Steinberg achieved his stature through his rigorous commitment to looking – and looking hard – at works of art and trying to understand them within the culture of their time. A typical example was his examination of Leonardo da Vinci's seemingly exhaustively-analysed fresco of The Last Supper.
Professor Leo Steinberg
In Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (2001) Steinberg took impish glee in skewering the laziness with which many art historians defer to textual references when interpreting the painting.
For 500 years it had been assumed to be an illustration of the biblical story in which Christ announces that a disciple will betray him – even though much in the fresco makes no narrative sense. Steinberg argued that it was more than that: both a Bible story and a visual embodiment of the Catholic mystery of the Eucharist, with the apostles to the left of Christ responding to the announcement of betrayal, while those on the right anticipate the gift of communion. It was this dual reality, he suggested, that made it so compelling as a work of art.
Steinberg explained that he had acquired the habit of looking at pictures when living in London during the Second World War. When the paintings at the National Gallery were put into storage for safekeeping, people complained; as a compromise the gallery brought back one painting every month. Steinberg visited the gallery every day to look at the one painting on display in splendid isolation.
More controversially, in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983), Steinberg stated that "the first necessity is to admit a long-suppressed matter of fact: that Renaissance art, both north and south of the Alps, produced a large body of devotional images in which the genitalia of the Christ Child, or of the dead Christ, receive such demonstrative emphasis that one must recognise an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds."
The exposure – sometimes even centrality – of the Child's genitalia, he felt, required an explanation beyond mere naturalism. After all, why would a loving mother expose her newborn's skin "to the nipping air so soon after Christmas"?
Steinberg went on to demonstrate that these images of Christ served a specific religious purpose: they embodied the doctrine of the Incarnation, showing that Christ was linked with the great chain of human procreation – even though divinely perfect.
In an essay published in Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art (1972), Steinberg spoke out against formalism, then the dominant approach to art criticism, with its view that a work's artistic value lies not in its content but in its shape, line, colour and other visual elements.
Steinberg believed that the greatest difference between modern painting and that of the Old Masters was almost entirely to do with the viewer's subjective experience. When Matisse unveiled his Joy of Life in 1906 it was panned as the amateurish daubs of a man who had "gone to the dogs". A year later, Picasso unveiled Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, and it was Matisse who led the charge against it. Yet both paintings have come to represent breakthroughs in modern art.
Steinberg noted that resistance to modern art originally derived not from what painters put into their pictures but from what they left out; abstraction shocked people because it lacked recognisable images.
But gradually art lovers accustomed themselves to judging art on the basis of pure forms and expressive brushwork – so much so that Pop Art, with its return to figurative imagery and lack of brushstrokes, seemed shocking.
Steinberg experienced resistance of his own in 1958 when he first attended a one-man show by Jasper Johns. He disliked the show and would gladly have dismissed Johns as a bore but, as he later recalled, his art "depressed me and I wasn't sure why".
Later he wrote that in the minute he allowed Johns to be good art, he had to let go of his own definition of what art was – the feeling that a painting should make the viewer feel some human warmth. He went on to identify in Johns's work a "sense of desolate waiting" in which objects such as flags, faces or coat hangers, which are designed to move and function in a particular way, are held absolutely still. With this technique, Steinberg suggested, Johns manages to subvert the viewer's expectations of what art is.
He was born Zalman Lev Steinberg to German-Jewish parents in Moscow on July 9 1920. His father, Isaac Steinberg, a lawyer and anarchist, served briefly as Lenin's Revolutionary commissar of justice in 1917-18 before his idealistic commitment to abolishing prisons led to a parting of the ways. In 1923, having been warned that he was in danger of assassination, he fled with his family to Berlin.
After Hitler came to power the family moved to Britain where, aged 16, Leo Steinberg entered the Slade School of Fine Art, receiving a diploma in 1940 for his work in sculpture and drawing.
After the war the family moved to New York, where Steinberg became a freelance writer, editor and translator. It was only in his thirties that he moved to art history and began to contribute to avant garde art magazines. In 1951 he caused a stir with a public lecture entitled "An Introduction to Art and Practical Aesthetics", the purpose of which was "to provoke an unprejudiced response to various and contradictory art forms".
After taking a doctorate from the New York University Institute of Fine Art in 1960 with a thesis on the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini, Steinberg was appointed Professor of Art History at Hunter College, New York. In 1975 he moved on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1991, though he also held lecturing posts at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard, and lectured widely at museums and galleries around the country.
Steinberg's often polemical approach to art did not meet with universal approval. In a review of his Michelangelo's Last Paintings (1975), Ernst Gombrich took issue with Steinberg's tendency to over-interpret paintings, reading into them meanings which could not be proved. "He has produced a book to be reckoned with," Gombrich concluded, "but a dangerous model to follow."
