The World of Steinberg

"The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meager, in terms of self-entertainment. In the end, working is good because it is the last refuge of the man who wants to be amused. Not everything that amused me in the past amuses me so much any more. " --Saul Steinberg

The artist is 64 this year: a solid, wiry man, rabbinically delicate in gesture and as immobile in repose as a large tabby cat. For decades he has been regarded as the best cartoonist in America. Publishing mainly in The New Yorker--for which, to date, he has done 56 cover designs and innumerable drawings--Steinberg has erected standards of precision and graphic intelligence that had not existed in American illustration before him. "After nearly 40 years of looking at his work," remarks the magazine's editor, William Shawn, "I am still dazzled and astounded by it. His playfulness and elegance are of a sublime order."

If he is the doyen of cartoonists, Saul Steinberg is also to growing numbers of his colleagues a "serious" artist of the first rank. "In linking art to the modern consciousness," declares Art Critic Harold Rosenberg, "no artist is more relevant than Steinberg. That he remains an art-world outsider is a problem that critical thinking in art must compel itself to confront." That showdown is about to begin. This week an exhibition of 258 drawings, watercolors, paintings and assemblages by Steinberg opens at New York City's Whitney Museum, accompanied by a book (Saul Steinberg; Knopf; $10.95 softcover) with critical appraisal of the artist by Rosenberg.

Steinberg is a loner, a cosmopolitan Jewish exile, a refugee, a man of masks, languages and doctored identities, through whom the world's multiplicity is refracted as by a prism. In America, he is both outsider and insider: only he could have dreamed up the poster that summarizes the Manhattanite's provincial view of America: Ninth and Tenth avenues wide in the foreground, a strip of Hudson River, a smaller strip of New Jersey, and in the background a few scattered cities--Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago--with Japan and China in the distance.

The focus does not quite work the other way. Most Americans may never have heard of Steinberg, but the influence of that clear, epigrammatic line and dry wit has been felt throughout American design and illustration for almost two generations. Moreover, his motifs are almost subliminally recognizable: the wry face whose nose turns into a detachable line, the worried cats, the Ruritanian flourishes and curlicues, the apocalyptic scenes of street riots and urban breakdown, the setting of the bizarre commonplaces of American life in a cosmopolitan matrix. Such details of Steinberg's work constitute a signature and have subtly altered America for everyone who has seen them.

His is one of the most remarkable oeuvres in applied art today: the product of an intelligence so finely drawn, insinuating and (at times) sadistic, so refracted in its maze of linguistic mirrors as to suggest no parallels. The best of Steinberg presents you with a master--but a master of what?

The short answer is: of writing.

Every artist finds his scale--the size of gesture proper to the image and medium he uses. "The scale of the drawing," Steinberg points out, "is given to you by the instrument you use," and pen drawings, being governed by the radius of the hand, cannot be very large. "The nib has an elasticity meant for writing, and that is why I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing. But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can't be reasoned in the mind. It can only be reasoned on paper." Steinberg's drawing, in all its varieties, is a form of thought.

Ogni dipintore dipinge se, a Renaissance maxim ran: every painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake.

Steinberg's work is always signaling that there are more interesting matters in art than "authenticity" in the expressionist sense. It looks beyond the man to the mask and finds there an extraordinary variety of personae, by turns bland, urbane, comic, ridiculous and distinctly threatening. The first mask of all is style itself. "I want the minimum of performance in my work," says Steinberg, a virtuoso if ever there was one. "Performance bores me. What interests me is the invention. I like to make a parody of bravura. You have to think of a lot of my work as some sort of parody of talent. Of course, parody is not an attack; you cannot parody anything you can't love. But I wish to create a fiction of skill."

Steinberg can fill a sheet with figures, each of them drawn in a different style--cubist, pointillist, child art, hatched shading, mock sculptural, hairy scribble, Leger boilerplate, art deco--and display a wide, ironic complicity with art history while making no final commitment to a "way" of drawing. The drawing works because he so obviously possesses each style. It is imitation without flattery. As a dandy, Steinberg owns all the hats in his wardrobe. A still life like Belgian Air Mail 1971, is not a "cubist-type" drawing, a thing done in homage to Braque and Picasso. It is rather a drawing about cubism, seen as one stylistic mannerism among others in the art-historical supermarket.

In short, it is an act of criticism. His "postcards"--melancholy vistas of flatland and horizon, with blotty little figures gazing at some manifestation of Nature or Culture, a pyramid or a rubber stamp masquerading as the moon--are philosophical landscapes. They are parodies of the picturesque.

The elusive self keeps peeping through, like the rabbit he once drew peering out of a man's eyes. Even Steinberg's cats have large meditative noses and Austro-Hungarian whiskers. The tone of his work is comic, but one's guffaw, once provoked, is checked by Steinberg's precision about how the self may be allowed to materialize. The artist seeks complicity with the audience, but he does it (so to speak) from the driver's seat.

