Saul Steinberg
(Râmnicu Sărat, Romania, 1914 - 1999, New York, New York)
American, born Romania
From the Smithsonian American Art Museum:
A draughtsman who does watercolors, collages, assemblages, and oil paintings, Saul Steinberg is best known as the New Yorker cartoonist whose fanciful people and
animals uncannily capture the masquerades of modern life. Using a cast of characters and elements that includes cats, crocodiles, letters and punctuation marks, architectural
monuments, and household equipment, Steinberg finds riddles more truthful than answers. Masked by the wit of his visual and verbal puns is social comment; Steinberg considers himself a “writer in line” and calls drawing a way of “reasoning on paper.” He continually questions the nature of people and things and uses his cartoons to meditate
on a limitless range of issues. Steinberg studied for a year at the University of Bucharest, but in 1933 transferred to the architectural school at the Polytechnic University in Milan. In 1936 he began publishing cartoons in an Italian humor magazine, and soon after receiving his architecture degree in 1940, Steinberg was publishing regularly in the New Yorker. The following year he immigrated to the United States and during World War II served in the U. S. Navy.
After World War II, Steinberg continued to publish drawings in The New Yorker and other periodicals, including Fortune, Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Harper's Bazaar. At the same time, he embarked on an exhibition career in galleries and museums. In 1946, he was included in the critically acclaimed "Fourteen Americans" show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibiting along with Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell, among others. Steinberg went on to have more than eighty one-artist shows in galleries and museums throughout the US, Europe, and South America. A dozen museums and institutions have in-depth collections of his work, and examples are included in the holdings of more than eighty other public collections.
Steinberg's long, multifaceted career encompassed works in many media and appeared in different contexts. In addition to magazine publications and gallery art, he produced advertising art, photoworks (combining photography and drawing or collage), textiles, stage sets, and murals. His work is difficult to position within the canons of postwar art history. He himself defined the problem: "I don't quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn't quite know where to place me."