Untitled

More Information

This work is a drawing with a New York City street, including dogs, a crocodile, screaming figures, and a woman in a feathered hat. In the background, the Empire State building rises against a red sky. It was included on page 122 of the collection of drawings "Saul Steinberg: The Discovery of America" (introduction by Arthur C. Danto, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). This drawing is part a body of work that Steinberg called “Urban Terrorists.” The late 1960s and early 1970s—like other moments in Steinberg’s career—saw more than one stylistic or conceptual innovation in his work. The most arresting and lasting shift in Steinberg’s art came at this moment, when America was deep into the Vietnam war. To express his own aversion to the war and the politics that directed it, he appropriated the visual style of the anti-war counterculture. This style, as Joel Smith observed, was influenced by underground comix, “the visual expression of hippie culture,” which waged “war on conformity and the Protestant work ethic… by drawing far-out, drug-addled fantasies.” The urban terrorists began to populate Steinberg’s drawings—cartoonish thugs, raging cops, predatory birds and reptiles, and equally predatory men and women, their heads and torsos supported on bizarrely long legs. “My line wants to remind constantly that it’s made of ink,” Steinberg said. “I appeal to the complicity of my reader who will transform this line into meaning by using our common background of culture, history, poetry.”