Dogramaci 2017, 232). In fact, Schapire managed to emigrate to London in August 1939, taking with her parts of her art collection containing works by Schmidt-Rottluff. Her books, however, which formed the intellectual foundation of her literary activity, were lost and stolen, as was her furniture designed by Schmidt-Rottluff: The container deposited for emigration in the port of Hamburg was confiscated. (Bruhns 1992, 276; Beiersdorf 2009, 262f.).

In London, Schapire lived in precarious circumstances. She lived as a sub-tenant and moved several times. A district such as South Kensington, inhabited by many Poles, offered her memories of her own childhood: “South Kensington, the district where I live, is the Polish quarter, a lot of Poles live here in the house too, I have very friendly relations with some of them, with the result that I speak a lot of Polish again. I often have the feeling that the circle is beginning to close.” (Schapire 1949) In her accommodation at 21 Leinster Square in Bayswater, Schapire was visited by the Expressionist artist Ludwig Meidner, who was also in exile in London, and who drew her, thus providing a rare portrait from this period of her life.
Schapire's principal criterion for choosing accommodation seems to have been proximity to the Victoria & Albert Museum Library, which was “eine zweite Heimat” (a second home) to Schapire (Schapire 1951). As a result, most of the lodgings, as far as can be reconstructed from her correspondence with her close friend Agnes Holthusen in Hamburg, were within a 30-minute walk of the museum. Here, Rosa Schapire read for her lectures and articles and conducted research work for other émigrés such as her brother-in-law Otto Neurath and the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who taught at the University of Cambridge. Schapire worked on Pevsner's major project, his publication series The Buildings of England (Pevsner 1954, 111). However, Schapire’s commitment to Expressionism, especially to Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, met with little approval and even rejection in London. Works from her collection that she wanted to give to the Tate, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum were rejected by the museums (Beiersdorf 2009, 270; Behr 1998, 222). Thus, instead of the three paintings she had actually offered to the Tate Gallery, the art historian was only able to place one work there: Schmidt-Rottluff’s Woman with Bag (1915).

Nevertheless, Schapire was able to contribute to the visibility of Expressionist art by lending works from her collection. For an exhibition on the “Fauves” and their German contemporaries, she lent two paintings to the Roland, Browse & Delbanco Gallery in 1951. As early as 1948, Schapire had been asked to loan two works by Schmidt-Rottluff for an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, co-founded in 1947 by the painter Roland Penrose and the art critique Herbert Read among others. However, Schapire had great success as a mediator of German modernism outside London, at the Leicester Art Gallery, where Peter Tomory worked from 1951 to 1954, championing European continental art. The exhibitions he curated were drawn from the collections of émigrés such as Thekla Hess and Rosa Schapire, including the Schmidt-Rottluff Exhibition. Graphic Works & Stone Carvings in September 1953, which featured 40 prints by Schapire and 20 cut stones owned by the artist (see Schapire 1953). In the same year, E.H. Ramsden’s book Sculpture Theme and Variations. Towards a contemporary aesthetic (1953) featured illustrations of two sculptures by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff owned by the art historian. So it was only after many years in the British Isles that her efforts to promote Expressionist art began to show results.

Since the end of the war, Schapire had resumed correspondence with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Art historians from Germany also began to seek her out, which can be attributed to the rapid recognition of Expressionism and especially of Brücke art in the post-war period: Leopold Reidemeister of the Wallraff-Richartz Museum, Walter Passarge of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Adolf Jannasch, head of the Office of Fine Arts at the Berlin Senate, and the Frankfurt gallery owner Hanna Bekker vom Rath met her in London (Schapire 1954; Wietek 1964, 127). These meetings seem to have brought her closer to Germany again. Although Schapire herself did not return, she decided to donate bundles of prints and postcards in her possession to German museums.

A few years after the end of the Second World War, Schapire resumed her publishing activities in her English exile. For the newly founded English-language art journal Eidos. A Journal of Painting, Sculpture and Design, Schapire wrote reviews mainly of German-language literature, such as monographs on the artists Otto Müller or Paul Klee. Schapire’s text on Paul Ortwin Rave's Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich (Art Dictatorship in the Third Reich, Hamburg 1949) brought to the attention of the British public a German-language book on the confiscation of “Degenerate Art”, which they would not otherwise have been aware of (Schapire 1950). Schapire also wrote texts for the English-language art and architecture magazine Le Connoisseur and worked for Architectural Review. However, it was only through her work for the German art journal Die Weltkunst that the art historian was again able to write more frequently about her preferred epoch – modernism. From 1952 to 1954, Schapire was the London correspondent for Die Weltkunst and wrote more than 30 exhibition and book reviews aimed primarily at lay people and collectors interested in art. She thus reported for a German audience that, after years in which modernism was only seen and exhibited through the defamatory perspective of National Socialism, now needed to be reintroduced to the art of the avant-gardes. (For a full list of Rosa Schapire’s writings, see Dogramaci/Sandner 2017, 257–268).
On 1 February 1954, Rosa Schapire died in the Tate Gallery during a visit. Seven days later, she was cremated at the inter-denominational Golders Green Crematorium (Beiersdorf 2009, 276), where numerous other émigrés were also cremated, including Alfred Flechtheim, Sigmund and Anna Freud, Ernö Goldfinger. Schapire’s estate was organised by Nikolaus Pevsner and the art dealer Gustav Delbanco, and parts of the collection were given to English and international museums.