Leo Steinberg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leo Steinberg (born 1920) is an American art historian. He is a Benjamin Franklin and University Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.

This short biography is partly taken from the University of Pennsylvania History of Art departmental website, with some additions:

Born in Moscow in 1920, Leo Steinberg spent his childhood in Berlin before moving to London, where he studied art at the Slade School, University of London, from 1936 to 1940. After World War II, he established himself as a critic of contemporary art before studying art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1960 with a dissertation on 17th-century Italian architect Francesco Borromini and the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.

Professor Steinberg taught at Hunter College from 1962-75 and in 1972 was co-founder of the art history department of CUNY's Graduate Center. In 1975, he was appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art at Penn, where he remained until his retirement from teaching in 1991.

Steinberg has published and lectured widely on Renaissance, Baroque, and 20th-century art. His books include Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972); Michelangelo's Last Paintings (1975); Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (1977); The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; revised edition, 1996); Encounters with Rauschenberg (1999); and, most recently, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (2001).

He has delivered the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1982), the Gauss Lectures at Princeton University (1985), and the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard (1995-1996). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and University College, London. In 1983, Professor Steinberg became the first art historian to receive an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The following year, he won the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Criticism.

Leo Steinberg is the only son of lawyer, politician, and writer Isaac Nachman Steinberg, who served briefly as Commissar of Justice under Vladimir Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.