Saul Steinberg: Contributions to The New Yorker

Steinberg, Saul. the New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.) This exhibition, a collection of Saul Steinberg’s contributions to The New Yorker magazine, comes to Artspace from Yale Union (YU) centre for contemporary art in Portland, Oregon (USA). The project has been organised by Scott Ponik and Robert Snowden.

“For more than fifty years, Saul Steinberg was The New Yorker’s nonpareil sketcher, observer, spy and—though he would have thought the word dingy and depressing—its chief cartoonist, too. But then he disliked being called an artist, too, since it called to his mind the salon-swindle of ‘exciting’ objects and collectors’ manias. ‘All of those drawings, whimpering at night in the wrong houses,’ was his dry description of the consequences of selling pictures to collectors, rather than publishers.”* Whatever he is, this exhibition, naming The New Yorker’s consecutive editors, collects some two hundred of his one thousand published contributions, presented as is: magazines, collected through time, some slightly yellowed and hung with that irrevocable library smell (…).

As a matter of biographical fact, Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) was a misfit. Born in Romania, European to the bone, he made little of his origins; “pure Dada,” he called his native land. He studied and made his artistic beginnings in Italy, receiving in 1940 a doctoral degree in an architecture he never practiced. Steinberg was shaken out of a congenial life by the turbulence of politics and war, and cast to America in the 1940s where he lived strung up between the unfortunate binary of Artist v. Cartoonist.

There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, zoological nomenclature and taxonomy are everything. But good thinkers, the ones that outlive their own historical circumstances, are always much more complicated than the rhetorical truths we have about them. And that’s what we like most about Steinberg. We like the absence of the-world-as-represented-by-anybody-else.

*Gopnik, Adam. “Saul and the City.” In The Guardian (Nov. 26, 2008).