The Blanton Museum of Art presents After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints, an exhibition exploring the history of printmaking through 200 prints from Steinberg’s collection.

Featured in the exhibition is a photographic series by Tacita Dean, titled The Line of Fate (2011). This series is a result of a photographic exercise Dean undertook with Steinberg. 

On her series of photographs and her encounter with Steinberg, Dean writes:

Leo Steinberg gave me one hour and I understood why. He was trying to complete his book in the face of the inevitable and non-negotiable deadline that is one’s own death. Aged ninety, shrunken and bearded, and irascible in his overheated and cluttered apartment on the Upper East Side, he made it clear that all interruption was intolerable... Back in Berlin, I put the photographs aside feeling that perhaps Leo had been right, and that the exercise had been pointless. Then, recently, as I shuffled them around, I caught sight of a serendipitous diagonal across five of the images—the appearance of a Line of Fate in the writing hand of Leo Steinberg.