SAUL STEINBERG, EL SIGNO ERRANTE

The wandering nature of Steinberg’s work reflects his own biography. Born in 1914 in a village in Romania, he was the son of a middle-class Jewish couple. Shortly afterwards, he moved with his family to the capital. The outbreak of the Great War compelled them to move once more, and they did not return to Bucharest until after the armistice at the end of 1919. These years were turbulent, characterised by widespread anti-Semitism: «My childhood, my adolescence in Romania were a little like being a Black in the state of Mississippi», the artist once admitted. 

With the rise of anti-Semitism, the life of Romanian Jews became more difficult. After studying philosophy and literature at the University of Bucharest, Steinberg moved to Milan, where he enrolled at the Politecnico to study architecture. This was a crucial moment in both his education and personal life, as it was there that he met Aldo Buzzi, a significant figure in his life. He also began working as a cartoonist around this time. He soon gained fame in the humor press through his work for the satirical publication Bertoldo. However, the introduction of racial laws in 1938 compelled him to leave the country. He then decided to emigrate to the United States, where part of his father’s family lived, but was not immediately successful. 

The journey was quite difficult and involved, among other things, his arrest and subsequent imprisonment in an internment camp. These events influenced his later interest in figures of power and his identity as an expatriate. Many of his works reflect this, featuring an abundance of images related to official documents, such as visas, passports, and fingerprints. He finally managed to flee Europe in 1941, although he had to wait nearly a year in the Dominican Republic to secure a visa to enter the United States. 

He arrived in New York in 1942, but his travels were only just beginning. Within a few months, he was recruited by the Naval Intelligence Service and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which sent him to China, India, North Africa, and Italy during World War II. After the war, he frequently travelled in Europe and across the United States for work or leisure.

According to art critic Harold Rosenberg, Steinberg’s status as a perpetual immigrant shaped the nature of his work: «Because he was an immigrant, what was commonplace to natives was an oddity to him; through persisting in reimmigrating, he has preserved his newcomer’s astonishment.» 

Steinberg’s passion for literature started early in life. An avid reader since childhood, he considered himself, first and foremost, a writer, more akin to authors such as Nabokov or Joyce than to visual artists like Warhol or Picasso, whom he knew and admired nonetheless. Steinberg’s closest relationships also included writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Norman Manea, and Ian Frazier, among others.

The artistic essence of his work challenges convention He described himself as a «writer who draws» and created his own language for creative expression. He did so, he claimed, because he had not mastered any of the languages he spoke: neither Italian, which he adopted at the age of nineteen, nor English, after settling in the United States, nor even Romanian, his native tongue, which he usually belittled. His pursuit of the precise “word” is best expressed through drawings, signs, or calligraphy — sometimes deliberately indecipherable — allowing him to craft dialogues, puns, and entire stories, all layered with multiple meanings. The fact that his pieces have no single interpretation is another characteristic that defines him as a writer. Steinberg aims to keep an open dialogue with his “reader”, as he often refers to the viewer, to whom he consistently grants the final word.

In 1945, the artist released his first book, “All in Line”. This was followed by works such as “The Art of Living”, “The Labyrinth”, and “The Inspector”, among others, in which he explored literary themes including identity, communication issues, and the absurdity of everyday life. Over time, the substance of his works became more philosophical in nature. The two autobiographical books published with Aldo Buzzi at Buzzi’s initiative warrant special mention. “Reflections and Shadows” is Steinberg’s memoir, which he dictated to Buzzi, who then edited it. “Letters to Aldo Buzzi, 1945-1999”, as its title suggests, is a collection of letters sent by Steinberg to his dear friend. Buzzi preserved them for several decades and published them after Steinberg’s death. These letters are among the most beautiful examples of literary correspondence, and one only needs to read them to grasp the deeply literary spirit of their author.

In the absence of a language truly his own — he despised Romanian as a language of beggars and policemen, and Italian and English were learned in adulthood — Steinberg considered the line to be his true language. He employed it as a means of expression, making it a signature element of his work. It is no coincidence that the title of his first book is “All in Line”.

Among his works, the drawings he created for “The Children’s Labyrinth” stand out. This work was a clover-like structure with a Calder mobile at the center installed at the 10th Milan Triennial in 1954. Although it was demolished at the end of the Triennial, Steinberg’s four extensive drawings have been preserved: “The Line”, “Shores of the Mediterranean”, “Cities of Italy” and “Types of Architecture”. 

“The Line,” which begins and ends with a hand drawing, is Steinberg’s manifesto of the conceptual possibilities of the line, as a single horizontal line shifts meaning from one passage to another — waterline, clothesline, railway line, among many others — commenting on its own transformative nature. 

Steinberg’s characters—medieval knights battling a monster rabbit, Don Quixote confronting a giant pineapple, letters engaged in a flirtatious conversation in a hotel room—invite the viewer to undertake a playful, existential journey whose destination is not fixed. 

