Steinberg’s World

Saul Steinberg, 1978. Photo: en.wikipedia.org

As relevant and as fascinating as ever, the art of Romanian-American artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) continues to be seen, discussed and enjoyed. It could be observed that his work straddles many lines: two and three dimensions; illustration and painting; art and architecture; literary and visual, and more. However it’s categorized, and interpreted, Steinberg’s oeuvre is always detached, despite his sometimes dark subject matter, but also ironic, comic and mysterious. Inviting prolonged scrutiny, his drawings, paintings, collages, sculptures and environments still defy conventional analysis, or rather, cannot be explained adequately, even for those who can cite and identify his salient imagery.
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Beginning last year and continuing through 2022, Steinberg’s multimedia creations have been and will continue to take center stage in no less than 12 exhibits mounted worldwide, including an 80-work retrospective at Paris’ Centre Pompidou and an installation, “Saul Steinberg: Milano New York,” on view through March 2022 at the Milan Triennale in Italy. A recent in-depth analysis, Jessica R. Feldman’s “Saul Steinberg’s Literary Journeys,” has been available since February, while the November 2021 issue of the Paris Review published a hitherto unknown interview in which the artist talked about baseball, a subject from which he drew visual inspiration during the early 1950s.

After World War I, Steinberg’s father, Moritz, ran a print and book binding shop that specialized in the production of decorative packaging. His designs for cosmetics and candy containers almost certainly incorporated engravings, florid lettering and motifs produced from stencils and the rubber stamps that were commonly used at that time. It was there that the young Saul would begin to develop his own technique, influenced by his exposure to and familiarity with ornate fonts and the stamps which gave his art its personality. Although his tools remained the same later on, his perception of the world would be filtered by his own experiences, as well as through Dada and Surrealist lenses, which, coincidentally, also made use of automatic writing, words and random markings; both also appropriated the conventions of advertising to turn bourgeois morality on its head. Steinberg’s artistic evolution, however, would produce results that could not easily be categorized. 

With his erudite visual acumen and knowledge of literature, it’s no wonder that Steinberg would feel at home in Italy, where he came to escape Rumania’s rabid anti-Semitism and academic quotas that barred Jews from specialized training. As an architecture student in Milan, he contributed (like another visual genius of this generation, the film director Federico Fellini) to several of the Italian satirical periodicals that proliferated during the 1930s. But his adopted land would betray him: After the fascist racial laws were enacted in Italy in 1938, Steinberg was an outcast, an undesirable Rumanian Jew, now compelled to emigrate. Lacking the appropriate paperwork, he remained in peril for another two years, living with the constant threat of arrest, imprisonment and ultimately deportation to a concentration camp.

Entries in Steinberg’s diary delineate the suffering he endured during a period of imprisonment and describe an aborted escape to America via Portugal, where officials rejected his expired transit visa and forced him back to Italy. Learning about these experiences comes as a shock to many who have laughed at his art over the years but never considered that he had a history outside of New York. 

Finally immigrating in 1942, Steinberg would become renown through his drawings and covers that would transform the New Yorker magazine: His work was instantly recognizable. Over the years, his other projects included designs for murals, stage sets and textiles. He was also a gifted maker of masks.

Above all his subjects, Steinberg’s New York pictures continue to define him. From his iconic poster of Manhattan, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” which envisions the island as the only civilized place on earth, to his brilliant female personifications of the borough’s West side streets: prissy, blowsy, elegant, or—embellished with blackened smears and erasure marks—downright salacious, Steinberg altered the perception of what his audience experienced of their environment. Here too, he straddled the line between the observer as flaneur and the fully engaged participant in the life of the city.

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Cheryl Kempler is an art and music specialist who works in the B'nai B'rith International Curatorial Office and writes about history and Jewish culture for B’nai B’rith Magazine. To view some of her additional content, click here.