Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...doyen of cartoonists, Saul Steinberg is also to growing numbers of his colleagues a "serious" artist of the first rank. "In linking art to the modern consciousness," declares Art Critic Harold Rosenberg, "no artist is more relevant than Steinberg. That he remains an art-world outsider is a problem that critical thinking in art must compel itself to confront." That showdown is about to begin. This week an exhibition of 258 drawings, watercolors, paintings and assemblages by Steinberg opens at New York City's Whitney Museum, accompanied by a book (Saul Steinberg; Knopf; $10.95 softcover) with critical appraisal...
...most remarkable oeuvres in applied art today: the product of an intelligence so finely drawn, insinuating and (at times) sadistic, so refracted in its maze of linguistic mirrors as to suggest no parallels. The best of Steinberg presents you with a master?but a master of what...
Steinberg's work is always signaling that there are more interesting matters in art than "authenticity" in the expressionist sense. It looks beyond the man to the mask and finds there an extraordinary variety of personae, by turns bland, urbane, comic, ridiculous and distinctly threatening. The first mask of all is style itself. "I want the minimum of performance in my work," says Steinberg, a virtuoso if ever there was one. "Performance bores me. What interests me is the invention. I like to make a parody of bravura. You have to think of a lot of my work as some...
Steinberg can fill a sheet with figures, each of them drawn in a different style?cubist, pointillist, child art, hatched shading, mock sculptural, hairy scribble, Leger boilerplate, art deco?and display a wide, ironic complicity with art history while making no final commitment to a "way" of drawing. The drawing works because he so obviously possesses each style. It is imitation without flattery. As a dandy, Steinberg owns all the hats in his wardrobe. A still life like Belgian Air Mail 1971, is not a "cubist-type" drawing, a thing done in homage to Braque and Picasso. It is rather...
...father Moritz was a printer, bookbinder and boxmaker. The infant Saul had the run of his workshop, which was filled with embossed paper, stamps, colored cardboard, reproductions of "museum" madonnas (literally, chocolate-box art) and type blocks. These were his toys. "I had from the beginning the large wooden type used for posters; so if later I made, for instance, a drawing of a man holding up a question mark by the ball, it's not such a great invention?it was something known to me." And so letters presented themselves to Steinberg as things, and "I have always...