Word: steinberg
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Everyone, no doubt, is unique; but some are more so than others, and Saul Steinberg, who died last week at 84, was very much so. There really was no one like him in the annals of American art. What was so remarkable about him was not his genius as a cartoonist or his qualities as a "fine" artist, but the way he combined both within the same body of work. He didn't flip between a serious and a funny side. Both were intrinsic to the same images, which entranced his audience for decades. But this also delayed his recognition...
...kind of image that only an expatriate could have made, and Steinberg, before anything else, was an expatriate. When dictators in the 1930s ranted about rootless Jews, Steinberg was what they had in mind. Born near Bucharest, Romania, the son of a printer (hence an early fascination with type), he studied architecture in Milan in the early '30s. He never designed a real building, but he was to develop an exquisite sense of architectural convention, of stylistic parody, that shows in the dream skyscrapers and iron galleries of his later cityscapes. In 1941 he made his way to Lisbon...
...girls and cowboys teetering on their high heels like stilts. Never vagrant or fussy, always economical, his line described conundrums that were at the heart of an artist's identity concerns: a little image, for instance, of a man with a pen whose drawn nib is drawing himself. To Steinberg, each drawing remade its author. It was both a mask and a card of identity, and a proof of existence as well. Never an expressionist, he liked, he said, "to make a parody of bravura. I wish to create a fiction of skill in the same sense that my writing...
...proof of that: the Mickey Mouse face, he told an interviewer, is "without character or age; for me it represents the junk-food people, the TV children, the spoilt young ones who have all their experiences, inferior as they are, handed to them on a plate." Nobody could say Steinberg was a particularly warm or approachable person. He loathed mediocrity and made no secret of it. He simply knew too much, and in his death he took that knowledge with him. He had no equals. Now he has no successors...
DIED. Saul Steinberg, 84, artist and cartoonist; in New York City (see THE ARTS...