Rendering 2

            The article published on the website of the newspaper “The New York Times” on February 14, 2013 is headlined “The Eye is Part of the Mind: Drawings From Life and Art by Leo Steinberg”. The article repots that now two collegial friends of Leo Steinberg, who was a hands-on artist. , David Cohen and Graham Nickson have selected nearly 60 of those drawings for a tribute show that is a posthumous Steinberg solo debut. Leo worked with skill in the versatile, revisable graphite medium.           

            It was revealed that his talent is obvious early, in a doe-eyed self-portrait from the Slade years, and in a series of carefully observed and polished drawings of a friend, Deirdre Knewstub. 

            The article informs us about that Steinberg was teaching art at Parsons School of Design and warming up to write his mold-shattering contemporary art criticism. The drawings suggest his range of interests, from Michelangelo to Picasso. They also capture his wit, as in an ink sketch of what looks like the morning-after of an orgy on Parnassus or in a downtown walk-up.

            I can say that Leo Steinberg is one of the most brilliant, influential, and controversial art historians of the last half of the 20th century..  Steinberg’s work didn’t sit well with everyone. While no one could deny his brilliance, some accused him of over-reaching in his art-historical interpretations. Acutely proud of his intellectual boldness, however, and vastly preferring going out on an imaginative intellectual limb to confining his art history to timidly tracking the trajectories of art and artists, Steinberg defended himself in a 1967 essay, “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self.”