Dawn Clements, who died on December 4th at the age of 60 after a two-year battle with cancer, left behind a magnificent body of work, and alas, ambitious plans that will never be realized. She was as single-minded about drawing as any artist has ever been, and as open minded. A small sumi ink rendering of a wingback chair begun during a residency at Middlebury College grew, by added sheets of paper, into an immense panorama thirty-seven feet long, the size needed to portray her entire surroundings at the same intimate level of detail. In one way or another, she was always drawing her world, from the optical scatter of diamonds to the blunt signage of paper laundry tickets. (Clements liked to point out that jewels and scraps of printed matter had equal value as drawings.) She came to embrace a self-sufficient tautology which all artists understand in their own way, but few with such clarity of purpose. As she put it in a 2007 interview with her gallerist Susan Swenson: “Where I live is my studio and the subject of my work is where I live.”

One day she took a small black and white television into the studio in order not to miss a Douglas Sirk melodrama. She was struck by bits of dialogue and jotted them down on a convenient surface. “All of a sudden,” as she said in the same interview, “the still life seemed to become animated.” It was the beginning of marking her drawings with the wordage of passing time –– thoughts, lists, things overheard, things read. It was also the opening of a window in her studio, a small black and white one, onto fictional dimensions, perpendicular axes awaiting exploration. Soon she was not only writing down dialogue but drawing directly from her television.

Clements studied the semiotics of film as an undergraduate, and she had a sophisticated critical appreciation of the medium, but it was soap operas and weepy “women’s films” that came to occupy her as an artist, culminating in major works such as Travels with Myra Hudson (2004; Saatchi Collection), and Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1946) (2010). The first is a meditation on a Joan Crawford vehicle with noir overtones, and the second derives from a Barbara Stanwyck society drama as polished as a toaster. Both feature strong, independent women looking for love but trapped in their blandly tasteful décor, their gilded cages. It was these Hollywood studio interiors that intrigued Clements more than the narratives, per se, or the films’ inscrutable, photogenic stars. In her own “studio” she forensically reverse-engineered the sets with as much clarity as she could, via flickering low-resolution video frames, and having to guess at background details that might be in shadow or out of focus. Pausing the playback, Clements found frames where ashtrays and bedspreads, wallpaper and perfume bottles emerged from behind the actors, or were revealed by a new camera angle (often noting the video timecode and dialogue on the drawings). The erasure, for the most part, of the actors as the space they left behind was liquidly unfolded and deciphered, induced a psychologically potent side effect. Their absence allows the viewer to enter archetypal precincts, where scenarios of love, loss and heroic sacrifice are enacted forever.

In Myra Hudson, Clements made her most explicit mapping of film, by representing  — right to left — a fateful train journey from New York to San Francisco. A view out one compartment window shows the plains in daylight, while the next window jumps ahead to a reflection of the train interior at night. The panorama passes  through ambiguous outlines in dreamy blank spaces to lead us smoothly into Myra’s San Francisco mansion, up an ominous staircase, and into the heroine’s study, where cruelly ironic scenes will unfold. This is as close to storyboarding the spacetime of film as Clements got. On the whole, she expanded her film panoramas purely by spatial contiguity –– Jessica Drummond’s bedroom being attached to her bathroom, and so on –– just as she did with drawings of her immediate surroundings, one piece of paper folding under, a new one gluing on until the drawing came to rest. When it would be fully opened for the first time, the joints and folds in the paper would remain prominent.

The TV in Clements’s studio was her portal from domestic still life into ancient mythopoeic saga, which is fair enough, since such stories are a part of life, and always have been –– as real as a turnip on a kitchen table. One comes to realize that reality and fiction flip everywhere in Clements work. Her drawings of film spaces are also, of course, analytic renderings of actual sets and props. As for the artist’s encyclopedic drawings of her immediate surroundings, they trade on the traditional fictions of still life in the way that disjunctive local spaces and times are fused under a continuous skin of illusion. Kitchen and Bathroom, for example (2004; collection Whitney Museum of American Art), is a monumental chronicle in sumi ink of her Brooklyn railroad apartment at gritty, Ivan-Albright resolution. It is a flash-lit snapshot that surely took months. The drawing’s fantastic continuum of cramp and clutter serves as a kind of doppelganger to the palatial bedrooms of Jessica Drummond or Myra Hudson. And from a certain point of view, Kitchen and Bathroom is no less cinematic –– one can easily imagine the drawing as a panning background for cel animation, with characters jumping from chair to stove to bathtub as the camera tracks along.

Clements’s panoramic formats, often wrapping around the walls of exhibitions, would have been enough to merit video-chronicler James Kalm’s description of her work as “expanded drawing.” Kalm, however, was also calling attention to the great variety of formats that Clements embarked on a without missing a beat, from vertical “tiltoramas” (as she called them), which travel from her foot to the ceiling and down the other wall; to a Dürer-like study of a single patch of weedy lawn, drawn every day for a month; to a multi-year collaboration with sculptor Marc Leuthold in which she drew a grouping of his sculptures that had been closely modeled, in turn, on her drawings. In every case, she was just drawing what she saw.

