FEATURES ARCHIVE

Leo Steinberg’s reputation as one of the most influential art historians of the past sixty years was built upon his courage to challenge the accepted orthodoxies of art history. Trained as a draftsman and sculptor at the Slade School in London, he brought to his later studies in art history, a deep respect for the work of art as a willed expression of the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual concerns. Whether interpreting Old Master or modern art, Steinberg’s scholarship rested on a sustained examination of the work. “These are the moments,” he wrote, “even in a wordy culture like ours, when images start from no preformed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustrations of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets.” This belief in the primacy of images led him to reject theory-based approaches, such as Greenbergian formalism that dominated art criticism in the 1960s, or interpretations of Renaissance and Baroque art that proceeded from reading rather than seeing. An inspirational lecturer in the classroom and in hundreds of public presentations, Steinberg was also an eloquent writer, who used language to penetrate the mysteries of an image.

In addition to his scholarly publications and lectures, Steinberg, with his connoisseur’s eye, acquired a considerable personal collection of art representing a broad range of historical periods and mediums. A good number of Steinberg’s drawings acquisitions were unattributed when he discovered them in New York shops or in his own travels. On the reverse of many of the frames are his notes, added throughout the years, with his attributions and research information as well as the opinions of his colleagues.

Steinberg’s enduring legacy will be the freshness and clarity of his ideas, the other criteria (to use the title of his classic collection of essays on modern art) that he applied to the visual and intellectual pleasure of looking.