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Moreover, in remaining outside the polarity between Greenbergian formalism and the nascent October approach to criticism, his now famous essays on Rodin, late Monet, Picasso, Johns, and Rauschenberg were an inspiring model for much criticism of the past decade. The extraordinary eloquence with which he developed his thoughts and arguments makes reading his essays and books a literary pleasure, a fact recognized by the Award in Literature he received in 1983 from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged over many centuries and enabled him to situate individual artworks within a network of art-historical, scientific, theological, and personal observations. The keen intelligence of the essays collected in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972) offered a new vocabulary for discussions of contemporary art, and The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983/1986) was likewise groundbreaking in its challenge to conventional art-historical thinking. Steinberg, who died this past March, was perhaps the most important critic of the postwar period. His family realized how serious the situation was and emigrated to London and then, after the war, to New York. Because he was Jewish, Steinberg was excluded from physical-education classes after Hitler seized powera cruel humiliation for a twelve-year-old, he added.
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We immediately started talking about his childhood in Berlin, and he began a solemn recitation of a poem by Schiller that he remembered from his school days. Mounted on the walls were old-master drawings and prints as well as a Woman drawing by de Kooning andtoward the back, approaching his more private roomsa print by Jasper Johns. The letters on his desk showed him to be a prolific correspondent, and several reproductions of the Doni Tondo bore witness to his tireless thinking about Michelangelo’s sole surviving panel painting. As a small monument to his sacrifice, he had mounted a cigarette-shaped dowel vertically on a little pedestal on his bookshelf. His health, Steinberg reported, was good his only cause for complaint was that after seventy-five years of daily cigarette consumption he’d had to give up smoking. Despite his eighty-nine years, he made an agile impression, and everything he said was marked by a rock-solid decisiveness and intellectual intensity. WHEN I VISITED LEO STEINBERG for the first time, in September 2009 in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he welcomed me in fluent, accent-free German.