Yet it was still life drawings–– very much in the tradition of that genre, for all their irregularly-shaped, rumpled, and annotated eccentricities–– that increasingly came to occupy Clements in the last years of her life. These watercolor masterpieces feature over-life-size fruit, vegetables, and bunches of flowers, maximal challenges for the artists’ ever-sharpening ability to see and describe. With the introduction of color around 2005 –– returning to her roots in painting, though not without misgivings –– Clements had expanded again. Using careful layers of translucent watercolor, she could now capture the waxy glistening of apples, melons and plums. She could enumerate the chromatic foldings of tulips, peonies, hyacinths and chrysanthemums, and solve the crinklings of their green leaves, the knobby fibers of their intertwining stalks, and their reflections and refractions through curved glass vases full of water.

As with Van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises, Clements’s floral still lifes are demonstrations of an ardent kind of mastery that conventional skill can’t touch. Leo Steinberg, in his 1953 essay The Eye is a part of the Mind, was reminding an avant-garde that had little use for representation about the ways in which fresh looking could fire neurons. Taking the exuberant early Renaissance anatomies of Pollaiolo as an example, Steinberg wrote: “Like all works connected with discoveries of representation, his pictures lack the sweet ease of accomplishment. His images are ever aborning, swelling into space and taking life, like frozen fingers tingling as they warm. It is not facts they purvey; it is the thrill and wonder of cognition.” If both Clements’s and Van Gogh’s flower paintings rise miles above easy sentiments normally attaching to the subject, it’s because one thrills and wonders along with the artists in their rapture of discovery.

Many of Clements’s last works, with and without flowers, also depict the colorful packaging of cancer medications. Just another laundry ticket, as it were. And just another vanitas –– one warning among many about the bittersweetness of passing time. Vanitas, indeed, was in her method. In Peonies (2014), a supremely gorgeous work, Clements replaced, as she often did, an area of the drawing with a fresh piece of paper. In the process, she sliced off the side of a lush red blossom (probably what had displeased her). When she resumed the drawing, apparently the blossom had wilted, falling forward a bit, and there she drew it, leaving the hard edge of the blossom’s previous incarnation behind, embedded in the daily fabric of her practice. This memento mori is echoed in the lower right by the ripe young face of thirties star Sylvia Sidney –– a drawing of a drawing, it seems, which was pinned to the studio wall behind the flowers. Clements told Eve Aschheim in a 2007 interview in the Brooklyn Rail that she was planning to bring figures back into the work, and in Peonies she left us with a transfixing hint about where things might have gone.

In writing this tribute to Dawn’s work, I watched a few of the melodramas lyrically transfigured in her drawings. One thing that struck me in the films was the consummate tact of dialogue and behavior, even during emotional eruptions. Perhaps social relations really were more formal, more beautiful then. John Yau, with exactitude, described the works in Dawn’s final show at Pierogi as “love letters to the world.” (The full review on Hyperallergic is mandatory reading.) Yes, love letters, and –– I hope I may add –– disciplined and gracious ones, as if written by the radiant heroines in the films she loved.

The post Expanded Drawing: Dawn Clements, 1958-2018 appeared first on artcritical.

September 16, 2017 to January 15, 2018
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, metmuseum.org

On November 17, 1917, France lost Auguste Rodin, a titanic sculptor and by some lights France’s last. By 77, after youthful failures (thrice rejected by the École des Beaux Arts), recurrent bouts of self-doubt, misprizal, and neglect, miseries more than matched by dogged perseverance and unshakable dedication to an artistic quest that he abandoned only once to a brief stay in a monastery after his sister’s death, Auguste Rodin had achieved international distinction. His centenary is being celebrated this year in the form of major museum exhibits worldwide as well as by programs, books, articles, and a dedicated website in his honor, a movie. Among these, an exquisite display has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will remain a permanent installation there (the adjacent gallery with works on paper and Steichen’s photographs of the Balzac adhere to the exhibition dates). Comprised mainly of the Cantor Collection, the display greets visitors entering from the east end with two monumental figures turned away from them. To the right is Eve, banished and crushed with remorse. To the left is Adam, his head pendant, an image that will be tripled on the Gates of Hell. In the center of the space, mounted on a four foot high pedestal, sits The Thinker in a bronze casting of no more than two feet.   Three backs greet us: three works of art seen from behind, works by an artist who asks us not to stand still but to move, to change position, to keep looking, asking, and reflecting. This installation of Rodin’s work by the distinguished sculpture curator Denise Allen serves as a supreme aesthetic tribute to its restless master.

Dwelling all summer in Paris “with” the artist, so to speak, contemplating his Burghers in differing light and weather, poring over Ruth Butler’s riveting biographical pages among others, strolling the streets of the various arrondissements where he worked—at first in cold ateliers shivering while wrapping his clay to keep it moist and later surrounded by students, including Camille Claudel, acolytes, and skilled assistants—I introduced his sculptures to students abroad, both at the Musée Rodin and the centennial exhibition taking place at the Grand Palais, and dreamt about him by night. Increasingly, it became evident to me that Rodin was au fond a compulsive modeler, never a carver: it felt right to flee his famous marbles (the emblematic stone Kiss, Hand of God, Cathedral) for his bronzes, his waxes and terra cottas, his fragments, cropped bodies, accidents cast as such, plasters with their rods left in, and crude small works. In my quest for confirmation of this hunch—that Rodin’s genius is found in his fingers—I suddenly recalled Leo Steinberg.

