Word: artiste
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Every artist finds his scale?the size of gesture proper to the image and medium he uses. "The scale of the drawing," Steinberg points out, "is given to you by the instrument you use," and pen drawings, being governed by the radius of the hand, cannot be very large. "The nib has an elasticity meant for writing, and that is why I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing. But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can't be reasoned in the mind. It can only...
Ogni dipintore dipinge se, a Renaissance maxim ran: every painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake...
...drew peering out of a man's eyes. Even Steinberg's cats have large meditative noses and Austro-Hungarian whiskers. The tone of his work is comic, but one's guffaw, once provoked, is checked by Steinberg's precision about how the self may be allowed to materialize. The artist seeks complicity with the audience, but he does it (so to speak) from the driver's seat...
...artist who has had such a pervasive influence on the U.S. was born in Rumania, a fact he considers fortuitous. In 1914 it was "a corridor, a marginal place"?a palimpsest on which various neighbors and colonial powers (Russia, Hungary, Turkey) had left their traces. To this day, Steinberg confesses himself to be "culturally a born Levantine?my sort of country goes from the eastern outskirts of Milan all the way to Afghanistan...
...biggest impression was made by an autobiographical sketch of Gorky's. It "was an excellent metaphor for how I felt. One must consider the idea of the artist as orphan, an orphaned prodigy, whose parents find him some where?the bulrushes, perhaps. To pretend to be an orphan, alone, is a form of narcissism. I suppose all children have this disgusting form of self-pity; but more so the artist, who is Robinson Crusoe. He must invent his stories, his pleasures; he succeeds in reconstructing a parody of civilization from scratch. He makes himself by education, by survival, by constantly...