Search Results

“... reviewers there were some who were embarrassed or shocked and some who were sceptical. The author, Leo Steinberg, kept watch on them and has now greatly expanded his original report. He is agreeably discursive and writes informatively and exuberantly about all manner of marginal topics, but his revision has two main purposes: to multiply the visual ...”

“... trick with his paintings of flags, targets and numbers in the mid to late 1950s; as the critic Leo Steinberg pointed out, these works met Greenberg’s criteria for Modernist painting – as well as being flat, it should be self-contained, objective, immediate – but by means that Greenberg found utterly alien to such painting: the kitschy images and ...”

“... The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in representations of Christ, both as an infant and as an adult, the genitals had a particular theological significance to which we are now oblivious because of the modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity ...”

“... it became routine to parse Picasso’s work from this period as a march towards flatness. Leo Steinberg was the first to challenge this in his 1972 essay ‘The Philosophical Brothel’, a painstaking reading of Picasso’s earliest major painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), based on the more than fifty preparatory drawings for the ...”

“... 20th-century painting, for the older kind of dialogue with tradition broke down; the criticism of Leo Steinberg, so delicate in its way of relating a work to its context in the oeuvre, so subtle about the now very complex relation to tradition, is a model of the right sort of response. But in writing about fiction we experience some vulgar inhibition ...”

“... an interview in 1984, ‘there’s a kind of restraint and morality in Johns’ that he admired. Leo Steinberg once described this posture as one of ‘sufferance’ before the world, which appeared to press on Johns’s passive art almost directly. Nauman transformed this sufferance into resistance: ‘doing things you don’t particularly want to do ...”

“... about postwar art.*Johns made an exceptional entrance in early 1958: his first show at the new Leo Castelli Gallery nearly sold out, with three paintings immediately purchased by MoMA, and one piece appearing on the cover of ARTnews. Then 27, he had sized up the New York art world precisely, dominated as it then was by the formalist model of ‘modernist ...”

“... of the image. In this way it presaged the reorientation of the picture plane that the critic Leo Steinberg declared, 15 years later, to be ‘expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture’ – a move towards a postmodernist conception of the image that is credited to Rauschenberg above all. If ...”

“... Silvers? Or, in the case of the inventiveness of Johns’s work, previous investigations by Leo Steinberg, Max Kozloff or Fred Orton? From the vantage-point of a card-carrying feminist, Hughes’s procedure raises the spectre of Big Daddy, most prominently in the less nuanced realm of the TV series, where that tough but sensitive, intelligent but ...”

“... has been replaced by less physical forms of homage. (Had the convention survived, the late Leo Steinberg might have been less successful in persuading so many of his fellow scholars that the eldest of the magi, who kneels to kiss Christ’s foot in Renaissance paintings, is actually trying to examine Christ’s genitalia.) Hale often provides more ...”

“... is that it confuses the picture with the objects depicted in the picture, a point well made by Leo Steinberg in an essay – published in 1972 in his book Other Criteria – which should finally have put paid to such notions. Cubism sought neither a three-dimensional nor a ‘scientific’ grasp of depicted form. Whatever objects or portions of ...”

“... the course of a single chapter, to account for the complex arguments advanced by such scholars as Leo Steinberg, William Rubin, Anna Chave and many others. The biographer of an artist will, inevitably, like to trace the development of a work, from early drawings to more finished sketches and to various versions of the final painting. To examine the ...”

“... moved easily between abstract painting and Romanesque sculpture; and after the Second World War, Leo Steinberg wrote with equal insight on 20th-century innovators like Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and Old Masters like Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velázquez. Yet this traffic is busier than ever before, according to Nagel, with art ...”

“... in the 1960s. Bois wasn’t the only one objecting to this model of modernism. By the late 1960s, Leo Steinberg had proposed ‘other criteria’ to the ones marshalled by Greenberg, and by the early 1970s Rosalind Krauss had become a vocal apostate from his formalism. Bois embraced both; indeed Krauss counts as his third great intellectual encounter ...”

“... He first drew her horoscope four and a half months into the marriage. Sylvia had ‘Mars in 24 of Leo, and the last degree of Aquarius rising, with Saturn in 29 of Capricorn, on the cusp of the 12th, which is suicidal – especially opposite Mars in the 6th. All Correct.’ The Hugheses also liked to commune with spirits using a Ouija board (they mostly asked ...”