Leo Steinberg (July 9, 1920 to March 13, 2011) was an art critic and historian. Steinberg was born in Russia, where his father had been appointed Commissar of Justice, by V. Lenin. However, the integrity of the father, who envisaged abolishing the prison system, meant the family had to go into exile. They wound up in the United States and found a home in Manhattan. Leo Steinberg's later academic career excited both artists and fellow scholars. His wide ranging erudtion resulted in his receiving an award for literature --from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1983.
His New York Times obituary includes these analyses:
The titles of his two best-known books, “Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art” (1972) and “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion” (1983), suggest the range of his interests....
In the essay “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind,” first published in 1953, ...Mr. Steinberg spoke out against formalism, then the dominant approach to art analysis, with its view that a work’s artistic value lies not in its content but in its shape, line, color and other visual elements.“Even nonobjective art continues to pursue art’s social role of fixating thought in aesthetic form, pinning down the most ethereal conceptions of the age in vital designs,” he wrote in “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind.” In “Other Criteria” he declared, “Considerations of ‘human interest’ belong in the criticism of modernist art not because we are incurably sentimental about humanity, but because it is art we are talking about.” Such arguments helped liberate a whole generation from the restrictive laws of formalist aesthetics, opening the field to more wide-ranging ways of studying meaning and representation in art...
[I]t was his ability to show how form and content are intertwined that made his writing so revelatory. His ability to discover ever deeper and more interconnected levels of meaning in the form and imagery of an artwork gave his writing a narrative excitement, like that of a detective story....
[The book] “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.” ... grew out of a question that had apparently occurred to no other modern scholar: Why is it that in so many Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, the infant Jesus’ genitals are actively displayed to viewers both within and without the picture? The explanation, Mr. Steinberg argued, was to be found in Renaissance theology, wherein a major question concerned the humanity of the son of God. Here the possession of reproductive organs proved that Jesus, whatever his metaphysical status, was indeed fully human and subject to human suffering....
Robert Rauschenberg was one of the artist about whom Steinberg wrote. In 1975 Steinberg asked
What is "pictorial flatness" about? Obviously it does not refer to the zero curvature of the physical plane— a cat walking over pictures by Tiepolo and Barnett Newman gets the same support from each one. What is meant of course is an ideated flatness, the sensation of flatness experienced in the imagination.... The flatbed picture plane lends itself to any content which does not evoke a prior optical event. As a criterion of classification it cuts across the terms "abstract" and "representational." ...[T]he flatbed picture plane [is] one which is man-made and stops short at the pigmented surface.
This same point as made in his obituary:
In the essay “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind,” first published in 1953, ...Mr. Steinberg spoke out against formalism, then the dominant approach to art analysis, with its view that a work’s artistic value lies not in its content but in its shape, line, color and other visual elements.“Even nonobjective art continues to pursue art’s social role of fixating thought in aesthetic form, pinning down the most ethereal conceptions of the age in vital designs,” he wrote in “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind.” In “Other Criteria” he declared, “Considerations of ‘human interest’ belong in the criticism of modernist art not because we are incurably sentimental about humanity, but because it is art we are talking about.” Such arguments helped liberate a whole generation from the restrictive laws of formalist aesthetics, opening the field to more wide-ranging ways of studying meaning and representation in art...
[I]t was his ability to show how form and content are intertwined that made his writing so revelatory. His ability to discover ever deeper and more interconnected levels of meaning in the form and imagery of an artwork gave his writing a narrative excitement, like that of a detective story....
[The book] “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.” ... grew out of a question that had apparently occurred to no other modern scholar: Why is it that in so many Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, the infant Jesus’ genitals are actively displayed to viewers both within and without the picture? The explanation, Mr. Steinberg argued, was to be found in Renaissance theology, wherein a major question concerned the humanity of the son of God. Here the possession of reproductive organs proved that Jesus, whatever his metaphysical status, was indeed fully human and subject to human suffering....
Robert Rauschenberg was one of the artist about whom Steinberg wrote. In 1975 Steinberg asked
What is "pictorial flatness" about? Obviously it does not refer to the zero curvature of the physical plane— a cat walking over pictures by Tiepolo and Barnett Newman gets the same support from each one. What is meant of course is an ideated flatness, the sensation of flatness experienced in the imagination.... The flatbed picture plane lends itself to any content which does not evoke a prior optical event. As a criterion of classification it cuts across the terms "abstract" and "representational." ...[T]he flatbed picture plane [is] one which is man-made and stops short at the pigmented surface.
This same point as made in his obituary:
Rauschenberg... invented a pictorial surface that let the world in again. Not the world of Renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message [about he weather.]...Rauschenberg's picture plane is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city....This flatbed picture plane is an altogether new kind of picture surface, one that effects, according to Steinberg, "the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture."
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