Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art

By Leo Steinberg

Book Overview

Leo Steinberg's classic Other Criteria comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public" and the "flatbed picture plane" to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and Jasper Johns. The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called "a tour de force of critical method," is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns's work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations. "The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . . .The significance of this volume lies not so much in the quality of its insights--although the quality is very high and the insights are important--as in the richness, precision, and elegance of its style. . . . A meeting with the mind of Leo Steinberg is one of the most enlightening experiences that contemporary criticism affords." --Alfred Frankenstein, Art News "Not only one of the most lucid and independent minds among art critics, but a profound one."--Robert Motherwell

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226771857
• ISBN13: 9780226771854
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.3" x 10.2"

Customer Reviews

Best Art Book I've Ever Read

Professor Steinberg takes art criticism to a new level with this book of essays on twentieth century art. This is a man who has spent his entire lifetime studying the work of Picasso, Rodin, Pollock, and others. And he puts it all together in 400+ page book that is easy and fun to read, even for the casual art lover. Which doesn't mean that his book is dumbed down or that it isn't brilliant and groundbreaking. He makes observations so keen and accurate that you really begin to believe there is method and logic and order to art (or at least great art). His choice of an artist's work to support his theories is always convincing, especially when he shows artwork in a sequence (for example, all the different versions of Picasso's "The Women of Algiers"). Some of the best parts of the book are when he explains the "Cubist simultaneity of point of view" or what a wrongly fitted limb on a Rodin's sculpture might mean. He's also a very good, clear writer. At one point, he'll be discussing the minute details of paintings and then he'll brilliantly link these observations to an artist's entire body of work or to art in general. One drawback: all the photographs of artwork are in black-and-white.