Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) was the rare scholar with the ability to alter the way we think about art, history and culture, and, inferentially, the things we create.
“The Eye Is a Part of the Mind” is the title of an essay first published in 1953 in Partisan Review and later in Steinberg’s landmark collection, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford, 1972).
In the essay, Steinberg seeks to “show that representation is a central esthetic function in all art; and that the formalist esthetic, designed to champion the new abstract trend, was largely based on a misunderstanding and an underestimation of the art it set out to defend.”
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