The great art historian’s stunning 1963 essay on Rodin (augmented in 1971 as the last chapter of Other Criteria) has never been surpassed on its subject. Steinberg’s insights richly reward re-reading in this commemorative year. They supply conceptual ties, moreover, between Rodin’s art and much sculptural work that followed in the twentieth century. Steinberg recounts his lifelong fascination with Rodin, starting when he was ten years old and saw the iconic marbles in sepia reproduction on the pages of Rilke’s 1903-07 meditations on the artist when serving as his secretary in Paris. Then as modern art flourished and Rodin’s oeuvre went into eclipse, Steinberg too suffered a predictable disenchantment with it. But subsequently, this being the core of his essay, he awakened to a new comprehension of Rodin: Rodin as, beyond all else, an incessant modeler (rather than a carver) whose “real self had gone underground.” It is Rodin’s full oeuvre that must be engaged, especially his multiple smaller works, which demand being brought into focus and examined with care. They are what matter most. Not the world-famous stone pieces and monuments, wrought by others albeit under Rodin’s aegis, for in them the exploratory touch goes missing—that burst of energy which makes and unmakes form in flurries of protean ambiguity—an ambiguity forever denied to the unforgiving mallet and chisel. To mount a case for Rodin, an artist often misunderstood, as a harbinger of modern art, one can do no better than take Steinberg for one’s guide. In what follows, I shall do just that. Steinberg’s eagle eye, his erudition, and his own direct studio experience equip him to reveal just how, in this case, modeling prefigures modernity.

It has long been recognized, ever since Rodin’s first rejection by the Salon in 1865 (for his mask of the Man with the Broken Nose), that he breaks ground with academic norms by erupting with those modeling hands of his right up to the final stages of his art. We intuit his fingers in each bump, groove, rough and savage texture, each harsh or delicate correction. Rodin’s refusal of closure compels us toward co-creation of our own as we look on. He plies his art moreover with an openness that extends to theme as well as form. Take the Burghers of Calais. Anathema at first to patrons because they saw it as diverging from prevailing academic norms for public monuments, Rodin meant it to incarnate the duality of ignominious defeat and raw courage in the face of enmity. While subsequent scholarship has altered the historical record (Jean-Marie Moeglin, a scholar at Paris XII, writing in The Guardian, 8/14/ 2002, argues that the events in Calais were neither as unusual, heroic, or sacrificial as was previously thought), Rodin’s masterpiece stands. Obsessively re-working it, figure by figure, its heads, arms, and hands, limb by limb, he strives to embody the fundament of human tragedy, the ground of this 14th-century legend of six brave men striding forth together from a besieged French town, ready to die to save their fellow citizens. From brute matter, he wrests a wrenching tribute that eclipses all narrative revision. Steinberg, writing on the magnificent figure of Jean d’Aire, one of the six, speaks of “how desperately these statues act out the drama of powerful bodies giving their whole strength to the labor of holding on.” And this, Steinberg adds, is what is necessary to be a man.

But holding on also matters in reverse for Rodin, who is equally obsessed with the “threat of imbalance which serves like a passport to the age of anxiety.” Think of the precariousness of Icarus, and recall the Prodigal Son whose outsized arms, raised wildly aloft, threaten to capsize him backwards. Bastien Lepage balances dangerously on his pedestal, palette in hand, and what about Falling Man on the Gates of Hell? Steinberg points to a “hovering” aspect inherent in so many of Rodin’s works, an unstable relation to any ground. Interpreting this with him as a symbol of the anxiety that will come tearing in with the advent of modernism, I wonder whether it might also serve as an analogue of the modeling process per se—which goes on and on, unlike carving, and never reaches the terra firma of certainty.

What about replication? Rodin reuses figures. And fragments. He reiterates them, adds to them, transports them from one site of aesthetic or semantic significance to another: Think of Paola and Francesca on the Gates of Hell and of Fugit Amor, or the Prodigal Son, who morph and reappear in the former work. Such re-visionings point backward in time perchance to the pounding hoof-beats of multiple horses profiled on the Parthenon frieze and simultaneously they prefigure incredible repetitions in modernity as detailed by Walter Benjamin in his classic 1935 essay—the work of art as infinitely replicable by mechanical and now digital technology. The repetition also figures an inner obsession, a mental perseveration. Steinberg points to Rodin’s “cross-breeding” of forms, his borrowing of figures and body parts and re-assigning them: how the exquisite Torse d’Adèle reappears both in Eternal Spring and on the Gates. No Rodin work is known, Steinberg avers, until it is beheld in all its adaptability, until the body is understood not as an integral whole but as imperfect, as fissured, cracked, distorted according to its momentary purpose: this, he implies in his reading of Rodin, is the human body’s greatest truth.   But something deeper than momentary impression matters here: an expression of force that dwells in the act and therein finds its authenticity. Think of the small bronze and terra cotta dancers in the Musée Rodin, those coils of clay simply bent and twisted into miracles of exertion and intense extension.

Steinberg speaks of Rodin’s art in terms of what he calls “pure sculptural energy.” In so doing, he cites the bronze Figure volante of 1890 as an example of directional motion foreshadowing the pure abstraction of Brancusi’s 1923 Bird in Space. Rodin’s art is an art that cannot be finished but only abandoned or reworked, he states, and he imagines a secret dream on Rodin’s part of keeping each work ongoing forever. Above all, Steinberg shows how energy, inert matter, and time make of the part a whole, “wholeness wholly immanent in the fragment.” This is modernity tout court and, with it, we can better parse the ways in which later artists have and will continue to draw upon Rodin.

