Leo Steinberg

Leo Steinberg (July 9, 1920 – March 13, 2011) was an American art critic and art historian. Life Steinberg was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, the son of Isaac Nachman Steinberg, a Jewish lawyer and Socialist Revolutionary Party politician who was People's magistrate of Justice under Vladimir Lenin from 1917 to 1918. His family left the Soviet Union in 1923, and settled in Berlin, Germany. In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, the Steinbergs were forced to move again, this time to the United Kingdom. Intending to become an artist, Steinberg studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (part of the University of London). 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. The importance of his criticism of modern art was proven by his being included in Tom Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word, in which Steinberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg were all labeled the "kings of Cultureburg" for the influence of their criticism. Steinberg eventually moved away from art criticism and developed a scholarly interest in such artists and architects as Francesco Borromini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In 1960, he earned his PhD at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts with a dissertation on the architectural symbolism of Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Subsequently, he taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York. In 1975, he was appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until retiring in 1991. From 1995 to 1996, Steinberg was a guest professor at Harvard University, delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures on "The Mute Image and the Meddling Text."