There are simple drawings in Steinberg's oeuvre, but very few simple situations. He delights in apparently simple ones: the conflict between a hero and a dragon, for instance. But then we find the fight is rigged. The hero and the monster are actually partners; they have a deal; without a dragon, what can a hero do? One drawing makes this point with particular elegance: a new kind of adversary, a man with a cannon, is drawing a bead on the dragon. The hero is about to save his enemy by attacking the gunman from the rear. In another drawing, the monster has become an enormous furry rabbit. "The rabbit is as armored as the dragon," Steinberg points out. "It has the impenetrable armor of fat fluff. It is invincibly sweet. There are, you see, two sorts of danger. One is being hit by a giant boulder: the direct assault of the world. The other is being overcome by a mountain of fluff, or molasses. The softness is as dreadful as the hardness."

One does not expect social optimism from a man of Steinberg's background, and one does not get it. The U.S. that rises from some of his drawings in the 1970s is an edgy, nasty place, a theater of disaster populated by grotesques. The white paper takes on the look of Manhattan's 42nd Street in summer, bombed out by midday glare. Whores, bums, flint-faced Irish cops, frazzled black pimps, rats, crocodiles up from some imagined sewer, sirens emitting Technicolor laser blasts of sound, bulbous cars belching their exhaust smoke, an S and M homunculus encased in glittering leather with the motto VIVAN LAS CADENAS (long live chains) worked in studs on its back--this, in Steinberg's ironic eye, is the American dream street (our equivalent of the Di Chirico piazza, repository of all unspoken fantasy) brought up to date from its origin in the Wild West movie.

One of his most cutting inventions--or adaptations--is the urban guerrilla seen as Mickey Mouse. In Six Terrorists, 1971, a file of them strut across the page, in aviator jackets and miniskirts, equipped with flick knife and carbine: young bourgeois clones of affectless violence, Black Shirt, S.L.A. or Brigata Rossa. It is an uncannily predictive drawing. "The Mickey Mouse face," Steinberg remarks, "is sexless, neither black nor white, without character or age: for me it represents the junk-food people, the spoilt young ones who have all their experiences, inferior as they are, handed to them on a plate." An encyclopedic disgust pervades these drawings. But it is not a common emotion in Steinberg's work. In general, he is a paragon of detachment: he is, as the title of one of his books announces, the Inspector, imperturbable, restless and nosy.

The artist who has had such a pervasive influence on the U.S. was born in Rumania, a fact he considers fortuitous. In 1914 it was "a corridor, a marginal place"--a palimpsest on which various neighbors and colonial powers (Russia, Hungary, Turkey) had left their traces. To this day, Steinberg confesses himself to be "culturally a born Levantine--my sort of country goes from the eastern outskirts of Milan all the way to Afghanistan."

He grew up in the Rumanian capital, Bucharest, then a city of about half a million people--the right size, neither cramped village nor crushing megalopolis. He spoke three tongues, Rumanian, French and "the secret language of my parents," Yiddish. "Childhood," he recalls, "was very strong. It stayed like a territory, like a nation. In my childhood the days were extremely long. I was high all the time without realizing it: extremely high on elementary things, like the luminosity of the day and the smell of everything -- mud, earth, humidity; the delicious smells of cellars and mold; grocers' shops."

His father Moritz was a printer, bookbinder and boxmaker. The infant Saul had the run of his workshop, which was filled with embossed paper, stamps, colored cardboard, reproductions of "museum" madonnas (literally, chocolate-box art) and type blocks. These were his toys. "I had from the beginning the large wooden type used for posters; so if later I made, for instance, a drawing of a man holding up a question mark by the ball, it's not such a great invention--it was something known to me." And so letters presented themselves to Steinberg as things, and "I have always had a theory that things represent themselves. The nature of the question mark is questionable; you always wonder how come the upper part of the question mark is always passively following the ball, whereas the top half of an exclamation point is so rigid, so arrogant and egotistical."

In adolescence he felt rather a misfit, as gifted children do. He went to high school in Bucharest -- a school photo shows him at twelve, the liquid gray eyes and budding prow of a nose beneath a military cap -- but, as Stein berg remembers it, "my education, my reassurance, my comportment came out of reading literature. I found my real world, and my real friends, in books." At ten, "much too early," he read Maxim Gorky; by twelve, he was devouring Crime and Punishment; from France, there were heavy doses of Jules Verne, Emile Zola and Anatole France, "whose boulevardier quality was amazing to me."

