London Sketchbook

The Artist who helped invent New York

Twenty Americans, 1975

IT IS A TRICKY business trying to pin down this butterfly - Saul Steinberg, who illuminated The New Yorker for over fifty years - is notoriously elusive. Even he regarded art history’s reductivist categories as the dreaded “crocodile” - which he prided himself in giving the slip. Until now.

We think of him as the quintessential New Yorker, but he was born in Romania; he was a cartoonist, but shied away from ‘gags’. Only he and fellow artist William Steig were granted the privilege by the cartoon editor of The New Yorker “not to have to be funny” - that is, to submit stand-alone drawings without a caption. He earned a living all his life as a cartoonist, and yet he proudly described himself as a “non-professional”, prizing artistic freedom over money or fame. He believed a cartoonist’s “lack of respectability” was a precious commodity.

At the age of seventy, Steinberg sued Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement of his most famous New Yorker cover, from March 29, 1976, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” which famously portrays a view of the world from a parochial New Yorker’s point-of-view. It shows Manhattan in all its glory in the foreground, with the world beyond the Hudson River telescoped into playfully labelled inconsequential lumps of land on the horizon - from a brown strip called “Jersey” to the distant trio - Russia, Japan and China. The poster design for the movie, “A View from Moscow”, was clearly plagiarism, and the judge landed squarely on the artist’s side. And yet Steinberg’s own testimony stresses a more subtle injury, that “his reputation was injured by having the public believe that he voluntarily lent his work to a profit-making enterprise.”

For Steinberg, his own artistic integrity was supremely important - it was everything he had fought for, and lived for. The idea that his art could be compromised by commercial enterprise was abhorrent to him. Above all, it was freedom of expression he craved - and perceived in every creature in every street in New York.

So eloquent was the judge’s defence that Steinberg couldn’t resist sending copies of the District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton’s twenty-five-page decision to his friends, celebrating the decision as a “glorious dream of every humble individual persecuted by invincible forces.” (Read Stanton’s 1987 decision here.)

Steinberg adored New York, and New York loved him back. The poet Charles Simic, a friend of the artist in later years, writes in his introduction to Saul Steinberg: Illuminations: ‘Saul said that the reason we understood each other perfectly was that we were both reared in what he called “the Turkish Delight manner”‘. Both were immigrants from Eastern Europe - Steinberg grew up in Bucharest, the child of Russian-Jewish parents, Simic in Belgrade. They both arrived in New York after the war, “pop-eyed” at “the city full of surprises”. Simic recalls Steinberg’s telling remark, “Being an immigrant made one into a child again … A child who talked funny and noticed things natives never did.” They would walk down Lexington Avenue and Steinberg would spot the boy with the toy wooden monkey on wheels; the tropical fish in a pet-shop window; the mini-skirted lady stepping out of a limo. He was a “world-class noticer” - a discipline that informs even his most surreal street-scenes, with their riot of styles and visual non-sequitors that sum up New York.

And yet there is more to his art than his parade of eccentric New Yorkers. There is a dark source deep within his past that fuels his art - a profound hatred of Fascism and tyranny he left behind in Europe. He despised Romania, his “fucking patria” - that willing partner of the Nazis - and his mother, whom he regarded as such a tyrant that his drawings of Mussolini bear a striking resemblance to her mountainous frame and long, straight, stubborn line of a mouth. He escaped to Milan, where he studied architecture and dropped his mother tongue, preferring to speak Italian. But before long the draconian racial laws descended, and in 1938, all Jews were banned from “the professions” - another category he resisted all his life. He did receive his diploma, but it was inscribed to “Saul Steinberg of the Hebrew race.” Every time he signed his work in unmistakably clear block letters, simply “SAUL STEINBERG,” he was declaring his freedom. He even turned the Kafkaesque stamps of officialdom into his own quirky, random ones.

The Sketchbook Table, 1974

It was New York - and The New Yorker - that lay at the end of his long journey to freedom. He secured his visa at last, and a flight to Miami on June 12, 1942. Transports were in short supply, so on Einstein’s advice - how often can you say that in life - Steinberg took a bus from Miami up the East Coast to New York City.

The only category Steinberg ever embraced was his American citizenship, but ultimately, he was a New Yorker, a glorious breed largely of his own invention. Any other category was unthinkable, like an airless, windlowless box for one of his delightfully eccentric birds, that flitter about with such irrepressible mischief in so many of his drawings.

Santa Claus as Christmas Tree, c. 1949

Steinberg was one of the greatest artists and illustrators who ever lived, and yet he disliked “Art Books” for their tendency to deaden everything in their tracks, and God knows academics have their embalming touch. But Joel Smith, the curator of the show and author of Illuminations knows better. He tells the story of how in 1946, the Museum of Modern Art courted Steinberg, inviting him to participate in the prestigious show, “Fourteen Americans” - which included the artists Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. The curator Dorothy C. Miller asked Steinberg for an “Artist’s Statement,” and received, by return post, an extravagant and surreal declaration in florid handwriting - only it is totally illegible, fictional nonsense. This was not an artist who can be contained within four walls, or pressed between the pages of a book. On the contrary, this wonderful exhibition and book celebrate the genius of a cartoonist who not only invented himself, but helped invent New York.

The exhibition, Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on the 26th of November until 15 February 2009. Opening hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10.0 - 5.0; closed Mondays. Saturday and Sunday, open 11.0 - 5.0. Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Rd, Dulwich, London, SE21 7AD (at the junction of Burbage Rd, Gallery Road and College Rd).

Food for thought:

The poet Charles Simic reads his poem entitled “Riddle”: listen here

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