The fact that paradoxes, double meanings, and puns are part of Steinberg’s own language means that his images stimulate the mind of the “reader” who encounters them. His creations provoke ideas, or rather — as Roland Barthes says — something more valuable: he imparts the longing for ideas. 

The message his pieces convey is never closed. Steinberg himself was not definitive about what he wanted to convey.  Sometimes, as he said he interviews, his images were indecipherable even to him. They are more like reflections, jokes, or riddles that he presented to himself before sharing with the viewer, whom he always invited to interpret in their own way. Steinberg’s central theme is artifice, and his aim as an artist is, above all, for the “reader” to go beyond perception. In the best-case scenario, it will be viewers who manage to discover some truth on their own.

Steinberg arrived in New York in 1942, after waiting nearly a year in the Dominican Republic for a visa to enter the United States. Once there, although he continued to travel for work and leisure, he remained connected to the city until his death in 1999. Moreover, his relationship to his new homeland was complicated: «Ah! I love America […]. Freedom of movement, freedom to be whatever you want. America is utopia! There are no social classes, no obligations… What I also like about it is that everything is discarded quickly.  Bins are always full; you can find grand pianos, last year’s televisions, or sofas: it’s the wealth of rubbish in America. Another thing: you can be alone. If you die, no one notices.»

He was especially critical of the superficiality of social relationships. An active participant in the social scene, he met many Americans and made quite a few friends among them; however, most of the people closest to him were immigrants like himself.

New York was the city that brought him into the global spotlight. He quickly found success thanks to his contributions to the country’s leading magazines, especially The New Yorker, a publication he regarded as his true home. Some of the most important milestones in his artistic career took place in the city: his participation in the 1946 exhibition “Fourteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art, his regular exhibitions at the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries beginning in 1952, and his first retrospective, in 1978 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of Steinberg’s greatest virtues was his observational skills, strengthened by his outsider’s perspective on a newly discovered world. This is how he depicted the American landscape —the genuine one, with its cubist-inspired architecture, its dressed-up women, and its speedy vehicles,  but also the mythological one, with its Wild West, its Uncle Sams, its Masonic pyramids and its crocodiles, which the artist perceived as symbols of danger.

Steinberg belongs to the generation of American artists who, after World War II, turned individual identity into the central theme of their work. As art critic Harold Rosenberg explains, unlike Pollock, de Kooning or Rothko, Steinberg’s search for the self is based on the idea that everything constantly represents itself. He is interested in how people and things invent themselves, or are invented, to present themselves to the world.

This is where the propensity for comedy arises. Steinberg believed that disguise, parody, and farce were part of his life since childhood in Romania, which he described as a «masquerade country». He considered Italy to be a country not without its own operatic delusions, which he replaced with an even bigger stage: the United States, «a land where everyone is busily engaged in becoming someone else—thus, as Steinberg saw it, an artist.

Rosenberg also points out that Steinberg’s iconography is made up of a cast of characters that serve as his disguise: the silhouetted small man (the more or less responsible citizen), the cat (the small man with a tail and whiskers), the dog (a more circumspect cat), the fish (the cat’s sphinx), the artist (the hand with the pen, the small man with the easel), the hero (a knight on his horse).

Over the years, Steinberg’s subsequent characterisations and metaphors reinforced his conviction that people hide behind their self-created styles. This idea is expressed in his work in many ways, including performatively. Steinberg frequently posed for photographs wearing paper masks on which he had drawn his own face. He produced a series of masks of other people with a wide variety of expressions between 1959 and 1962. These became famous thanks to the photographs taken by his friend, the photographer Inge Morath, who captured him and his friends wearing the masks in various settings.

«Why am I so reluctant to draw from life (dal vero), and why do I look for any excuse not to? It’s hard to tell the truth about anything, or to portray oneself in terms of something else. What I try to do is to say with painting something more than what the eye sees. My paintings are not so much paintings in themselves as parts of a table, objects of a drawing table, the painter’s work table.» 

Steinberg considered everything to be an artifice: people, animals, objects and even nature itself, «which bears the imprint of the social and political world, including the forms provided by the accumulated styles of the past.» Accordingly, Rosenberg concludes that Steinberg’s artistic essence has nothing to do with things as they are or the appearance of things, but rather with the artistry of things, their style.

The fact that, according to Steinberg, style is related to the stereotypes that, over time, influence everything around us. When portraying people, objects or landscapes, Steinberg tried to strip them of their artificiality to reveal what lies concealed behind them. He often achieves this through the use of parody, farce, or collage, in an attempt to reveal the image from an unexpected perspective. The intention is to provoke a feeling of strangeness or alienation in viewers, inviting them to think and look beyond the apparent.

The artist took his idea of representation a step further in the 1970s by shifting to the third dimension with Drawing Table Reliefs, which were composed of desk and studio paraphernalia, including pens, pencils, brushes, rulers, and notebooks. These objects served the same identifying function as the official signatures, fingerprints, or postmarks that characterised his work. These are not reality, but something created by Steinberg to represent another dimension of his autobiography, embodied by the objects to which he feels most attached: his “erotic art”, as he liked to define it.

