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Notes
1. Biographical details in the essay derive from Leo Steinberg, interview by Richard Candida Smith, conducted in 1998 for the Art History Oral Documentation Project, 2001, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Some of the material reappeared in a talk delivered at the College Art Association Conference, 21 February, 2001, published as ‘False Starts, Loose Ends’, The Brooklyn Rail: www.brooklynrail.org/2006/06/leo; see also Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For a general assessment on Steinberg's writings on Renaissance and modern art, see M. Hill, “Steinberg, Leo”, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Volume 6, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44–48. While Steinberg is the active agent in this essay, the account of Greenberg is passive; this may be unfair, but it is a characteristic of Greenberg's historical position: see Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg, Art Critic, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 6–7; Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 201–79; Stephen Melville, ‘Kant after Greenberg’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (Winter, 1998): 67–73. I would like to acknowledge the contribution to my research of Sheila Schwartz, Steinberg's assistant.
2. Jacob Pat, Ashes and Fire, trans. Leo Steinberg from Yiddish (New York: International Universities Press, 1947); Sholem Asch, Mary, trans. Leo Steinberg from Yiddish (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1949). Steinberg's mother tongue was Russian, and first literary language German. He learnt English after moving from Berlin to London in 1933.
3. Leo Steinberg, ‘The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism’, The Sewanee Review, vol. 60 n. 3 (Jul.–Sept, 1952), 418–44.
4. Clive Bell, Art (1914), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 8.
5. ‘Preamble’ (1971) to ‘Rodin’ (1963), Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 323. Steinberg was also arguing against his youthful self, later recalling that at the age of seventeen, Roger Fry was his ‘revered mentor’.
6. See Leo Steinberg, Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 363–69.
7. Peggy Erskine, ‘Review of Greenberg, Miro’, The Sewanee Review 58, no. 2 (1950): 368.
8. Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 30. A footnote refers to Walter Pater's 1872 essay, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in which is written, ‘All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.' Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 124.
9. Sheila Schwartz, private communication with the author. Steinberg deleted the essay from his CV in the 1970s.
10. Leo Steinberg, ‘The Eye is a Part of the Mind’, Other Criteria, 289–306. The essay was first published in Partisan Review 20, no. 2, 194–212 (March–April 1953), the journal Greenberg edited in the 1940s and to which he continued to make contributions. It was reprinted in Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, ed. Susanne Langer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958), 243–61. In 1987, Greenberg referred to Susanne Langer as a philosopher ‘whom I don’t admire much’. Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1996), 127.
11. James Joyce, Ulysses, episode 3, Proteus. Steinberg knew this chapter by heart; it began with his favourite phrase, the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’.
12. See Greenberg, ‘Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art’ (1951), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85.
13. Steinberg, ‘The Eye is a Part of the Mind’, 305.
14. Leo Steinberg interview (1998), 55.
15. Greenberg, ‘Abstract and Representational’ (1954), in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, 186–87.
16. Greenberg, ‘Abstract and Representational’, 189.
17. See the 1978 Postscript to ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–69, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 93–94; also, De Duve, Between the Lines, 147.
18. Greenberg, ‘The Role of Nature in Modern Painting’ (1949) in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–49, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 271–75. On his formalist analysis of earlier art, see, for example, ‘The Venetian Line‘ (1950) and the amusing ‘Very Old Masters’ (1954) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, 29–34 and 178–80.
19. Greenberg, ‘Abstract and Representational’, 190.
20. Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, 6–7; Hilton Kramer, ‘Tom Wolfe and the revenge of the Philistines’, The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972–84 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), 303. Steinberg had become a contributing editor of Arts Magazine in early 1955. Parts of the monthly column were republished in Other Criteria, and citation of these reviews will refer to this publication. The relationship between Steinberg and Kramer eventually soured.
21. Greenberg, ‘Review of an Exhibition of Willem de Kooning’ (1948) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 2, 228–29; ‘Foreword to an Exhibition of Willem de Kooning’ (1953), and ‘American-Type Painting’ (1955) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, 122 and 222.
22. Steinberg, Other Criteria, 259–60.
23. Steinberg, ‘Month in Review’, Arts Magazine 44, 43–4. (April 1956) (unpublished in Other Criteria).
24. Steinberg, ‘Pollock's First Retrospective’, in Other Criteria, 263–67.
25. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 17–18. Kirk Varnedoe assessed Steinberg's review as a serious articulation of the mid-century challenge that Pollock presented.
26. Steinberg, ‘Pollock's First Retrospective’, 265.
27. Greenberg, in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1, 166; The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 2, 16; 74; 124–25; 202–03; 285–86. See also The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, 61;104–05. Greenberg reviewed Pollock every year, from 1945 to 1952.
