Leo Steinberg, a giant of 20th century art history, died last Sunday, at home in New York. Steinberg revolutionized the practice of his chosen field, pushing the analysis of art out of Greenbergian formalism by insisting on the importance of context and meaning.. His classic, foundational texts, including the essays collected in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, and the beautifully titled, revelatory The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, inspired a generation of art historians to take risks with their work by exploring relationships beyond those between medium and material. “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,” Steinberg declared in the collection’s titular essay. If his theories were sometimes deemed too strong given the available evidence, they were wildly inspiring; The Sexuality of Christ explored the consistent presentation of the infant Jesus’s genitals to interior and exterior viewers in Renaissance Madonna and Child paintings, concluding that the theology of the time necessitated strong affirmations of Christ’s humanity and capacity for suffering. Its creativity, originality, and clarity of thought gives you goosebumps, while its eloquence and lack of jargon drive you inexorably along (rare for a work originally published in October).
I had the honor of meeting Leo Steinberg once, about five months before his death, to accompany him through a Matisse exhibition. He was frail, needing a wheelchair to navigate the galleries, but his mind was incredibly alive. He saw much he had never seen, but had he not told me, I would have never known – he picked apart paintings r as quickly as any he had known his whole working life. I was in awe.
I remember one incident more than any other. We stopped in front of Matisse’s Head, White and Rose, from 1914-15, and he asked me what I thought. I froze. How to answer Leo Steinberg? The painting, full of sharp geometries and blocks of color, was clearly a response to the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, and I said (or stammered) as much. He turned to me, and exclaimed, “No generalities! You could say that about every painting here!” (The show focused on Matisse’s fertile period 1913 and 1917, when he was indeed responding to the new techniques the Cubists were employing.) He wanted me to give more, to delve in, to specify, identify… and then he proceeded to do so himself. He identified the facility with which Matisse used a few curved lines to naturalize his subject, endowing her with a real, classic humanity, while also keeping Cubism’s constricting dogma at bay. It was a true lesson in how to practice art history, how to look closely at a painting and beyond it, into the context of its production and the philosophy of its creator. I like to think I redeemed myself, later, when we talked about the symmetries in Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s “La desserte”, but even if not, I will think of that moment whenever I look at or analyze a painting. With Leo Steinberg’s passing we have lost a treasured thinker. Hopefully future generations will live up to his example.
