IFPDA 2024 BOOK AWARD | The Circulating Lifeblood of Ideas: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints — Holly Borham

Beginning in the 1960s, with the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Leo Steinberg amassed a collection of more than 3,500 prints that spans the medium’s 500-year history in the West. Steinberg’s collection, incorporating the work of artists both famous and obscure, illuminates his claim that in the era before photography, prints functioned as the “circulating lifeblood of ideas,” disseminating figures, compositions, and styles across boundaries of geography, time, and medium. This volume examines the development of Steinberg’s remarkable collection and its role in his scholarship on artists ranging from Michelangelo and Leonardo to Picasso and Jasper Johns.

Holly Borham is Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, where she has curated a range of exhibitions on the graphic arts from the 16th through 21st centuries.