Becoming Leo. Steinberg e l'Institute of Fine Arts di New York: dall’eredità dei professori tedeschi allo sviluppo di un nuovo criticism

Leo Steinberg, born in Moscow in 1920 but raised in Berlin and London, arrived in New York in January 1945. Trained as an artist in London in the early 1950s, when he was already in his thirties, he decided to study art history at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), where he was educated by Jewish-German refugee art historians such as Richard Krautheimer, Wolfgang Lotz, and Erwin Panofsky. This essay reconsiders Steinberg’s work, which is well-known for its unconventional and revisionist inter- pretations, through the lens of his academic formation and the legacy of German Kunstwissenschaft in postwar America. Taking into account unpublished material (including university course notes and papers and an abandoned dissertation on the afterlife of Romanesque art), I point out how Steinberg’s first scholarly works, while respecting the methodologies of his professors, at the same time tried to “resist” their heritage. His engagement with contemporary art, for example, led him to challenge the biases of his professors, sometimes to their annoyance, as was the case with his Ph.D. dissertation on Borromini’s church of San Carlino, which was contested by his adviser Richard Krautheimer. The essay argues that during the IFA years Steinberg had already developed some of the concepts that would characterize his later intellectual trajectory: the dialogue between Old Master art and contemporary experience, the emphasis on the beholder’s physical and psychological response to artworks, the epistemological reevaluation of subjectivity, the priority of visual data over texts, and the hermeneutical validity of ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning. Through these means, Steinberg achieved a personal synthesis between historical investigation and criticism, anticipat- ing the rethinking of the methodological tradition in the 1960s and 1970s.