Word: steinberg
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...Saul Steinberg has always refused to be photographed: at the desk where he produces some of the sharpest, most visionary cartoons of our time, Steinberg keeps a couple of special masks, made from paper bags and decorated with parodies of his own face, to thwart any would-be portraitist. As if a photograph would catch his image in a distortion he could not control. As if being so revealed would endanger his perspective as self-appointed "inspector" of modern life--a term which is also the title of his new book of cartoons...
Cartooning and caricature have always been arts of the great cities. Daumier had his Paris, George Grosz the Berlin of the twenties, and Steinberg is best known through the New Yorker. Steinberg's New York, however, is more a city of the mind than anything else, a set of prejudices and routines which shape the life of the whole culture...
Cartooning has started making its way into art galleries in recent year, and for a time threatened to enter the realm of pure camp. Steinberg has had several shows, there was a Thomas Nast revival some time ago, and well-known commercial cartoonists are now able to sell their originals with relative ease. David Levine, whose caricatures of political and cultural figures helped propel The New York Review of Books into its ascendancy, is probably the best known figure. New York Times theater cartoonist Al Hirschfield, who specializes in seeing how many times he can scrawl his daughter's name...
...Steinberg is a little bit different from any of those. His view is wider, and more self-conscious. He is the creator of landscapes and illustrated parables as well as of imaginative characters. His line has a verve and sophistication which he has been learning from the best in "conventional" art for over thirty years. (The Inspector is his sixth book since 1945.) He has clearly learned a lot from Grosz's fat generals and Berlin prostitutes, from Paul Klee's wandering tactile line, and perhaps less noticeably, from the sketches of Picasso. The Inspector includes a number of collage...
...less distinction is that strange collection--The Duke of Plaza-Toro and his suite. As the hen-pecked grandee, Bill Fuller keeps dignity; Judith Steinberg's duchess dowdiness is meet...