The post “Pure Sculptural Energy”: Seeing Rodin, Reading Steinberg appeared first on artcritical.

October 7 to November 15, 2015
36 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets
New York City, 212 995 1774

Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus has, for a long time, been the subject of much interpretation. In her present exhibition, Rebecca Quaytman further opens up that process. Two years ago, when visiting the Israel Museum, she discovered that Klee had glued his painting, which is a monoprint, directly on top of an old engraving, identified with a date in the 1520s and the initials LC. Walter Benjamin’s much-discussed essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) uses Angelus Novus to stage discussion of a Marxist vision of historical progress. Benjamin owned that painting, which then after passing through the collection of his friend, Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, entered the museum in Jerusalem. The picture, Benjamin wrote,

[S]hows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. […] This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] A storm is blowing in from Paradise. […] This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin says that the angel looks out at past events, which are in front of him. But the engraving found by Quaytman is behind that angel. And so now the analysis must become still more complex. Normally interpretation of a painting is written, but sometimes an artist may be said to interpret prior paintings; think of how Picasso re-interpreted Poussin and other old masters. Responding as an artist, Quaytman offers a series of painted variations on Benjamin’s commentary, which constitute an unexpected interpretation of Angelus Novus in light of her remarkable discovery. She presents here a number of rectangular, painted-wood panels, some containing an inked, rectangular silkscreen, as in Preview of Angelus Novus (2014). These paintings display Klee’s painting along with the underlying print, in perspectival constructions that open up the picture space. And some of her works on display — for example an encaustic titled O Tópico, Chapter 27 (2014) — provide information about the scientific techniques (x-rays, thermography) used in the investigation of the print.

“[Haqaq], Chapter 29” (Haqaq, in Hebrew, means engraved, carved or inscribed) is something of a tease. Suppose that LC are the initials of the 16th-century German painter Lucas Cranach—and perhaps the portrait shows Martin Luther. What would that reveal? The gallery says that a full report on Quaytman’s discovery must await the publication of her catalogue. Perhaps! Meanwhile, however, a reviewer must report on what he sees. Quaytman’s paintings don’t really tell us how to understand Angelus Novus. Rather, it seems that interpretation of Klee’s painting has become an open-ended process. Inspired by her, allow me to take analysis one-step further. She is the daughter of the distinguished late abstract painter, Harvey Quaytman, who loved to paint cruciforms. His 1998 exhibition at David McKee surprised Leo Steinberg, who found it “astounding to see the most familiar of signs de-semanticized, de-centered, de-Christianized, and emancipated to exercise its own territorial power.” Here, then, Rebecca Quaytman extends what has become a familial tradition, playful visual exegesis of Judeo-Christian iconography. The meaning of Klee’s picture remains elusive.

The post Angelus Novus Anew: R.H. Quatyman’s Chapter 29 appeared first on artcritical.

January 31 to March 9, 2013
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 673 6466

Leo Steinberg was a kind of godfather at both my alma maters. Although I just missed being able to hear his lectures at the University of Texas, I marveled at the collection of 15th-through-20th-century prints he donated at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art. At the School of Visual Arts, where I did my graduate work in art criticism, students would occasionally be invited to his home. Again, I arrived a year too late to participate in those quorums, but his writings were crucial to the curriculum there. In the summer of 2012, SVA inherited part of Steinberg’s library. Looking at the marginalia and annotated bookmarks, one could glean something of his character.

And now, at the New York Studio School, another facet of this iconoclastic historian’s intellectual life is revealed, in his drawings. “The Eye is Part of the Mind” runs through March 9.

Steinberg was born in Moscow, in 1920. After fleeing Russia for Berlin, his family settled in London in 1933. In 1936 Steinberg began to study sculpture and painting at the Slade School. Following World War II, he immigrated to New York and worked as a freelance critic and translator. Receiving his PhD from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, Steinberg soon rose to eminence as a scholar of renaissance art. But he also wrote widely and expertly on the work of his contemporaries, making significant critical contributions to the way we understand modernism. His books and essays have left an indelible imprint on contemporary scholarship. He died in 2011, leaving behind an extensive archive of drawings, from which this exhibition has been selected.

Although the show packs 58 artworks two smallish rooms, the modest-scaled drawings are given ample space. The survey covers 35 years—from his time as a student up to the publication of his collected early essays, Other Criteria (University of Chicago Press, 1972) and with a few drawings, beyond. Steinberg, one imagines, would have loved these drawings, were they not his own. Co-curator Graham Nickson speculates, in an introduction to the catalogue, “He would, I suspect, be embarrassed by their public display.” In them, one can see an inquisitive student’s hand, eye, and mind learning how to apprehend form, discovering the effects various marks might capture or create. The draftsmanship is competent, if academic and, as Steinberg himself demurred, “overly conservative.” The art historian Jack Flam, in another essay for the catalogue, asserts that, “If Leo had been made of lesser stuff […] praise might well have led him to become a competent artist—rather than a great art historian.”

His self-portraits bolster his reputation as a heartthrob. In Untitled (1940) the twenty-year-old Steinberg looks up with piercing, preciously drawn eyes. His numerous portraits of one Deirdre Knewstub are each rendered with care and devotion—possibly more than attended any other sitter. One in particular is a stark demonstration of his esteem for her image, contrasting a tenderly modeled Knewstub with a spare, illustrative line drawing of another friend, René Scott.

