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More information about our limited editions by Saul Steinberg.
March 29, 1976Background In the nearly four decades since it was first published, Saul Steinberg's View of the World from 9th Avenue has become the icon of a Manhattanite's telescoped perception of life beyond the Hudson River, and it has spawned countless imitations of other city dwellers' self-centered realms. Steinberg's image, however, is but one of his many explorations of the potential of a map to visualize social, political, or cultural attitudes. In the 1963 New Yorker cover of France conversing with Sardinia, maps turn into speech balloons that characterize national culture: the cosmopolitan French woman "speaks" the intricacies of a Paris street map, and is answered by the simple outline map of her counterpart's island. Maps can also tell time, as in Steinberg's New Yorker cover of late March 1966, where a cat on a bicycle crosses a meandering river between March and April. The distant hill marked February represents "before"; the road sign pointing to summer is "after." Past, present, and future are encapsulated in the form of a map. |
New Yorker Cover, October 12, 1963. |
New Yorker Cover, March 26, 1966. |
Conventional cartography is again abandoned in the late drawing Swiss Still Life. Abstracted renderings of plants, the tablecloth design, and a violin bridge fill the right half of the table; on the left, an equally abstracted map of Switzerland ("La Svizzera"), wending southward toward Italy ("Milano"), becomes a still-life element that locates the table setting. In Steinberg's imagination, the map is not a system of geographic measurement but a way of thinking.
Swiss Still Life, 1990. Crayon, marker, and watercolor on paper, 18 x 24 in. The Saul Steinberg Foundation. |
April 2, 1960Background Saul Steinberg, trained as an architect in Milan, gauged the mentality of a place through its architectural styles. Immigrating to New York in 1942, he was enchanted by the city's Art Deco structures—he named "the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, jukeboxes, cafeterias, shops"—each one unique and resonating with a special American sense of vitality and optimism. Steinberg's 1952 drawing Lower Broadway captures the visual energy that the geometric patterns and stylized floral motifs of Art Deco brought to New York. The postwar boom in International Style architecture, with its flat rectangles and unornamented surfaces, produced, in Steinberg's eyes, monotony and impersonality. The 1960 New Yorker cover looks at the soulless effect of one of these modern monoliths on the exuberantly ornamented Deco-era skyline of midtown Manhattan. |
Lower Broadway, 1952. Pen, graphite, and crayon, 14 1/2 x 23 in. The Saul Steinberg Foundation. |
To Steinberg, the International Style was an architecture of the organization man in a culture of conformity. Almost all the elements of NYC are rubber stamps—the pedestrians walking among crocodiles (Steinberg's symbol of evil), the cars, and even the black oblongs and squares of the facades. The city Steinberg loved, and continued to love long after it ceased to be a physical reality, was an Art Deco wonderland. The majestic hero of the Chrysler Building at 42nd Street rises from the perspective of an awed pedestrian at street level, while the newer buildings flanking it merely stand at attention.
NYC, 1969. Pen, graphite, crayon, and rubber stamps, 14 1/2 x 23 in. The Saul Steinberg Foundation. Originally published in The New Yorker, May 3, 1969. |
Chrysler Building at 42nd Street, 1982. Originally published in The New Yorker, July 4, 1983. |
September 20, 1976Background Saul Steinberg turned still life into autobiography: throughout his work, the drawing table at which he sat every day and the implements of his art appear in a variety of guises. In the 1976 New Yorker cover, traditional still-life elements—a vase of flowers, a seashell, a bottle of scented water—share table space with a pencil, ruler, ink bottle, a sketchbook with two of Steinberg's classic image types, and a colored drawing of a small-town street, the kind of local scene he sketched during his worldwide travels, here signaled by the box of Turkish matches. In the 1970s, Steinberg began to make "Drawing Tables," relief sculptures with lifelike, hand-carved components. Orient Express Table combines the tools of his art with the food of his life—a sculpted ruler, brush, pen, pencil box, a loaf of bread, and slices of mushroom and cucumber. Across the top is a painting done in the "postcard" style he invented to signify landscape. |
Orient Express Table, 1981. Mixed media on wood, 23 x 31 x 2 in. Private collection. |
Some drawings present Steinberg working, as in the 1969 sheet where he is hidden among the Cubist lines at right, while the letters "APR" at lower center and the adjacent "12" mark this particular day at the drawing table. An earlier ink drawing of 1964 treats the theme through Steinberg's witty play on the function of line: the left edge of the table turns into an elaborate French curve that ends at Steinberg's hand holding the pen—a creative continuum from work surface to image to generating hand.
