Leo Steinberg in Memoria Mea—Fragments

With immense gratitude and a measure of unembarrassed sadness, I dedicate this, my final Apropos the Arts column, to Dr. Peter Rudnytsky, who is now stepping down after having served American Imago as its editor for a decade. As maestro, he has conducted its medley of authors with brio. He has combined the precision of a Leinsdorf (chastening and exhorting us) with the adventurousness of a Boulez (spurring us to heights of intellectual and aesthetic daring). Privileged to perform as a member of his ensemble, I have benefited from his accuracy, his sureness of phrase, and his abiding rigor. I have reveled in his appreciation of dissonance. Perhaps, above all, it has been a pleasure for me as well as a challenge to join him in his courageous prizing of intensely personal as well as discreetly public voices. What follows here is written in one of those personal voices, coaxed forth by Dr. Rudnytsky. Participating in the psychoanalytically inflected polyphony that he has made a hallmark of this hallowed journal, I offer this essay as a tribute to him as well as a deeply felt homage to its chosen subject, my cherished mentor, the distinguished art historian Dr. Leo Steinberg who passed away on March 13^th of this year, at the age of ninety.