As a great accompaniment to the obvious excitement Steinberg took in drawing, many are appended with his own exuberant memos: one sketch, showing the back of a graceful looking young woman, is given the caption, “…And then the model fainted!” On another tall and slim page (14 by 6 inches), a pensive nude approaches the viewer, her eyes downcast. A rich crosshatch shades the space at her feet and she is framed by an auratic glow of white conté around her trunk. At the top of the page, just over her brow, a note is attached with yellowed tape: “Censored!”

A fervent draftsman, Steinberg appears to have been frugal with his materials. There are drawings on all sorts of odd-sized scraps. Earlier sketches are often visible: studies fill the space around figures, some pictures are cut off at the edges or covered over with bolder images, and a few are visible on the thin leaf’s verso. Steinberg seems to have been constantly drawing, either from life or after the works of other artists. His attempts at figurative abstraction and expressionism fall a bit flat, but his prodigious display of curiosity is enough to make those works endearing to anyone moved by his writing.

It is hard to imagine a better venue than a school for an exhibition of Steinberg’s drawings. He was an educator, whether as an instructor of drawing at Parsons or as an art historian at various major institutions, and as a writer whose groundbreaking prose and ideas fundamentally changed the study of art’s history. The exhibition is a lesson in and of itself. His drawings don’t testify to the emergence of an artistic prodigy. Rather, they are predictive of Steinberg’s precocious genius and dedication as an historian, as someone who sought scrupulously to understand the craft that he’s looking at, thinking about, and describing. In the same way that his hand, eye, and mind were interwoven in his drawings, those same organs were entwined, enhanced by his early experience, in his descriptions and analyses of the art he wrote about. In his seminal essay, “The Eye is a Part of the Mind,” (1953), Steinberg asserts, “Almost anyone with a modicum of talent and sufficient application can appropriate another man’s mode of representation.” That may be true, but what one is able to accomplish with such an act may say more about oneself than the appropriation. And his use of the medium of drawing seems to have helped Steinberg accomplish a great deal.

“Hands On,” a related panel discussion features Svetlana Alpers, David Rosand, Robert Storr and exhibition co-curator David Cohen as moderator, takes place at the New York Studio School on February 12 at 6:30 PM.  The panel, held on the eve of the College Art Association 2013 Convention, considers connections between making art and writing about it.

The post The Craft of Looking: Drawings by Leo Steinberg appeared first on artcritical.

Evenings, before his last debilitating fall, Leo would wait for me standing, posed nonchalantly—oxymoron fully in force—at, not quite in, the open doorway of his seventeenth-floor New York City apartment in an architecturally undistinguished modern skyscraper across from Lincoln Center.   Normally, I would arrive at around seven, and when I was late, he would sometimes say he had begun to worry that I had forgotten.  Which hurt and puzzled me because of its sublime incongruity.  As if I could forget!  There was no iconic cigarette any more (they were forbidden finally by a doctor who threatened him into compliance).  Just the well-published knowing look, mischievous and boyish, despite his nearly ninety years.  His contrapposto, like so much else about him, exuded complexity—message  and mystery enmeshed.  Standing at his open doorway, he occupied a liminal space, and Leo seemed to me in so many ways a liminal figure.   He was waiting expectantly and, as I emerged from the elevator each time, the sight of him sent an electric current through my body.  Partly reverence, partly pleasure, partly amazement.  My awe of him never abated, and it returns even as I write these words.

Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) will be remembered as one of the most learned, eloquent, and original thinkers who ever graced the discipline of art history.  His erudition and revolutionary ways of seeing art are, like his scholarly range, nonpareil, for he wrote luminously not only on the Italian Renaissance masters of his principal training, such as Borromini, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo, but delectably and perspicaciously on Velasquez, Rodin, Picasso, and on a host of twentieth-century painters including De Kooning, Pollock, and Johns.  He famously said:  “It is naïve to imagine that you avoid the risk of projecting merely by not interpreting.  In desisting from interpretation, you do not cease to project.  You merely project unwittingly.  For there is no escape from oneself . . . ”  (Other Criteria, 1972).

At first, I wanted to bring him tokens—of esteem and affection—especially because he was largely shut in, confined to his apartment, and I once essayed a delicate bouquet of peach-colored scented lilies.  He was not pleased.  Do not bring me flowers, he said, for they simply die and must be thrown out, and that makes me sad.  But why can’t you simply enjoy them while they are alive? I queried in surprise.  He remained adamant.  Reluctantly, I gave up my floral offerings.  He told me that at his time of life he wanted no presents of any kind.  He reminded me of a colleague whose mansion near London’s Hampstead Heath is filled with bric-a-brac and objets d’art amassed over decades and who now, rather than allow guests to arrive with gifts, encourages them to take away something every time they pay a visit.  Leo gave me something every time I paid him a visit.  He gave me words—intangible and priceless.  I do not know in turn what I gave him, as he refused almost everything.

