Leo Steinberg's Distinctive Geometrical Style

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “See More, Think More” (The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2021), a review of three recent collections of Leo Steinberg’s essays, gets at some of Steinberg’s most powerful ideas, e.g., simultaneity and ambiguity, but scants what I view is his most original contribution to art criticism – his distinctive blend of geometry and figuration. Steinberg loved words like “orthogonals,” “convergences,” “perpendiculars,” “obliques,” “verticals,” “diagonals,” “volumetric,” “trapezoid.” He combined them with vivid metaphors and similes to create inspired feats of quasi-abstract art description. This, for example:

For all its tectonic carpentry, the armature of floorboards and panels allows no averted planes, not even thinkable ones, so that the environment of both solid form and spatial containment becomes resistless like the limitless diaphane of outdoors. [Description of Picasso’s Reclining Nude and Seated Woman, study for L’Aubade, May 4, 1942; from Steinberg’s brilliant “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Other Criteria, 1972]

And this:

Visually, choreographically, the motive force in the picture is the flare of Christ’s arms, and it is to their action that the whole picture responds. As Christ’s hands clear a site for themselves, his nearest neighbors roll back, make way, and fall into responsive diagonals. The redisposition of these flanking triads with respect to the table is instantaneous. On our left, parallel to the right arm of Christ, one oblique trine runs elbows-out from John to Judas. On our right, Thomas and Philip align with the startled St. James. Both trines together confirm the divergence of that central arm’s spread. They absorb its momentum and relay it, further amplified, to the tapestried walls, so that the walls, too, seem to expand, fanning out in remote obedience to the charge of Christ’s arms. [Description of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1490s); from Steinberg’s superb Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, 2001]

“Tectonic carpentry,” “armature of floorboards and panels,” “averted planes,” “spatial containment,” “responsive diagonals,” "flanking triads," “oblique trine” – this is the stuff of Steinberg’s wonderful geometrical style. He saw art in terms of its spatial order, and he invented a way of writing about it that expressed it exactly.