His lively, personal style of writing, which, in the words of one reviewer, brought to scholarship "the candour and wit of a private conversation and the suspense of a whodunit", earned him the distinction in 1983 of becoming the first art historian to receive an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
A tall, elegant figure, never seen without a cigarette (his only fallow period, he claimed, was when he had attempted to quit), Steinberg seemed remarkably impervious to consumer culture. He lived in a modest apartment in Manhattan, did not own a car, seldom took a holiday and was not particularly interested in food or fine clothes.
Over 40 years, however, he assembled a superb collection of 3,200 prints by artists ranging from Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Goya to Matisse, Picasso and Jasper Johns. In 2002 he donated the entire collection, valued at $3.5 million, to the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Leo Steinberg married, in 1962, Dorothy Seiberling; the marriage was later dissolved.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/8427669/Professor-Leo-Steinberg.html
Steinberg went on to demonstrate that these images of Christ served a specific religious purpose: they embodied the doctrine of the Incarnation, showing that Christ was linked with the great chain of human procreation – even though divinely perfect.
In an essay published in Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art (1972), Steinberg spoke out against formalism, then the dominant approach to art criticism, with its view that a work's artistic value lies not in its content but in its shape, line, colour and other visual elements.
Steinberg believed that the greatest difference between modern painting and that of the Old Masters was almost entirely to do with the viewer's subjective experience. When Matisse unveiled his Joy of Life in 1906 it was panned as the amateurish daubs of a man who had "gone to the dogs". A year later, Picasso unveiled Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, and it was Matisse who led the charge against it. Yet both paintings have come to represent breakthroughs in modern art.
Steinberg noted that resistance to modern art originally derived not from what painters put into their pictures but from what they left out; abstraction shocked people because it lacked recognisable images.
But gradually art lovers accustomed themselves to judging art on the basis of pure forms and expressive brushwork – so much so that Pop Art, with its return to figurative imagery and lack of brushstrokes, seemed shocking.
Steinberg experienced resistance of his own in 1958 when he first attended a one-man show by Jasper Johns. He disliked the show and would gladly have dismissed Johns as a bore but, as he later recalled, his art "depressed me and I wasn't sure why".
Later he wrote that in the minute he allowed Johns to be good art, he had to let go of his own definition of what art was – the feeling that a painting should make the viewer feel some human warmth. He went on to identify in Johns's work a "sense of desolate waiting" in which objects such as flags, faces or coat hangers, which are designed to move and function in a particular way, are held absolutely still. With this technique, Steinberg suggested, Johns manages to subvert the viewer's expectations of what art is.
He was born Zalman Lev Steinberg to German-Jewish parents in Moscow on July 9 1920. His father, Isaac Steinberg, a lawyer and anarchist, served briefly as Lenin's Revolutionary commissar of justice in 1917-18 before his idealistic commitment to abolishing prisons led to a parting of the ways. In 1923, having been warned that he was in danger of assassination, he fled with his family to Berlin.
After Hitler came to power the family moved to Britain where, aged 16, Leo Steinberg entered the Slade School of Fine Art, receiving a diploma in 1940 for his work in sculpture and drawing.
After the war the family moved to New York, where Steinberg became a freelance writer, editor and translator. It was only in his thirties that he moved to art history and began to contribute to avant garde art magazines. In 1951 he caused a stir with a public lecture entitled "An Introduction to Art and Practical Aesthetics", the purpose of which was "to provoke an unprejudiced response to various and contradictory art forms".
After taking a doctorate from the New York University Institute of Fine Art in 1960 with a thesis on the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini, Steinberg was appointed Professor of Art History at Hunter College, New York. In 1975 he moved on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1991, though he also held lecturing posts at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard, and lectured widely at museums and galleries around the country.
Steinberg's often polemical approach to art did not meet with universal approval. In a review of his Michelangelo's Last Paintings (1975), Ernst Gombrich took issue with Steinberg's tendency to over-interpret paintings, reading into them meanings which could not be proved. "He has produced a book to be reckoned with," Gombrich concluded, "but a dangerous model to follow."
His lively, personal style of writing, which, in the words of one reviewer, brought to scholarship "the candour and wit of a private conversation and the suspense of a whodunit", earned him the distinction in 1983 of becoming the first art historian to receive an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
A tall, elegant figure, never seen without a cigarette (his only fallow period, he claimed, was when he had attempted to quit), Steinberg seemed remarkably impervious to consumer culture. He lived in a modest apartment in Manhattan, did not own a car, seldom took a holiday and was not particularly interested in food or fine clothes.
Over 40 years, however, he assembled a superb collection of 3,200 prints by artists ranging from Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Goya to Matisse, Picasso and Jasper Johns. In 2002 he donated the entire collection, valued at $3.5 million, to the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Leo Steinberg married, in 1962, Dorothy Seiberling; the marriage was later dissolved.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/8427669/Professor-Leo-Steinberg.html
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