Haim Steinbach
Haim Steinbach
American, born Israel, 1944
B.F.A. Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York
Université d’Aix-Marseille, Aix en Provence, France
M.F.A., Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Artist in Residence, Middlebury College, 1974
Assistant Professor, 1974–77
Selected Collections
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Middlebury College Museum of Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
A teacher of painting while he was on the Middlebury faculty, Steinbach was also interested in conceptual and minimal art. Remembered by many who studied with him for his relentless philosophical vigor, Steinbach initiated exhibitions and brought some of the leading conceptual artists to the campus. (In addition to inviting Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner, who each spoke here, for example, he showed works by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher.)
His own work while he was on the faculty consisted of monochromatic panels to which he glued, around the perimeter, variously colored oil stick or printed linoleum stripes. Made of plywood or particle board, the “canvas” in such works, according to Steinbach, became a game board, an object; and everything that was on its surface became a symbol. The flatness of the picture surface (to which much painting of the 1950s and 1960s was formally in thrall) had become literal. There was no longer even a pretense of the illusion of pictorial space.
While he was on campus Steinbach also began to make shelves for objects. (He and the photographer Nancy Shaver, his wife at that time, frequented local flea markets where they found offbeat objects for use in their works.) It was shelves, often stocked with grocery store commodities, that eventually became Steinbach’s signature art works in the 1980s.
A retrospective exhibition of Steinbach’s work was held at the Castello di Rivoli, Museum d’Arte Contemporanea, Italy, in 1995.
Steinbach taught at Cornell University after leaving Middlebury. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
-Emmie Donadio, 2000