Steinberg was critical of what he perceived as the shallowness of American social relationships. Nevertheless he frequently attended social and professional events where he met artists and writers he came to cherish. Cartier-Bresson, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, John Updike, Federico Fellini, Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut and Vladimir Nabokov are some of the most notable.

None of Steinberg’s close friendships were as profound as his bond with Aldo Buzzi. Their friendship, which began in the 1930s at the Politecnico in Milan, endured until Steinberg’s death.  Although an ocean separated them, their bond remained strong through frequent meetings and the exchange of letters over more than five decades. This deep connection with Buzzi significantly influenced Steinberg’s two most personal books, underscoring the profound impact of their relationship on his work.

Steinberg’s bond with Hedda Sterne was also special. A painter of Romanian origin like himself, they met some months after he  arrived in the United States. They wed in 1944 and, although they separated in 1960, they remained friends for life. Steinberg’s subsequent relationship with German designer Sigrid Spaeth, who suffered from depression, was a stormy one. Spaeth committed suicide in 1996. Her death deepened the artist’s melancholy and depression at the end of his life.

Steinberg found an unexpected companion in a cat named Papoose. For many years, he and Sigrid shared his Amagansett country house with this beloved pet, who became an essential member of the household.  Animals were a constant feature in his work from the very beginning—in particular, cats and dogs, which he often turned into his alter ego. Rabbits, lions and, above all, crocodiles, representing a kind of monster for him, also feature in his creations: «It’s something that exists and that some people try to kill.  The crocodile is society, the museum, the ministry, the state, the organisation… […] I never try to kill it; […].  I travel by crocodile and, in the end, I try to turn it into a good monster.» 

At one point, Steinberg and Bellow found themselves surrounded by crocodiles while sailing down the Nile. According to the artist, they were as terrified by the idea of disaster as they were by comical obituaries that would be written.

Steinberg’s respect for his audience was profound. He saw his ‘readers’ as the ones who truly give meaning to his work. They do so, he said, by actively drawing on a «common backgorund of culture, history, poetry».

In addition to relying on the viewer’s complicity, Steinberg directly involved them in several of his pieces, incorporating them into the work itself. This is one of the ways he approached another of his central themes: the reciprocal influence between the observer and the observed. 

The mural collage “Art Viewers” is particularly noteworthy in this regard. According to Sheila Schwartz, of The Saul Steinberg Foundation, this colossal work is the culmination of the artist’s twenty-year exploration of the viewer’s relationship with the artwork: «In a Steinbergian play of reality levels, visitors see a simulacrum of themselves wandering through the gallery looking at Steinbergs.» For Schwartz, “Art Viewers˝ is also a tribute to the collage making that Steinberg practised throughout his life, a craft that was deeply influenced by his father’s profession as a decorative box maker.

Spectator and work merge in other works by Steinberg, such as his parodies of exhibitions.  He also explores the theme of art within art when he playfully imitates certain artists or emulates styles and techniques, which he sometimes combines in the same work as a form of art criticism. In a 1963 letter to Aldo Buzzi, he wrote: «I haven’t done much work but I’ve rather enjoyed making myself a very elegant collection of Mondrians and a few cubist collages of Braque, Gris, etc.all done by me and well framed. Nobody suspects and so the country house has become a great luxury for me too.»

The wandering quality of Steinberg’s work is also related to the fine line that separates his art from mass culture. This is mainly due to the popularity his work has gained in The New Yorker. His collaboration with the well-known New York weekly began before he arrived in the United States and lasted for more than five decades. This alliance brought him fame, making it difficult to categorize his work. Even he was not immune to the contradiction underlying his work: «People who see a drawing in The New Yorker will think automatically that it´s funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it is artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie they think it’s a prediction…». 

On the other hand, it is Steinberg’s drawings on the covers and inside pages of The New Yorker that make his work more widely known to the public than that of other artists. At times, this popularity is so disproportionate that it annoyed him. Such is the case with his drawing “View of the World from 9th Avenue”, published on the cover of The New Yorker on March 29, 1976. As Steinberg’s ironic view of New Yorkers’ perspective on the rest of the world, this image has been imitated, distorted, and reproduced ad nauseam around the world for years without his permission.

Nevertheless, the collaboration was mutually beneficial and decisive for Steinberg in multiple ways. Among other reasons, he considered his The New Yorker work a craft that allowed him the freedom to pursue other projects. His long-standing relationship with The New Yorker, which he considered his true home, had not been without its challenges. After William Shawn, editor-in-chief for thirty-five years, was fired in 1987, Steinberg, in protest, stopped contributing to the magazine for several years.

Among Steinberg’s late works for The New Yorker, a cover stands out showing a the year two thousand on the horizon at the end of one of his distinctive maps. At the end of his life, he was particularly melancholic and pessimistic, believing that there was no place for him in the 21st century. Confirming his premonition, Steinberg died on May 12, 1999, in his New York apartment, surrounded by his dear friends Aldo Buzzi, Hedda Sterne, and Ian Frazier.