In 1945, encouraged by his older sister and her husband, Steinberg moved to New York City. For years he made a living writing art criticism and teaching art, including at the Parsons School of Design. In 1957, William Kolodney invited Steinberg to give a lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Change and Permanence in Western Art" focused on ten periods of art, dealing with problems or solutions with special relevance to modern thought and taste.[2]
Steinberg approached the history of art in a revolutionary manner, helping to move it from a dry consideration of factual details, documents, and iconographic symbols to a more dynamic understanding of meaning conveyed via various artistic choices. For example, in 1972, Steinberg introduced the idea of the "flatbed picture plane" in his book Other Criteria, a collection of essays.[4] The whole of the Summer, 1983, issue of the journal October was dedicated to Steinberg's essay The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, later published as a book by Random House and by publishers in other countries. In that essay, Steinberg examined a previously ignored pattern in Renaissance art, which he named ostentatio genitalium: the prominent display of the genitals of the infant Christ and the attention also drawn to that area in images of Christ near the end of his life, in both cases for specific theological reasons involving the concept of the Incarnation – the word of God made flesh.[5] Steinberg died on March 13, 2011, in New York City at the age of 90.
In 1962 Steinberg married Dorothy Seiberling, an art editor for Life magazine; the marriage ended in divorce. For more than 40 years, Sheila Schwartz was his "indispensable collaborator",[9] assistant and editor.[10] Steinberg had no children.[11][12]
Steinberg's research particularly focused on the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other Italian Renaissance artists and their depictions of Christ in art. As a critic, he produced important work on Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. One of his most significant essays was Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public, which appeared in March 1962 in Harper's Magazine.
Steinberg took an informal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. This was in juxtaposition to many formalist critics at the time, such as Clement Greenberg, who were known to be resolute in their writing.[14] In many of his writings, he expressed his love for art's ability not only to reflect life but also to become it and commented, "Anything anybody can do, painting does better."[15] He believed that the difference between modern painting and that of the Old Masters was the viewer's subjective experience of that artwork. He also believed that Abstract Expressionist action painters, such as Jackson Pollock, were more concerned with creating good art than with merely expressing a personal identity on canvas, a point of view contrary to that held by Harold Rosenberg, another American art critic of Steinberg's era.
Works
Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays, edited by Sheila Schwartz (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Michelangelo's Painting: Selected Essays, edited by Sheila Schwartz (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Michelangelo's Sculpture: Selected Essays, edited by Sheila Schwartz (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art, (Oxford University Press, 1972; reprinted University of Chicago Press, 2007).
"Pontormo's Capponi Chapel." Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (1974): 385–399.
"Borromini's San Carlo alle quattro fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1960). Garland Publishing, 1977.
The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. (Pantheon, 1983; revised edition University of Chicago Press, 1996.)
Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (Zone Books, 2001).
"Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public" Harper's 224 no. 1,342 (March 1962): 31–39.
^Borham, Holly, Simone J. Wicha, Peter W. Parshall, and Blanton Museum of Art. 2023. The Circulating Lifeblood of Ideas: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints. [Austin, Texas]: Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin.
^Steinberg, Leo; Cándida Smith, Richard; Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, compiler; J. Paul Getty Trust, publisher (2001). The gestural trace : Leo Steinberg. Getty Research Institute.
^Steinberg, Leo (February 13, 1975). Other criteria: confrontations with twentieth-century art. Reflections on the state of criticism: Oxford University press.
^Kostelanetz, Richard (March 4, 2019). A Dictionary of the American Avant-Gardes. Leo Steinberg: Routledge.