10 Facts About Leo Steinberg

Leo Steinberg was a Russian-born American art critic and art historian.

Leo Steinberg's family left the Soviet Union in 1923, and settled in Berlin, Germany.

In 1957, William Kolodney invited Leo Steinberg to give a lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Leo Steinberg approached the history of art in a revolutionary manner, helping to move it from a dry consideration of factual details, documents, and iconographic symbols to a more dynamic understanding of meaning conveyed via various artistic choices.

For example, in 1972, Leo Steinberg introduced the idea of the "flatbed picture plane" in his book Other Criteria, a collection of essays.

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In that essay, Leo Steinberg examined a previously ignored pattern in Renaissance art, which he named ostentatio genitalium: the prominent display of the genitals of the infant Christ and the attention drawn to that area in images of Christ near the end of his life, in both cases for specific theological reasons involving the concept of the Incarnation – the word of God made flesh.

Leo Steinberg died on March 13,2011, in New York City at the age of 90.

In 1962 Leo Steinberg married Dorothy Seiberling, an art editor for Life magazine; the marriage ended in divorce.

Leo Steinberg took an informal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers.

Leo Steinberg believed that Abstract Expressionist action painters, such as Jackson Pollock, were more concerned with creating good art than with merely expressing a personal identity on canvas, a point of view contrary to that held by Harold Rosenberg, another American art critic of Steinberg's era.