Unknown Netherlandish Artist,
Landscape with Elisha Mocked after an engraving by Schelte Bolswert after a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, and after an engraving by Nicolaes Ryckmans after a design by Pieter de Jode I (1640-52). Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art.
Few art critics can afford to seriously collect art. And those that do don’t collect like Leo Steinberg did. The Russian-born writer, one of the most influential of his generation, amassed a trove of some 3,500 prints before his death, in 2011 a time when the medium was often overlooked, undervalued, and ripe for reassessment.
Steinberg’s contributions to art history wouldn’t have been the same without his hobby, argues a new exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. It’s through this conceit that the show, “After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints,” seeks to unpack the tricky legacy left behind by the era-hopping thinker, outsider academic, and iconoclastic cr