The fifth and final volume in the Essays by Leo Steinberg series, focusing on modern artists.   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 ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with 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 and influential reading. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis that were always put into the service of interpretation.   Following the series publication on Pablo Picasso, this volume focuses on other modern artists, including Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Max Ernst, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Hans Haacke, and Jeff Koons. Included are seven unpublished lectures and essays, Steinberg’s landmark essay “Encounters with Rauschenberg,� a survey of twentieth-century sculpture, and an examination of the role of authorial predilections in critical writing. The final chapter presents a collection of Steinberg’s humorous pieces, witty forays penned for his own amusement.    Modern Art is the fifth and final volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.  

Originally published in 1983, Leo Steinberg's classic work has changed the viewing habits of a generation. After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility. Steinberg's evidence resides in the imagery of the overtly sexed Christ, in Infancy and again after death. Steinberg argues that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition. Christ's lifelong virginity, understood as potency under check, and the first offer of blood in the circumcision, both required acknowledgment of the genital organ. More than exercises in realism, these unabashed images underscore the crucial theological import of the Incarnation.
This revised and greatly expanded edition not only adduces new visual evidence, but deepens the theological argument and engages the controversy aroused by the book's first publication.

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 ranging 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 and influential reading. Steinberg's perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis, but always put into the service of interpretation. This volume begins and ends with thematic essays on two fundamental precepts of Steinberg's art history: how dependence on textual authority mutes the visual truths of images and why artists routinely copy or adapt earlier artworks. In between are fourteen chapters on masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque art, with bold and enlightening interpretations of works by Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Pontormo, El Greco, Caravaggio, Steen and, finally, Velazquez. Four chapters are devoted to some of Velazquez's best-known paintings, ending with the famously enigmatic Las Meninas. Renaissance and Baroque Art is the third volume in a series that presents Steinberg's writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.

The Author Reports On The Jewish Communities Of Poland During And Immediately After The Holocaust.

The Author Reports On The Jewish Communities Of Poland During And Immediately After The Holocaust.

Leo Steinberg's classic "Other Criteria" comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public" and the "flatbed picture plane" to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and Jasper Johns. The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called "a tour de force of critical method," is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns's work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations.
"The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . . .The significance of this volume lies not so much in the quality of its insights--although the quality is very high and the insights are important--as in the richness, precision, and elegance of its style. . . . A meeting with the mind of Leo Steinberg is one of the most enlightening experiences that contemporary criticism affords."--Alfred Frankenstein, "Art News
" "Not only one of the most lucid and independent minds among art critics, but a profound one."--Robert Motherwell