Saul Steinberg (1914–1999)

1945 1st Edition of Saul Steinberg's first monograph "All In A Line" a timeless compilation of his graphic observations on life. Saul Steinberg (American, born Romania, 1914-99) had one of the most remarkable and varied careers in postwar American art. While known for the drawings that graced the cover of the New Yorker for nearly six decades, he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world. Through these parallel careers-cartoonist and independent artist-Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom and, in the process, became celebrated the world over for giving graphic definition to the postwar age.… (more)

Saul Steinberg defined drawing as "a way of reasoning on paper," and he remained committed to the act of drawing. Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, Saul Steinberg peeled back the carefully wrought masks of 20th-century civilization.

THE ART OF LIVING is divided into five sections:

The Art of Living
The Important People
The Domestic Animals
The Arts
The Women
Famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades, he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.

Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel yet integrated careers. Such many-leveled art, however, resists conventional critical categories. “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me,” he said. 1 He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination.

Steinberg’s commercial work is too often isolated from his gallery art, whereas both groups, connected in style, concept, and motifs, are the product of a single artistic vision. In the art world, Steinberg had first achieved prominence in 1946 as a participant in the famous “Fourteen Americans” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where his work hung alongside that of Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Theodore Roszak, and Mark Tobey. His first major solo show took place in 1952, a two-gallery exhibition mounted by the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries in New York. (Parsons and Janis became his US dealers, holding joint exhibitions of his work into the 1970s; beginning in 1982, he was—and continues to be—represented by the Pace Gallery.) Versions of the 1952 sell-out show traveled in the US, England, France, Brazil, Holland, and Germany for three years. In Paris, it was installed at the Galerie Maeght, which continued to mount Steinberg exhibitions through the 1980s. His art came to further international attention with the periodic publication of drawing compilations, beginning with the best-selling All in Line (1945), followed by The Art of Living (1949), The Passport (1954), The Labyrinth (1960), The New World (1965), and The Inspector (1973).… (more)

The first part are conventional civilian cartoons, some clever and subtle, some not. The second part, overseas, is more interesting now, as the introduction to it explains "Steinberg saw most of the theaters of war as a Lieutenant in the Navy and the OSS. HIs overseas drawings reflect the G.I>'s unconscious viewpoint better than most of the books of the war correspondents." Some are essentially realistic with little or no humor; others are quite sardonic, as for instance one of a single sturdy but unburdened American soldier followed by two emaciated "native" porters piled high with his luggage, followed by a "native" child carrying one handbag on his head. I inherited this from my father's collection. He probably boughti t when it came out.… (more)

Published after his death in 1999, this is a meditation based on a series of interviews of Steinberg by Buzzi. Beginning with his childhood and youth in Romania, through his wartime experience in Italy and his maturity in the United States, Steinberg muses with an acute visual sense, appropriate for an artist. The book is illustrated with his drawings.

His ideas about influences on art are insightful. as he describes early photographers “inspired by the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres”, to his thorught that Bacon “clearly derives from the Polaroid”. I was intrigued by his suggestion that the use of industrial paints in American art occurred because of poor artists used cold-water flats as studios, “and to make them livable they had to scrape and paint the walls, doors and windows, and floors . . . and this led them to work on a large scale, to use industrial paints, such as gold or silver on radiators, new materials”. His description of the New York City taxi cab of the ‘40’s as created out of Cubist elements, of the automobile influenced by Constructivism, Cubism, and “Fernandlégerism” makes one look at cars in a whole new light.

The title, Reflections and Shadows, comes from a section in which he discusses how what one sees in reverse in a reflection (in a mirror, in water) or shadow is often better - sharper, more intense - than the original. “If ou look only at the reflection, and not at the reflecting part, you see a gratuitous reality that exists for you alone. For fun I throw a stone into the upside-down landscape, and seeing that the lower part moves I almost expect the upper part to move too.”

If I quoted all my favorite parts of this book, I’d be typing almost the entire thing, so you’ll have to go read it for yourself!… (more)