Word: steinberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are simple drawings in Steinberg's oeuvre, but very few simple situations. He delights in apparently simple ones: the conflict between a hero and a dragon, for instance. But then we find the fight is rigged. The hero and the monster are actually partners; they have a deal; without a dragon, what can a hero do? One drawing makes this point with particular elegance: a new kind of adversary, a man with a cannon, is drawing a bead on the dragon. The hero is about to save his enemy by attacking the gunman from the rear. In another drawing...
...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...
...elusive self keeps peeping through, like the rabbit he once 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...
...does not expect social optimism from a man of Steinberg's background, and one does not get it. The U.S. that rises from some of his drawings in the 1970s is an edgy, nasty place, a theater of disaster populated by grotesques. The white paper takes on the look of Manhattan's 42nd Street in summer, bombed out by midday glare. Whores, bums, flint-faced Irish cops, frazzled black pimps, rats, crocodiles up from some imagined sewer, sirens emitting Technicolor laser blasts of sound, bulbous cars belching their exhaust smoke, an S and M homunculus encased in glittering leather with...
...seen as Mickey Mouse. In Six Terrorists, 1971, a file of them strut across the page, in aviator jackets and miniskirts, equipped with flick knife and carbine: young bourgeois clones of affectless violence, Black Shirt, S.L.A. or Brigata Rossa. It is an uncannily predictive drawing. "The Mickey Mouse face," Steinberg remarks, "is sexless, neither black nor white, without character or age: for me it represents the junk-food people, the spoilt young ones who have all their experiences, inferior as they are, handed to them on a plate." An encyclopedic disgust pervades these drawings. But it is not a common...