Few scholars in the field of art history have matched Leo Steinberg's
breadth of knowledge and perspicacity. He had the ability to tackle the
most complex of our Old Masters and Modern artists (Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns) and offer up thrilling discoveries.
His colossal talent as an art historian and art critic lay not only
in his exhaustive research, but also in his original analyses. He
understood artistic techniques and intentionality as integral parts of a
whole. (Steinberg's commentary on Raphael's Alba Madonna, ca. 1510, in the National Gallery's collection, listed below under "Sources," provides a brief introduction to his mind.)
Date and Place and Place of Birth
July 9, 1920, Moscow, Russia
Life
Born Zalmon Lev Steinberg into an intellectually gifted family, Leo
Steinberg (as he anglicized his name) was the son of Isaac Nachman
Steinberg, a lawyer and member of the post-Russian Revolution
government, and the wealthy Anyuta Esselson Steinberg. His father's
unwelcome proposal to abolish the prison system led to the family's move
to Berlin from 1923 to 1933. When Hitler rose to power, the family
moved to England. From 1936 to 1940, Steinberg pursued his artistic bent
at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, concentrating on
sculpture and drawing. After World War II, Steinberg immigrated to New
York and made a living as a freelance writer and a translator from
German to English. In 1951, he gave a series of lectures entitled
"Introduction to Art and Practical Aesthetics" at the 92nd Street Y in
Manhattan. These talks launched his career in the art world. He earned a
Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University in 1960 with a dissertation on the Baroque architect
Francesco Borromini.
In 1962, Steinberg married Dorothy Sieberling, an art editor for Life Magazine.
(Their marriage ended in divorce.) That same year, at the age of 42,
Steinberg began his first full-time position at Hunter College, an
undergraduate branch of the City University of New York. There he taught
art history and drawing.
From 1971 to 1975, he taught at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate and
University Center, where he co-founded the graduate art history program
with Milton W. Brown (1911-1998) and John Rewald (1912-1994). These
three mavericks created a Modernist curriculum (1800 to the present),
permitted dissertations in art history and art criticism (almost unheard
of at the time), and encouraged the study of popular culture. Their
visionary concept proved to be clairvoyant, as the department's birth
coincided with the rise of Andy Warhol's influence and the Postmodernist
appropriation of material culture.
In 1975, Steinberg accepted a teaching post at the University of
Pennsylvania. He retired in 1991. He also taught at Harvard, Princeton,
Stanford, Berkeley and the University of Texas, Austin, which received
his collection of 3,200 prints valued at about $3.5 million in 2002.
Selected List of Awards and Honors
- In 1983, Steinberg became the first art critic to win the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
- In 1984, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinguished art criticism, College Art Association.
- In 1986, he was selected for the "genius" award, the MacArthur Fellowship Program.
- In 2002, the College Art Association (CAA) dedicated a special session of papers in his honor.
Steinberg's facility with English, his third language, was enviable.
His accessible writing laced with esoteric vocabulary (not jargon, but
uncommon words) assisted the reader's comprehension of how he saw the
artwork. His enthralling lectures spun seemingly random factoids into
nuggets of art historical gold.
During his talk at CAA in 2002, Steinberg confessed to a bit of
irritation that years of hard work turned into five-minute synopsis for
today's art history student, who expects predigested instant
gratification in this digital age.
Here is an annotated bibliography of his best-known contributions.
A Selected Annotated Bibliography of Leo Steinberg's Writing
- Pointing out the emphasis on Jesus Christ's humanity in "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion," October, no. 25, Summer 1983.
- Shifting the reading of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon from formalist to sexually iconographic in "The Philosophical Brothel, Parts I and II," ArtNews, September and October 1972, reprinted in one volume of October, Spring 1988, 7-74 and translated into French for the exhibition catalogue Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, volume 2 (Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988: 319-365).
- Reading the central figures as recumbent nudes and incipient Cubism in Picasso's Demoiselles "The Algerian Women and Picasso At Large," in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 1972).
- Identifying the tiny male figures as angels behind the Madonna and Child in "Concerning the Doni Tondo: The Boys in the Back," a lecture, CAA conference, New York, 1994.
- Accounting for the integration of composition, narrative and iconography in Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (MIT Press, 2001).
Leo Steinberg is survived by nieces, nephews and an enormous
community of art historians indebted to his work. His often
controversial criteria opened our eyes and minds to bold new paths of
inquiry.
Date and Place of Death
March 13, 2011, New York City
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