Leo Steinberg
Leo Steinberg was an art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S who was born in Moscow, Russia and grew up in Berlin, Germany. He was the son of Isaac Nachman Steinberg, aonce powerful Russian minister.
He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (part of the University of London). In 1945, he moved to New York City, where he graduated from New York University Institute of Fine Arts with a Ph.D. in 1960, and taught life drawing at the Parsons School of Design. He taught at the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania as Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art, from 1975 to 1991
He was professor of the History of Art at Hunter College. He is known for his work in several areas of Art History, notably Renaissance art and Modernism. From 1995-96, he was a professor at Harvard University.
In 1972, Steinberg introduced the idea of the "flatbed picture plane" in his book, Other Criteria, a collection of essays on artists including Jackson Pollock, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Phillip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning.
The whole of the Summer, 1983, issue of October was dedicated to Steinberg's essay The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, later published as a book by Random House. In that essay, Steinberg examined a previously ignored pattern in Renaissance art: the prominent display of the genitals of the infant Christ, and the attention drawn again to that area in images of Christ near the end of his life.
In Tom Wolfe's 1975 book, The Painted Word, Steinberg was labelled one of the "kings of Cultureburg" for the enormous degree of influence that his criticism, along with that of other "kings," Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, exerted over the world of modern art at the time. However, Steinberg, who originally trained as an artist but earned a PhD in Art History, moved away from art criticism, concentrating on academic art-historical studies of such artists and architects as Borromini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. His collection of 3,200 prints is held at the The Leo Steinberg Collection, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin.[5] His papers are held at the Getty Museum.
He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (part of the University of London). In 1945, he moved to New York City, where he graduated from New York University Institute of Fine Arts with a Ph.D. in 1960, and taught life drawing at the Parsons School of Design. He taught at the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania as Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art, from 1975 to 1991
He was professor of the History of Art at Hunter College. He is known for his work in several areas of Art History, notably Renaissance art and Modernism. From 1995-96, he was a professor at Harvard University.
In 1972, Steinberg introduced the idea of the "flatbed picture plane" in his book, Other Criteria, a collection of essays on artists including Jackson Pollock, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Phillip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning.
The whole of the Summer, 1983, issue of October was dedicated to Steinberg's essay The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, later published as a book by Random House. In that essay, Steinberg examined a previously ignored pattern in Renaissance art: the prominent display of the genitals of the infant Christ, and the attention drawn again to that area in images of Christ near the end of his life.
In Tom Wolfe's 1975 book, The Painted Word, Steinberg was labelled one of the "kings of Cultureburg" for the enormous degree of influence that his criticism, along with that of other "kings," Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, exerted over the world of modern art at the time. However, Steinberg, who originally trained as an artist but earned a PhD in Art History, moved away from art criticism, concentrating on academic art-historical studies of such artists and architects as Borromini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. His collection of 3,200 prints is held at the The Leo Steinberg Collection, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin.[5] His papers are held at the Getty Museum.
George Clair Tooker, Jr. (August 5, 1920 – March 27, 2011) was a figurative painter whose works are associated with the Magic realism and Social realism movements. He was one of nine recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2007.
Tooker was raised by his Anglo/French-American father George Clair Tooker and English/Spanish-Cuban mother Angela Montejo Roura in Brooklyn Heights and Bellport, New York along with his sister Mary Fancher Tooker. Tooker wanted to attend art school rather than college, but ultimately abided by his parents' wishes and majored in English Literature at Harvard University, while still devoting much of his time to painting. During 1942, he graduated from college and then entered the Marine Corps but was discharged due to ill-health. Although he was raised in a religious Episcopalian family he later converted to Catholicism.
In 1943 Tooker began attending at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Early in his career Tooker's work was often compared with other painters such as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and his close friends Jared French and Paul Cadmus.
Working with the then-revitalized tradition of egg tempera, Tooker addressed issues of modern-day alienation with subtly eerie and often visually literal depictions of social withdrawal and isolation. Subway (1950; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City) and Government Bureau (1956; Metropolitan Museum of Art) are two of his best-known paintings.Tooker died on March 27, 2011 due to kidney failure.