28. See Varnedoe and Karmel, Jackson Pollock, 46 on Greenberg's etiolated vision of Pollock.
29. Leo Steinberg, ‘Introduction’ in The New York School: Second Generation, exhibition catalogue (New York: Jewish Museum, 1957), 4–8.
30. Steinberg, ‘Introduction’, in The New York School, 7. See also Achim Hochdörfer, ‘A Hidden Reserve: Painting from 1958–1965’, Artforum 159 (February 2009): 153. Hochdörfer describes Steinberg's introduction as the first to identify the evisceration of abstract expressionism, and thus a precursor to the ‘crisis’ of painting following the appearance of minimalism.
31. Steinberg, ‘Introduction’ The New York School, 8; see Lisa Saltzman, ‘Readymade Redux: Once More the Jewish Museum’, The Grey Room 9 (Autumn, 2002): 98.
32. Steinberg, ‘Month in Review’, Arts Magazine 46, 46 (December 1955) (unpublished in Other Criteria).
33. Greenberg, ‘Picasso at Seventy-Five’ (1957) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4, 26–35. Greenberg had been complaining about Picasso since the 1940s: ‘Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters’ (1946) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 2, 89; and ‘Reply to George L. K. Morris’ (1948) in ibid., 243. The review operated as the basis for slighting asides (for example, ‘Matisse's hesitations were open, not dissembled like those of Picasso’, from ‘Feeling is All’ (1952) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, 100). The final notice was delivered in ‘Picasso since 1945’, (1966) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4, ed. O'Brian, 234–39.
34. Leo Steinberg, ‘Retrospect’ to ‘The Philosophical Brothel’ (Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon), October 44 (Spring 1988): 67.
35. Steinberg, ‘The Philosophical Brothel’ (Picasso's Demoiselles d‘Avignon), Part I, Art News 71, no. 5 (September 1972): 20–29; Part II, Art News 71, no. 6 (October 1972): 38–47 (revised for October, 1988; see note above). These two long essays on Picasso appeared in 1972. See also Steinberg, ‘The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large’, in Other Criteria, 125–35. Steinberg's revision of Picasso was completed with, ’Resisting Cézanne: Picasso's Three Women of 1908', Part I, Art in America 66 (November–December 1978): 114–33 and Part II, Art in America 67 (March–April 1979): 114–27.
36. Greenberg, ‘Review of the Exhibition, A Problem for Critics’ (1945), in Greenberg, Collected Essays, volume 2, 29.
37. The lecture was published in Harper's Magazine, March 1962, reprinted in Other Criteria, 3–16. (The title perhaps jibed at Greenberg's ‘The Plight of our Culture’ of 1953, in which the prospect is advanced that middle-brow taste might absorb the high cultural production hitherto the preserve of the avant-garde: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, 122–133.) The retrospective was completed in December 1961, published in Metro, 1962, and reprinted in Steinberg, ‘Jasper Johns: the First Seven Years of His Art’ in Other Criteria, 17–54. Johns responded well to the critique: ‘I was impressed with Leo Steinberg's comments on my work … He saw the work as something new, and then tried to change himself in relation to it, which is very hard to do.’ Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 196. Apropos the deadpan Johns, Steinberg later suspected that the artist insincerely uttered the thoughts of John Cage: Achim Hochdörfer, ‘Passages: Leo Steinberg (1920–2011)’ [2009 interview], Artforum 50, no. 2 (October 2011): 60.
38. Steinberg, ‘Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public’, 5.
39. Greenberg, ‘Louis and Noland’ (1960) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4, 95. Greenberg, like many other critics, enjoyed Johns's ironic representation of flatness, but thought his work a little too easy to understand. See also ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ (1962) in ibid., 126. Greenberg's contempt for Steinberg's interest in Johns is recalled in Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, 26.
40. Greenberg, ‘The Recentness of Sculpture’ (1967) in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4, 251–2.
41. See Arts Magazine 37, no. 7 (April 1963) for a transcription of the symposium.
42. Leo Steinberg, ‘Month in Review’, Arts Magazine 46 (January 1956), 46–7 (not in Other Criteria). Steinberg retracted the review in a letter the magazine published in May 1958: see Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, 3–7.
43. The significance of the lecture and the later published essay in Art Forum and then Other Criteria is discussed by Brandon Joseph, ‘Preface to ‘Reflections’’, in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. B. Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 1–4. ‘Other Criteria’ is critiqued by David Carrier, ‘Postmodernism is Dead! (Long Live Leo Steinberg)’ in David Carrier, ed., The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 165–78.
44. ‘Modernist Painting’ was first published in Arts Yearbook, 1961; Steinberg cited the reprint in Art and Literature, no. 4, Spring 1965, pp. 193–201. John O'Brian chastised Steinberg as ‘focused too narrowly on the stereotypical Greenberg’ in ‘Introduction’, The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3, ed. O'Brian, 24; see also, Kuspit, Clement Greenberg, 45.
45. Steinberg Interview (1998), 63.