Last Supper By major painters

 

The temporal range of Steinberg’s collection might shock some viewers, especially those who aren’t familiar with his background as an artist, or with his passionate engagement with modern art. As an art critic, Steinberg engaged with everyone from Robert Rauschenberg to John Cage and Richard Serra. He was very engaged with other art critics of his time, most famously writing a series of essays reacting against Clement Greenberg’s school of formalism. All of these different personas appear in the Blanton’s exhibition. How does the exhibition integrate all of these aspects of Steinberg’s practice? 

Clio: Some of the groupings in the very last room of the exhibition, “Steinberg’s Scholarship,” almost read like primers in art historical methodology, guiding the visitor through various aspects of the scholar’s practice: how to look, how to compare objects, how to think about art as historical, as well as artistic, objects.

Raphael Morghen, “The Last Supper, after Leonardo da Vinci,” 1800, Etching and engraving, 25 13/16 in. x 40 11/16 in., Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002

Pieter Claesz. Soutman, after Peter Paul Rubens, after Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, c. 1618. Published by Frederik de Wit. Etching. Sheet: 11 3/4 × 39 5/8 in. (29.8 × 100.6 cm) Image: 10 3/4 × 39 1/8 in. (27.3 × 99.4 cm). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. Purchase by exchange, anonymous gift from a member of the class of 1943 in memory of her father, 2018.7.4

Take the pair of prints made after Leonardo’s last supper–they’re presented as a trio, with a photograph of the fresco in Milan. The prints largely follow Leonardo’s composition, but they are not exact copies. The wall text notes that Raphael Morghen’s print “removes the wine glass at Christ’s right hand, thus erasing the Eucharistic meaning,” while the other print, by Pieter Claesz Soutmen after a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens, deviates from Leonardo by clearing the table of everything “except for the bread and wine, rendering the sacrament paramount.” Morghen’s print was made almost 200 years after the Rubens/Soutmen print (c. 1800 vs. c. 1620-30). The prints bear completely different inscriptions, and the painting bears no comparable inscriptions. The little trio is both a lesson in looking, and a lesson in historical analysis. Add on the fact that the Soutman print is a print after a Rubens drawing, and we begin to see how these objects present us with dizzying possibilities of artistic and scholarly interpretation. One could say the same of the very next grouping, a set of prints after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 

https://arslongajournal.org/2021/05/17/after-michelangelo-past-picasso-leo-steinbergs-library-of-prints/?fbclid=IwAR2chPtkNlLEBI6yq6hB2IXQ0W6L6Tkl2-O0vdulGDVjNL4uYDkmgWe2A70