He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1968 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Tooker lived for many years in Hartland, Vermont
Hedda Sterne
Hedda Sterne (born Hedwig Lindenberg; August 4, 1910 – April 8, 2011) was an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. Sterne was, in fact, the only woman photographed with the group in Life magazine. In her artistic endavors she created a body of work known for exhibiting a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with which she is often associated.
Sterne has been almost completely overlooked in art historical narratives of the post-war American art scene. At the time of her death, possibly the last surviving artist of the first-generation of the New York School, Hedda Sterne viewed her widely varied works more as in flux than as definitive statements. In 1944 she married Saul Steinberg the Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.
During the late 1940s she became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards American painting of the 1940s and who posed for a famous picture in 1950; members of the group besides Sterne included: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.Her works are in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, also in Washington D.C. She turned 100 in August 2010.
During the late 1940s she became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards American painting of the 1940s and who posed for a famous picture in 1950; members of the group besides Sterne included: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.Her works are in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, also in Washington D.C. She turned 100 in August 2010.
John McCracken
Artist John McCracken dies at 76
John McCracken, an artist whose fusion of painting with geometric sculpture in the mid-1960s embodied an aesthetic distinctive to postwar Los Angeles, died April 8 in New York. He was 76. The cause of death was not reported.
Mr. McCracken was one of a group of artists whose work was variously described as representing the L.A. Cool School, thanks to its rejection of emotionally expressive gestures; Finish Fetish, in recognition of its pristine color and high-tech surfaces; and Minimalism, because of its reliance on simple geometric forms.
The difficulty in naming his practice or easily linking it to a school attests to the success of his artistic ambition.
The geometric forms Mr. McCracken employed were typically built from straight lines: cubes, rectangular slabs and rods, stepped or quadrilateral pyramids, post-and-lintel structures and, most memorably, tall planks that leaned against a wall. Usually, the form was painted in sprayed lacquer, which did not reveal the artist’s hand. An industrial look was belied by sensuous color
His palette included bubble-gum pink, lemon yellow, deep sapphire and ebony, usually applied as a monochrome. Sometimes an application of multiple colors marbleized or ran down the sculpture’s surface, like a molten lava flow. He also made objects of softly stained wood or, in recent years, highly polished bronze and reflective stainless steel.
Embracing formal impurity at a time when purity was highly prized, the works embodied perceptual and philosophical conundrums. The colored planks stood on the floor like sculptures; relied on the wall for support like paintings; and, bridging both floor and wall, defined architectural space. Their shape was resolutely linear, but the point at which the line assumed the dimensional properties of a shape was indefinable.
“My tendency,” Mr. McCracken once said, “is to reduce or develop everything to ‘single things’ — things which refer to nothing outside [themselves] but which at the same time possibly refer, or relate, to everything.”
These “single things,” abstract rather than figurative, embodied a simultaneous sense of individual and collective identity typically ascribed to human beings.
In 1971 and 1972, he made a rarely seen series of paintings based on Hindu and Buddhist mandalas. They are included in a 40-year survey of Mr. McCracken’s career at the Castello di Rivoli Museum in Turin, Italy, through June 19.
Mr. McCracken was bedeviled by Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction epic, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with its iconic image of an ancient monolith floating in space. The 1968 blockbuster was released two years after the artist made his first plank. “At the time, some people thought I had designed the monolith or that it had been derived from my work,” he said in a 1998 interview.
John Harvey McCracken was born Dec. 9, 1934, in Berkeley, Calif., and studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts. After his first solo show at Los Angeles’s adventurous Nicholas Wilder Gallery in 1965, he moved south.
He taught for many years at schools in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, Calif., before moving to Santa Fe, N.M., in the mid-1990s. His work is in most major U.S. museum collections, including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His last solo show was at David Zwirner Gallery in New York in September.
— Los Angeles Times
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