Steinberg, Satirist

Top names in the wry gallery of U.S. satiric artists are Thurber, Arno, Bemelmans. By last week the name of Ensign Saul Steinberg, U.S.N.R., was added to the list.

Steinberg was about to go to war, but he would leave behind him a wickedly funny, highly distinctive body of work that augured well for a great postwar career. At Manhattan's Wakefield Gallery, Steinberg was giving his first U.S. one-man show--water colors, tempera and line drawings like the sidesplitting And How Is Business?.

Steinberg's drawings, which have most frequently appeared in The New Yorker, have a timeless, durable, hieroglyphic quality, as if their acid comments on human affairs had eaten into stone. Steinberg has a great liking for bits of ornamental detail (they are almost his trademark) as in his drawing of Hermann Goering drenched with medals. One of the outstanding drawings in his show portrayed the two sparsely clad Axis dictators in a theater dressing room ("Benito & Adolf--Aryan Dancers").

Blond, bespectacled Saul Steinberg, 29, was born in Rumania, has the serious appearance of most earnest satirists. His father was a box manufacturer, his mother "made wonderful cakes with all sorts of decorations. They were so beautiful I didn't even have the courage to eat them." After a year of philosophy at the University of Bucharest, young Steinberg decided that architecture was his field, Italy the country to study it in. He was seven years getting his degree because he spent so much time drawing.

Steinberg mailed his first drawing in 1936 to an Italian magazine. Bertoldo, got $1.50 and much abuse from readers. Says he: "It was new, and they didn't like new things." But Steinberg continued working for Bertoldo for two years, then switched to Settebello and was also published in Harper's Bazaar, Brazil's Sombra, Argentine's Cascabel.

After a year in Santo Domingo, Steinberg reached the U.S. last July. At once he felt at home. He is most amused by American women, especially "the middleaged, fat [ones] eating in cafeterias always a piece of bread, always smiling." Explains he in Steinbergian English: "The adventures for these women who are accustomed to quiet lives and banalities are so funny when things happen to them." Steinberg is somewhat more explicit about his art.

Some of his observations:

> "Cartooning is a delicate thing, like walking on an edge. If you lean a little to the left or a little to the right, you are lost."

> "Cartooning with its sense of humor is very important. It is an expression of our times. The Latin sense of humor is direct and brutal. They are surrealists in their cartoons. Their faces are so much deformed that sometimes they don't look like human beings. ... If the Latins want to portray a drunk they make a big shiny nose. Here in America the humor is much more delicate."

> "Ideas are the most important thing to a cartoonist. I make always ideas. ... To get the idea, I have to sit alone, sometimes close the door with the key to assure I'm really alone. ... I work very quick, it is like writing for me."

Steinberg feels that the U.S. has no really good humorous magazine, thinks The New Yorker too high-brow for the whole nation. His own brand of humor appeals to brows of all shapes. Enlisting in the U.S. Navy in January of this year, he received a commission the following month. Today Steinberg is in Washington, waiting to be shipped overseas.

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