The biggest impression was made by an autobiographical sketch of Gorky's. It "was an excellent metaphor for how I felt. One must consider the idea of the artist as orphan, an orphaned prodigy, whose parents find him some where--the bulrushes, perhaps. To pretend to be an orphan, alone, is a form of narcissism. I suppose all children have this disgusting form of self-pity; but more so the artist, who is Robinson Crusoe. He must invent his stories, his pleasures; he succeeds in reconstructing a parody of civilization from scratch. He makes himself by education, by survival, by constantly paying attention to himself, but also by creating a world around himself that hadn't existed before. The corollary of this is the desire not to end childhood. Which in turn makes for a desire not to stop growing."

He graduated from high school and enrolled as a philosophy student at the University of Bucharest. The following year, 1933, Steinberg embarked on the first of his many expatriations--to Italy, where he settled in Milan to study architecture at the Polytechnic. "It was clear to me that I could never become an architect, because of the horror of dealing with people that architecture involves. I knew it from the beginning, but I went on with it. One learned elementary things. How to sharpen a pencil. The fact was that most of my colleagues went to architecture the way I went, as a decoy or an alibi."

In fact, the influence went a good deal deeper than that, for Steinberg's later drawings would display an exceedingly refined sense of architectural convention, of the parodies of style learned by precision rendering: the sharp, etched shadows and intricately reasoned-out facades of his dream skyscrapers on the American horizon could only have been drawn by an architectural dropout gazing with irony on his past. "You learn all the cliches of your time. My time was late cubism, via Bauhaus; our clouds came straight out of Arp, complete with a hole in the middle; even our trees were influenced by the mania for the kidney shape."

In Milan, his career as a cartoonist got under way. "I succeeded right away; I published my first drawing, and the magazine paid me for it." Living off his cartoons for Bertoldo, a satirical fortnightly, Steinberg in his early 20s could afford a reasonable facsimile of the boulevardier life he had read about as a child in Anatole France: buying new neckties in the Galleria, lounging in the Ristorante Biffi. "I had the rare, beautiful pleasure of making money out of something I enjoyed doing and then spending as soon as I made it. As I lunched, I knew that this was my cat--I mean my drawing of a cat--that I was consuming; followed by a tree, the moon and so forth."

But whatever the pleasures of Milan in the late '30s, the countervailing fact was that Steinberg, a Jew--and a foreign Jew at that--was living under a Fascist regime which grew more anti-Semitic by the week. He graduated as a Dottore in Architettura in 1940; and on his diploma, awarded in the name of Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, King of Albania and (thanks to Mussolini and his bombers) Emperor of Ethiopia, was written "Steinberg Saul... di razza Ebraica "(of the Jewish race). "It was some kind of safeguard for the future, meaning that although I was a dottore I could be boycotted from practicing, since I am a Jew. The beauty for me is that this diploma was given by the King; but he is no longer King of Italy. He is no more King of Albania. He is not even the Emperor of Ethiopia. And I am no architect. The only thing that remains is razza Ebraicar!"

It was time to go. In 1941 Steinberg left Italy for a neutral country, Portugal, and after some altercations with the authorities there, he managed to get on a boat to America, armed with a "slightly fake" passport that he had doctored with his own rubber stamp.

It got him to, but not past, Ellis Island. The quota for Rumanian immigrants was minuscule, and Steinberg was over the limit. While a relative in New York tried at short notice to persuade The New Yorker to sponsor him in the U.S., Steinberg spent a sweltering Fourth of July on Ellis Island and was deported to Santo Domingo on a cargo boat.

After a year, his visa came through: the editor of The New Yorker had agreed to sponsor him. In July 1942 Steinberg landed in Miami and caught a bus to New York, enjoying the "noble view, as from horseback," of America as it rolled by. He had come home to his definitive expatriation.

With a steady outlet for his drawings in The New Yorker and the newspaper PM, Steinberg almost at once set out to see the U.S. coast to coast by train. "Driving is no substitute for the view from the sleeping compartment. The window is like a screen. To arrive at a whistle-stop in Arizona and see Indians at the station, even though they don't have feathers--how expected!" It was, in part, a ballet of fables and stereotypes. Steinberg's America, as confirmed by this trip, proved to be as much an invention as it was in Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny: flat horizons broken by mesas or isolated, rococo-deco movie palaces; the tubular, metallic faces of Midwest entrepreneurs and their massive but wizened spouses, gazing blankly through their horn-rims: blazing signs the size of provincial churches; all-leg girls and cowboys teetering on their long heels like human stilts. The drawings testify to America's unutterable strangeness in the eyes of a young European who could not as yet speak English. "Individuals unmasking themselves only to reveal other masks," Rosenberg notes in his essay, "verbal cliches masquerading as things, a countryside that is an amalgam of all imported styles, an outlook that is at once conventional and futuristic--America was made to order for Steinberg."

