Leo Steinberg

The second edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion - doubled in size by the addition of a "Retrospect" - expands the now classic original text in three directions. It brings in a host of confirming images; deepens the theological argument; and answers skeptical or scandalized critics who decried the book at its first publication. In its polemical parts, the book wrestles large issues, such as the validity of interpretations that come without supporting texts, or the modern pleas that the maleness of Christ be tempered into androgyny. Along the way, the topics engaged range from Christ's human nature to Dr. Strangelove, from St. Augustine's dismal assessment of babyhood to the aesthetics of the U.S. Post Office.

"Leo Steinberg is the rare art historian who has known the pressures implicit in reviewing the work of living artists. In his engrossing lecture, filled with exciting insights and personal memories, he surveys the career of Robert Rauschenberg, one of the great American postwar artists. Beginning with his own experience as a moonlighting critic in the turbulent art world of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, he reveals much about himself and more about the insolent originality of the young Rauschenberg.". "Steinberg offers in-depth discussions of such major challenges as the Erased de Kooning Drawing, Bed, and Monogram. Where his interpretations differ from those of other critics, he shows how, and why. And he reflects candidly on his own changes of mind over the years.". "Steinberg warns against the modish interpretations that now load Rauschenberg's work with murderous symbolism or same-sex iconography. He argues that meaning in this artist's work is almost unspeakable, and the novel relationship established between the work and the viewer more subtly intentioned."--BOOK JACKET.

"A picture universally recognized, endlessly scrutinized and described, incessantly copied, adapted, lampooned: does Leonardo's near-ruined Last Supper still offer anything new to be seen or to be said: This book is a resounding Yes to both questions. With direct perception - and with attention paid to the work of earlier scholars and to the criticism embodied in the production of copyists over the past five hundred years - Steinberg demonstrates that Leonardo's mural has been consistently over-simplified. This most thought-out picture in Western art, painted in the 1490s on the north wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, is a marvel of compressed meanings. Its subject is not one arrested moment, but successiveness and duration. It is not only Christ's announcement of the forthcoming betrayal, but in equal measure the institution of the eucharist. More than the spur of the moment animates the disciples, and more than perspective determines their housing. Though Leonardo's geometry obeys all the rules, it responds as well to Christ's action at center, as if in emanation from the prime mover. The picture is simultaneously narrative and sacramental. As its protagonist is two-natured, as the twofold event of this night is both human submission and divine dispensation - so the entire picture is shown to have been conceived in duplexity: a sublime pun.". "Meanwhile, the unending disagreement as to what exactly is represented, what the depicted actions express, how and where this assembly is seated - all these still raging disputes are traced to a single mistaken assumption: that Leonardo intended throughout to be unambiguous and clear, and that any one meaning necessarily rules out every other.". "As Steinberg reveals an abundance of significant interrelations previously overlooked, Leonardo's masterpiece regains the freshness of its initial conception and the power to fascinate."--BOOK JACKET.

In the early 1970s, Rauschenberg moved his permanent studio from New York City to Captiva Island, off the Gulf coast of Florida (Today, this site is in use as the artists' residency program of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation). This relocation marked a shift from the gritty urban detritus that had been the basis of much of the earlier work to a rhapsodic embrace of color and geometric abstraction in a wholly new vernacular language. The Jammers series (1975-76), its title a direct reference to the Windjammer sailing vessel, is Rauschenberg?s salute to his new island life. In 1975, he also went to India to investigate textiles and papermaking, and the inspiration of this new and exotic context is evident in the use of vivid colors and nuanced textures of cotton, muslin, and silk. For the most part, the Jammers comprise stitched fabrics in pure, solid colors, affixed to rattan poles or hung directly and loosely on the wall; whereas in works such as Sprout (1975) and Caliper (1976), the unadorned poles are the principal formal element, propped against the wall. Departing from Rauschenberg's densely collaged imagery or muscular, layered materials, the Jammers are simple and light, focusing on the transparency and seductiveness of veil-like fabrics, that are lent sculptural structure by the cloth-covered poles or other found objects. In Quarterhorse (1975), segments of blue, green, tan and yellow cloth evoke sandy beaches, palm trees, and bright sunshine. In Index (1976), widths of gleaming azure and white satin drape together, a diptych of clouds and sea. The hot, saturated hues of Pimiento III (1976) and Mirage (1976) attest to more exotic influences; while Coin (1976) incorporates found tin cans, stripped of their labels, gleaming mysteriously inside a gauze bag that sags under their weight.--Gagosian website.

Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital reading. For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo's work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist's highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures elucidates many of Michelangelo's paintings, from frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, the artist's lesser-known works in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel; also included is a study of the relationship of the Doni Madonna to Leonardo. Steinberg's perceptions evolved from long, hard looking. Almost everything he wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but always put into the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo's rendering of figures, as well as their gestures and interrelations, conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers. Michelangelo's Paintings is the second volume in a series that presents Steinberg's writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.