Saul Steinberg

Biography

Steinberg’s first drawing appeared in the Milan humour weekly Bertoldo on 27 October 1936. It was signed with the pseudonym “Xavier”. In a year and a half the magazine printed more than two hundred of his works, while the artist was still finishing his studies as an architect.

He was born on 15 June 1914 in Râmnicu Sărat, into a Jewish family. His father, Moritz (Maurice) Steinberg, was a bookbinder who ran a workshop making cardboard boxes; his mother’s name was Rosa. By some accounts Steinberg grew up in Bucharest. In 1932 he entered the University of Bucharest, and the following year moved to Milan, to the Polytechnic University, to study architecture. He received his degree in 1940. He never worked as an architect, but to my mind it shows in his drawings: he renders the styles of buildings, the layout of city streets and linear perspective with complete assurance.

Racial laws had been introduced in Italy, and a Jew could no longer stay there. In 1941 Steinberg left for the Dominican Republic and spent a year waiting for a US visa. His drawings were by then appearing in American periodicals, and his first contribution to The New Yorker was published in October 1941. He arrived in New York in July 1942, according to some accounts at the magazine’s invitation. A few months later he received a commission in the US Naval Reserve and was seconded to the Office of Strategic Services. He served in the Morale Operations division in China, North Africa and Italy; according to other accounts, his service also took him to India. In 1943 he became an American citizen. In 1944, after being sent back to Washington, he married the Romanian-born painter Hedda Sterne. They separated in 1960.

After the war he went on working for The New Yorker, and also for Fortune, Vogue, Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. At the same time he began to exhibit. In 1946, together with Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi and Robert Motherwell, he took part in the exhibition “Fourteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From the early 1950s his drawings were shown by avant-garde galleries and museums. He was affiliated with the New York galleries of Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis and with the Galerie Maeght in Paris. He had more than eighty solo shows in the United States, Europe and South America.

In 1956 he visited the Soviet Union: Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa, Tashkent, Tbilisi and Samarkand. From the trip he made a series of good-humoured, ironic drawings, which The New Yorker published. At the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, the American pavilion was decorated with a large mural by him.

He mixed techniques freely, often on a single sheet: ink, pencil, charcoal, watercolour, gouache, oil, and also rubber stamps and fingerprints. He moved into three dimensions as well, painting paper bags with eyeholes cut in them, in which friends posed for photographs. Besides magazine drawings and gallery work, he made advertising art, photoworks, textiles, stage sets and murals. He himself admitted that he did not quite belong to the art world, the cartoon world or the magazine world, and so the art world did not know where to place him.

His best-known work became the cover of The New Yorker of 29 March 1976, “View of the World from 9th Avenue”. It is a map of the world as a Manhattanite sees it: the foreground is taken up by the blocks of Ninth Avenue, beyond lies the Hudson, and the rest of the country and the world are squeezed into a narrow strip at the horizon.

In 1978 the Whitney Museum held a large retrospective of his work. Steinberg died on 12 May 1999 in New York. Under his will the Saul Steinberg Foundation was established, which works to study and preserve his legacy. A posthumous retrospective opened in Valencia, at the Institute of Modern Art, in 2002.