ABSTRACT

After leaving London’s Slade School with a fine arts diploma in 1940, Steinberg spent the next decade working out what to do, having realized that he lacked that indefinable something that could have made him an artist. Along the way he honed his literary skills (he had only begun to learn English in 1933) with translations from the Yiddish of Jacob Pat’s Ashes and Fire (1947) and Sholem Asch’s Mary (1949). Entering his 30s, he committed to writing about art and studying its history, beginning with two statements of intent: “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism” in 1952, and “The Eye is a Part of the Mind” in 1953. Although Steinberg disowned the first essay a decade later, its incipient approach is telling. It argues that a work of art will outlive any specific interpretation and that no system of aesthetics can adapt to its persistent vitality. The critical criterion of what Clive Bell called “significant form” is too fragile to be of long-term aid, resting as it does on the mistaken idea that the modern pundit speaks from a prospect at the end of humanism, art having liberated itself from content.3 The proposition of the second essay is simple but far reaching: “natural fact can be purely apprehended only where the human mind has first endowed it with the status of reality.”4 Perception cannot stand unviolated by thought and no threshold separates representation and abstraction, because thinking eyes automatically situate perceived data, whether from the world beyond or the pictorial surface near at hand, into the metaphorical fabric of the mind; contrawise, naturalism is not transparent that it is innocent of subjectivity.5 Steinberg’s attention to the cultural sediment beneath modernist imagery would be a feature of his short career as reviewer for Arts Magazine, commenced in November 1955 at the behest of Hilton Kramer and completed July 1956 at the exhaustion of the author.6