The next year. 1943, Steinberg enlisted in the Navy and became a U.S. citizen. He was at once assigned to Intelligence and posted successively to Ceylon, to Calcutta and then, masquerading as a weather observer with the 14th Air Force (his knowledge of meteorology being slight), to Kunming in China. His task was to act as a go-between with friendly Chinese guerrillas. Since he spoke little English and less Chinese, he drew pictures for them. It was a small but poignant metaphor of once r ...... and future Sino-American incomprehension.

When the war was over, Steinberg returned to his favorite occupations: drawing and traveling, the one nourishing the other. He did not work en route, which is one reason why Steinberg's drawings of places all look equally exotic: their abnormality is a refraction of memory, whether of Paris, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Tashkent, Palermo or Samarkand (whose telephone directory, stolen by him in 1956 and listing 100 subscribers, is one of Steinberg's more cherished souvenirs). Provoked by a "geographical snobbism," he and his wife, the artist Hedda Sterne--they were married in 1944 and fondly separated without divorcing 16 years later--became epicures of travel.

"Things always happen to him," Sterne remembers. "At one point he was doing parades. We went to Europe and to Istanbul and there was a parade that had not taken place in 500 years, and it took place the day we arrived." Steinberg likes to look back on those journeys. "I loved to arrive in a new place and face the new situations, like one newly born who sees life for the first time, when it still has the air of fiction. It lasts one day." The late '40s and '50s were perhaps the last time in Europe when travel was travel, unfiltered and not homogenized by mass tourism. It must have appealed to Steinberg as a form of controlled exile--the mask of expatriation.

In the meantime, his books and albums accumulated: All in Line, his wartime drawings, in 1945: The Passport in 1954; The Labyrinth in 1960. As they did so, his reputation steadily grew, and he began to enter that choppy strait, much roiled by the currents of American aesthetic puritanism, where the "illustrator" or "cartoonist" finds his reputation crossing to that of "artist."

That Steinberg made that passage, few of his colleagues doubt. But he is one of the very few American graphic artists to have done so; not even the big popular illustrators of earlier years, N.C. Wyeth or Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell or Charles Dana Gibson, can quite bear that claim. Esquire magazine's design director, Milton Glaser, sees Steinberg as a cartoonist who "by some extraordinary series of shifts became a major artist ... It is very hard to truthfully understand what happened to him on the way, not only in terms of self-transformation but in terms of how the audience saw that transformation -- so that he could keep working as a literary and social critic through drawing, and still be a unique American painter. He is the only one that I know who has been able to achieve both at once."

Steinberg, on the other hand, dismisses (or refuses to pin down) the idea of such a transition. What marks the difference between his work and that of the easel painter, in his view, has always been more a question of medium than of aesthetic fullness. "I think of myself as being a professional. My strength comes out of doing work which is liked for itself, and is successful by itself, even though it is not always perfectly accessible. I have never depended on art historians or the benedictions of museums and critics. That came later. Besides, I like work to be on the page. I never like to sell the object. I enjoy selling the rights of reproduction. In that way I consider myself to be doing the work of a poet who prints the words but keeps the manuscript. I kept most of my original drawings. I believe every artist in the world would like to sell only the rights of reproduction. Except for the ones who make giant paintings--they are very happy to get rid of them. And sculptors: there is nothing more tragic than the unsuccessful sculptor, faced constantly by his large, reproachful objects. Comment s 'en debarrasser!" His recognition is, Steinberg admits, "one of the biggest satisfactions of my life." His way of living is set, and is likely comfortably to remain so. Steinberg divides his time between a book-lined duplex in Manhattan's Upper East Side, sprinkled with his own objects and hung with a collection of drawings by American artist friends (de Kooning, Arshile Gorky), and a modest studio on Long Island. In the country, his wooden constructions: tables scattered with whittled books, made-up pens, artificial pencils. A disciplined man with many friends and no discoverable enemies, he enjoys what he calls "the Kabuki theater of the night" -- the rituals of sociability and long dinner conversations. His extracurricular passion (apart from cats) is baseball, which he regards not only as "an allegorical play about America" but as a metaphor of ideal conduct. "At night," he says, "I often identify myself with the pitcher who pitches a perfect game. Before falling asleep I strike out a side, then in the next inning I initiate a triple play, then I go ahead at bat and hit a homer. All these fantasies, based on the true glory of base ball! And why? Because a major league player has to be special; he must have a certain lyrical quickness and luck that belong more to the poetic than to the athletic part of life. Baseball is nearer to art because of the expert solitude of the player."

That solitude is threatened by the Whitney exhibition, and Steinberg views the glare of attention with a carefully nurtured indifference. "I would like," he says opaquely, "to retrospect the retrospective." But the crowds that arrive to inspect the Inspector will, one may predict, come to laugh and stay to think; for this show sets before us one of the most intriguing and complex intellects in art today.

-Robert Hughes

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