Leo Steinberg

Leo Steinberg (July 9, 1920 – March 13, 2011) was an American art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

Leo Steinberg was born in Moscow, Russia, the son of Isaac Nachman Steinberg, a lawyer, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in revolutionary Russia, and Commissar of Justice under Vladimir Lenin from 1917 to 1918.

Notified that Isaac Steinberg's life was in danger, the family escaped Russia in 1920, when Leo was an infant, and settled in Berlin, Germany. In the early 1930s, the Steinbergs were forced to move again, this time to the United Kingdom, after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. Intending to become an artist, Steinberg studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (part of the University of London).

In 1945, encouraged by his older sister and her husband, Steinberg moved to New York City. For years he made a living writing art criticism and teaching art, as for example teaching life drawing at the Parsons School of Design. His criticism of modern art was important, to the extent that in Tom Wolfe's 1975 book, The Painted Word, Steinberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg were all labeled the "kings of Cultureburg" for the enormous degree of influence that their criticism exerted over the world of modern art at the time.

However, Steinberg eventually moved away from art criticism and developed a serious, scholarly interest in such artists and architects as Francesco Borromini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In 1960, he earned a PhD at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts with a dissertation on the architectural symbolism of Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.

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