Untitled (Drawing Table "Apr 12"), 1969. Ink, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 in. The Saul Steinberg Foundation. |
Untitled, 1964. Ink on paper. Originally published in The New Yorker, January 9, 1965. |
November 23, 1968Background In Saul Steinberg's world, people make their way through life by disguising themselves in invented personas. He likened this masquerade to the styles of art, turning the visual vocabulary of his profession into cultural commentary. The geometric squares in the 1957 ink drawing below, for example, interlock father, mother, two children, and a dog, suggesting both family unity and enforced conformity. A later drawing presents a living room populated by design motifs, which Steinberg described as "a conversation between people....A very hard outside with a soft inside sits on a straight-backed chair talking to a fuzzy spiral. On the sofa there is a boring labyrinth speaking to a hysterical line...." Even letters of the alphabet are personified. The strong, angular capital "A" at the door in the 1965 drawing is a man greeting his family: his wife, a softly shaded capital "B," with their two children, the lowercase "b" and "a," too young to be differentiated. The family members in the 1968 New Yorker cover appear in different graphic styles of fine and popular art—Pointillism, cartoon contours, academic life drawing, fashion advertising, hatching, stippling, and children's art. Has Steinberg presented their steadfast individuality or their inherent incompatibility? The richness of his art allows both interpretations. |
Untitled, 1957. Ink on paper, 11 1/2 x 10 in. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Originally published in The New Yorker, March 2, 1957. |
Untitled. Ink, graphite, and watercolor on paper, 22 x 23 in. The Saul Steinberg Foundation. Originally published in The New Yorker, August 11, 1962. |
Untitled, 1965. Ink on paper, 14 1/2 x 23 in. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Originally published in The New Yorker, December 4, 1965. |
Steinberg's Biography
For nearly sixty years, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) filled the pages of The New Yorker with acerbic, witty drawings that elevated the graphic language of cartoons and illustration to fine art. Born in Romania, he studied philosophy and literature in Bucharest. After enrolling at the Politecnico in Milan as an architecture student in 1933, he began contributing cartoons to the satirical biweekly humor newspaper Bertoldo. On October 25, 1941, while awaiting an entry visa to the United States, Steinberg published his first drawing in The New Yorker. Over the next six decades, more than 1,200 drawings and 85 covers captivated New Yorker readers. In these same years, more than 80 one-man shows of Steinberg's art were mounted in museums and galleries throughout America and Europe.
Despite his success in the art world, Steinberg never abandoned magazine reproduction. "I like work to be on the page," he wrote. The New Yorker drawings and covers represent the extraordinary range of his graphic inventiveness and probing mind. Using the styles of high art and popular culture, he turned an affectionate eye on Art Deco architecture, automobiles, diners, baseball players, casinos, and cowboys. But his astute pen also exposed false pieties, cultural affectations, and pompous officialdom. In the pages of The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg kept a journal of 20th-century America.
See the entire Saul Steinberg collection.
The Saul Steinberg Foundation
The Saul Steinberg Foundation is a nonprofit organization established by the artist's Will. Its mission is to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg's contribution to 20th-century art. Through the development of databases, archives, and publications, the Foundation will serve as a resource for the international curatorial-scholarly community as well as the general public. Address: www.saulsteinbergfoundation.org.