“The gloom of the mind and the light of the body” (1972, 93), he once wrote.   Enunciating syllables with care, he would sometimes apologize that he was “not in good voice.”  I knew what he meant, but to me that slight quaver cast an incantatory spell.  On one occasion, he told me an anecdote about his psychoanalysis with, as it happens, a former teacher of mine at Columbia, a fact that, not wishing to interrupt him (he did not like being interrupted), I forbore to mention.  He started by referring to an article he wrote for Life Magazine. That was in 1968, and its opening gambit concerns a haunting watercolor by Picasso, painted during the Blue Period in 1904.  The artist, in profile, then twenty-three years old, sits at a table gravely watching a girl sleep, her left arm bent to cradle her head.  Clad in melting blue with a white scarf, the painter appears to be daydreaming, while the girl herself actually dreams.  Discussing this picture with his analyst, Leo mentioned that he detected in it an inversion of aggression.  He made no further comment.  But I quickly knew.  For, although the gaze of a male artist at an immobilized female figure tends to be conventionally seen as aggressive (male toward helpless female), Leo was constitutionally attuned to the less obvious.  He detected in the scene an element of counter-aggression.  Leo’s analyst responded to his intuition with an empathic elaboration:  What about the aggression that lies latent in a kept secret?  He asked.  The response impelled Leo to rise and begin pacing the room.  With his inimitable brand of calm fervor, he described the encounter as an epiphany.  Gazing into the distance, he explained the immensely liberating insight: within the throes of this exchange, he had grasped the wondrously empowering idea that his unconscious was actually working with him in his creative endeavors.  The scene took on the aspect of a revelation, and I in turn reveled in the heightened intonation of his speech as he relived the dramatic story.

The two of us are seated face to face at a small table, only slightly unstable, located just outside his cramped, typically windowless city kitchen.  We are surrounded by a sepia mise-en-scène of prints, statuettes, antiquarian books, papers, journals, and letters and equipped with tiny inverted bell-shaped etched glasses of a liqueur Leo has poured from a delicately tinted bottle, or, perhaps it is only I who sip the liqueur, as he often prefers a tumbler of apple juice.  He urges me to eat.  But in his presence I am never hungry.  His incessant flow of words, associations, ideas, and images fills me to brimming so that I am unable to take in much food or drink and want for nothing except to be able to concentrate fully, to be absolutely present to this extraordinary intellect, which billows out far beyond the confines of the frail body it now inhabits.  If only I could catch fast, grasp tight, hold on!  But the elegant sentences flutter by on gossamer wings and vanish in the ether only to be replenished by others equally alluring.  How can I embrace and preserve all this?  He cannot live forever.  His blue eyes smolder with an amber glow, his tapered fingers occasionally gesture to emphasize a point.  His still thick grey locks curl tightly.  Burning to reach out my arms in a hopeless gesture, I bring them in closer, self-consciously, toward my own body.

We move over to the couch, where Leo has taken out a portfolio to show me his life drawings, which he deprecates, some made when he was an art student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and also a strange little childhood sculpture of a horse he has kept since he was a boy.  He talks about the value of a sure line and the problems students have with drawing extremities—feet and hands.  Sternly, he deplores a hesitant line, one that staggers at the edges, lurching, limping, redirecting and correcting itself.  He wants me to take note that he had no fears about completing the human form.  Nor did his hand limp.  I sigh, shyly recalling a moldering black portfolio filled with my own youthful life drawings on newsprint done at the Art Students League in New York and in Boston at the Museum School, but I do not speak of them.  Leo’s drawings appear skillful and beautiful to me, but to him they are merely academic, devoid of spark or originality.  I had, he insists, nothing new to say as an artist; on the contrary, I realized that when I gazed at art, I could see what others failed to find.  Thus, Leo Steinberg left the studio forever and turned exclusively to the study of art—to gazing intently for years—and to the alchemy of written words.

One evening in a conversation on education, I am lamenting that children no longer memorize poetry.  Leo leans back, and in a voice made soft only by lack of strength starts reciting to me, line-by-line, Milton’s Paradise Lost.  My eyes fill with tears as I listen.  Here was a man whose mother tongue was Russian, who learned Hebrew, Latin, also German, English, Italian, and I do not know what others and who sits calmly before me at the end of his life declaiming these glorious lines of seventeenth-century blank verse, and he goes on until I beg him to stop because I cannot bear it.  Will there ever again be anyone in the world who can do this?  Now that people depend on Google and such.  Furthermore, Leo knows the Hebrew Bible chapter and verse; citing passages when we talk, he refines my understanding and teaches me.  His family, having moved to Germany from Russia, went on to England to escape the Nazis and thence he came to New York.  One of Leo’s best stories involves the renowned art historian and distinguished immigrant European scholar of the era, Erwin Panofsky.

In answer to a question I pose, Leo tells me that one morning he had been studying in the library of the Institute of Fine Arts.  Emerging in the company of a fellow student, he enters a nearby café where they are astonished to find Panofsky and his wife occupying the next booth.  Leo goes over to the great man, introduces himself as an Institute student, says he has been reading all morning, and quips that it is most unusual to come out of the library and encounter in person the very author whose work one has been studying for hours!  Panofsky asks him what he has been reading, and when Leo hands him the used book, Panofsky spies, written inside in small letters, a name he knows.  Startled, Panofsky tells Leo that this was his first student.  He recalls how concerned he had been for the young man, who was a Jew.  Panofsky feared that, because of rampant anti-Semitism in Germany, there was a chance the student would not be allowed to pass his doctoral exams.  To help him, expressly to sit on his committee and assure his success, Panofsky returned to Germany.  Afterwards, he helped the young scholar obtain a teaching post in America.  Leo now gets up slowly to find the book as he wants to show me Panofsky’s inscription, for on that serendipitous occasion Panofsky had signed the book to Leo: To Leo Steinberg from Erwin Panofsky in the Apostolic Succession, or words to that effect.  Needless to say, Leo relishes the bittersweet irony of this.  For, whereas “Apostolic Succession” denotes an ecclesiastical doctrine of inheritance of spiritual and sacramental authority which passes from early Christianity to the present—from the twelve Apostles to present day Catholic bishops worldwide— in Panofsky’s inscription the term refers to the successive waves of disenfranchised Jews who fled from a dangerous Europe to America, Jewish students, that is, of art history like himself and his student and Leo: a very different laying on of hands.

