Steinberg, Leo

Biographical/Historical Note

Leo Steinberg, art historian, critic, lecturer and professor, was born in Russia in 1920 and lived in Berlin and London before emigrating to the United States in 1938. After studying at the Slade School of Art in London, he entered the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in the mid-1950s (Ph.D., 1960), where he studied art and architecture with historians Harry Bober, Richard Krautheimer, Karl Lehmann, Wolfgang Lotz, Erwin Panofsky, Alfred Salmony and Charles Sterling. In 1958 and 1959 he was a guest of the American Academy in Rome, where he researched and wrote his dissertation on the baroque architect Francesco Borromini.

Steinberg taught drawing and art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York from 1961 to 1975, and ended his teaching career as Benjamin Franklin Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1975-1991). His lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio School in New York, Columbia University, and elsewhere attracted a broad audience of artists, art lovers and scholars. As an art critic, he is known for his writings on historical subjects and individual artists, as well as on modern and contemporary art subjects.

Published works range from short reviews and essays to book-length studies and include San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, a study in multiple form and architectual symbolism, 1960; Jasper Johns, 1963; Other Criteria, 1972 (compilation of 18 essays); Michelangelo's last paintings, the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace, 1975; The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance art and in modern oblivion, 1983.

Leo Steinberg is the first art historian to receive the Award in Literature from the American Academy and the Institute for Arts and Letters (1983). He also received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association (1984), and a MacArthur Fellowship (1986).