I am brooding now.  On other stories that lurk untold in the pockets of this protean mind, this intensely lived life, this congested psychic space.  Leo picks up Other Criteria, his acclaimed magnum opus in which the original Picasso essay was republished, and reads to me from it.   He mentions brief remarks on Jeanne Claude he must deliver at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He turns to his unfinished, never-to-be completed work on Michelangelo’s Doni tondo, a propped print of which has adorned his worktable for as long as I can remember.  In one of the bookcases under the windows on which a long row of small bright plastic cigarette lighters supply the only kitsch and spark of saturated color, he searches for and reads to me a Tennyson poem, in which the poetic speaker cannot tolerate the carefree joy of a young girl and suffers murderous impulses towards her.  Leo knows why, for he has experienced this himself.  The room seems suffused with russet; it has grown late.  Melancholy descends.  I glance furtively at the row of darkened windows facing southeast over the unvarnished city.  Awkwardly, I find my wrap, and Leo insists on going downstairs with me, a practice that will cease as his strength ebbs.  After he has said goodbye and I am safely in the taxi, I feel blank.  He will die, scream the speeding traffic and indifferent strobe lights that flash across my strained face.

Yet, the months pass, and especially after his fall and enforced restriction to a single chair even for sleeping, Leo seems to relax into a mode of resignation.  I have saved several of his voice messages on my cell phone so that I can still listen to the timbre of his modulated voice and meticulously chosen words.  But, as with my father, it happened in March and caught me by surprise.  In spite of everything.  He was also ninety: a grand age.  Now Leo Steinberg has become, for the world, as Wallace Stevens titled one of his poems, a man made out of words.   He was never merely that.  He lived fully, as again per Stevens (from “Esthétique du Mal”), in a physical world, and yet he knew that desire could be difficult to tell from despair.

Ellen Handler Spitz, who is Honors College Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland (UMBC, writes on the arts and psychology.

A version of this tribute will appear in American Imago (The Johns Hopkins University Press) later this year.

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Leo Steinberg, revered as an art historian and critic of profound erudition, riveting style and audacious methodology, has died in New York, aged 90. He is remembered principally for two groundbreaking works, Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art (1972) and The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).  His reputation was equal in the periods represented by these titles, and was carried as much by his charisma at the podium as by his sauve, persuasive printed prose.  In what became his typical gambit, in The Sexuality of Christ, Steinberg asked himself a strikingly obvious yet oddly overlooked question about Madonna and Child paintings: why the sexual organs of the Christ Child were ubiquitous in Renaissance paintings.  He found answers in period theology, but the question arose from actual looking rather than theory, reading or debate, recalling that this late starter in art history had first trained as an artist, at London’s empirically-focused Slade School.  In later studies of Michelangelo and Leonardo he developed an abiding fascination with ways in which the critical literature surrounding legendary artists would repeat interpretations that actually ran against the visual evidence.     He would offer what many took to be outlandish over-interpretations of the visual content and symbolism of familiar masterpieces like the Sistine ceiling and the Last Supper, but always backed up by close reading of the work that matched philological insights with passionately argued imaginative leaps.  Working in a half century in which criticism and scholarship were marked by extremes of close formal reading and theoretical speculation, Steinberg pioneered a highly personal idiom in which these extremes met on cordial terms.  DAVID COHEN

Leo Steinberg: The Courage of His Convictions
by LAURIE SCHNEIDER ADAMS

Born in Soviet Russia, Leo and his family left for Berlin and later moved to London.  At the age of sixteen, Leo studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art, and thus developed an artist’s eye for in-depth looking at imagery. After World War II, he and his family relocated once again, this time to Manhattan, where he studied philosophy and worked as a freelance author and translator.  In his thirties, he shifted his focus to art history, receiving his PhD from New York University in 1960 with a dissertation on the Italian Baroque architect Francesco Borromini.  Given his range of study, his command of several languages, and his experience as an art student and author, Leo Steinberg established a basis for his comprehensive, analytic, and, above all, humanist approach to the interdisciplinary field of art history.

He was a writer who insisted on perfection, an influential critic, and a lecturer who combined humor with erudition.  The drafts of his lectures indicated exactly where he should pause, cough, or adjust his glasses.  His books, essays and articles cover a wide range of topics from Renaissance and Baroque art to contemporary art.  He argued that more than the formalist approach was needed to understand works of art, and he was able to apply different methodological interpretations to imagery that resulted in profound, occasionally controversial, critical analyses of imagery and its relevance to culture and civilization.  But with the courage of his convictions, reinforced by decades of scholarly research combined with the proverbial “eye” of a great critic, even his most controversial works carry the weight of truth.  In this respect, Steinberg was like Sigmund Freud – he made people see what they would have preferred not to see, even though it was right before their eyes.

The work that best exemplifies this particular talent is, of course, Steinberg’s ground-breaking work, first published in 1983 and provocatively entitled The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.  At the outset, Steinberg describes his three basic intentions in writing the book:

1. To “admit a long-suppressed matter of fact: that Renaissance art…. produced a large body of devotional imagery in which the genitalia of the Christ Child, or of the dead Christ, receive such demonstrative emphasis that one must recognize an ostentatio genitalium….. All of which has been tactfully overlooked for half a millennium….”

2. “to prove plausible theological grounds for the genital reference in the works under review…”,  notably in the many works where it is clear that the Madonna is unveiling or otherwise calling attention to her son’s genitals.

3. Steinberg’s “didactic” concern:  “At the risk of belaboring what is obvious, I must address myself to the many who still habitually mistake pictorial symbols in Renaissance art for descriptive naturalism.”  Taking the example of what he calls the “chin-chuck” motif, he cites the iconographic tradition dating to the royal art of ancient Egypt in which a child’s gesture of grasping his mother’s chin connotes “erotic communion.”  Transferring the motif to Christ, according to Steinberg, designates “Mary’s son as the Heavenly Bridegroom who, having chosen her for his mother, was choosing her for his eternal consort in Heaven” – as per Saint Augustine.  Needless to say, the Oedipal implications of this reading, confirmed as they are by scripture, are inescapable.  Intentionally avoiding all references to Freud, except in a single footnote (p.232, n.5, second edition), Steinberg confirms Freud and illustrates the fact that, whether one is talking about theology or psychology, human nature is what it is.  Freud attributed the Oedipus complex to human nature, using not theology, but rather Sophocles and years of clinical experience.  Nonetheless, Steinberg and Freud, being careful researchers, lucid thinkers, and essentially humanists, have come to comparable conclusions.  It also bears mentioning that the story of Christ and his parentage has provided the Christian world with a satisfactory, because sanitized and somewhat mystical, solution to the Oedipus complex.

It is particularly fortuitous that Steinberg should have been dealing with Renaissance works on this matter.  For the Renaissance itself was a quintessentially humanist age, in which classical literature was revived, translated and read.  Egyptian iconography, although not always understood, was also familiar during the Renaissance, especially in Italy.  Thus the “descriptive naturalism” to which Steinberg refers above is true, but it is not the whole story, as he points out.  For descriptive naturalism describes nature, and it is the nature of being human to which both Steinberg and Freud addressed themselves, the former in the field of art history, the latter in that of child development.  In addition, both knew that their ideas risked causing controversy – which they did – hence the “Modern Oblivion” of Steinberg’s title.  He refers there to a willful unseeing on the part of art viewers, inhibited by sexual taboos, that can block intellectual research and insight.   Fortunately for both art history and human psychology, which one would be well advised to consider as parts of a humanist whole, both Freud and Steinberg had the courage of their convictions, which impelled them to lay their discoveries before a skeptical audience.

“An Extraordinarily Suggestive Revisionist”
by DAVID CARRIER

He was a great art critic and a great art historian, an unusual combination. As he himself noted, relatively few people were aware of the relationship of his concerns with contemporary and old master art. His “Other Criteria,” presented as a lecture in 1968, was the manifesto that marked the end of the era of Clement Greenberg’s formalism. This far reaching essay develops an exhilarating, tightly reasoned argument which leads up to his three “post-Modernists,” Jasper Johns (about whom he wrote an important early account), Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Soon enough, of course, postmodernism became a label, which was much used, and then abandoned. And so it is worth going back to Steinberg’s essay, which retains its value even now when the terms of debate have shifted.

Steinberg’s account of Caravaggio, “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel,” published in The Art Bulletin in 1959 was one of a sequence of articles and books which develop his account of the site-specific qualities of old master art. Every time I return to Rome, I walk into this chapel, seeing the paintings in the terms of his analysis. He liked to tell the story of how, as a graduate student, he very quickly developed this analysis in response to his teacher’s challenge.  And a small early portion of the argument developed in his 1982 Mellon lectures on Michelangelo was published as essays. (The book circulates in Xeroxes, like the literature of his native Russia before the end of state socialism.) A year or two ago, the last time I saw him, he described the new research he was doing. As every reader immediately senses, he was a perfectionist. A number of other art historians have discussed the relationship of pre-modern paintings to the position of the embodied beholder. But so far as I know, no one has developed a systematic account linking the artists he discusses, Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Guercino, cubism, late Picasso and Johns and Rauschenberg.

Thinking of his long time association with October, I once asked Steinberg if his book on Christ’s sexuality owed something to Foucault. No, he said a little surprised, my interest lies in logical positivism, which makes claims, which can be tested. When in 1994 I did a critique of his account of postmodernism, he wrote a response that he permitted me to publish, after editing by him. I referred in passing to his followers, which led his trusty assistant to blurt out, ‘Who the hell are they?’ But that retort was  mistaken, for very many art critics surely acknowledge his influence.  I knew him only very slightly, but his publications influence almost everything that I have written. What the situation is in art history I am not competent to judge. But since his writings offer an extraordinarily suggestive revisionist art history reaching up almost to the present, is it unreasonable to hope that soon followers will rise to the challenge?

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