"I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing - without the traditional interruption of academic training." -- Saul Steinberg
Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914 – May 12, 1999) was a Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.
"A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only; not as a woman, but as a Madonna, a queen, a sphinx.""Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.""The artist is an educator of artists of the future who are able to understand and in the process of understanding perform unexpected - the best - evolutions.""The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines."
Steinberg was born in Râmnicu S?rat, Romania. He studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest, then later enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano, studying architecture and graduating in 1940. During his years in Milan he was actively involved in the satirical magazine Bertoldo.
Steinberg left Italy after the introduction of anti-Semitic laws by the Fascist government. He spent a year in the Dominican Republic awaiting a U.S. visa; in the meantime, he submitted his cartoons to foreign publications. In 1942, The New Yorker magazine sponsored his entry into the United States, and thus began Steinberg's lifelong relationship with this publication. Through well over half a century working with The New Yorker, Steinberg created nearly 90 covers and more than 1,200 drawings.
During World War II, he worked for military intelligence, stationed in China, North Africa, and Italy. After the war's end, he returned to work for American periodicals, merging an encyclopedic knowledge of European art with the popular American art form of the cartoon, to pioneer a uniquely urbane style of illustration. Although best remembered for his commercial work, Steinberg did exhibit his work throughout his career at fine art museums and galleries. He married Romanian born abstract expressionist painter Hedda Sterne in 1944. In 1946, Steinberg, along with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell, was exhibited in the critically acclaimed "Fourteen Americans" show at The Museum of Modern Art. He has also enjoyed a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1978) and another posthumous one at the Institute for Modern Art in Valencia (IVAM), Spain (2002).
After Steinberg's death in 1999, the Saul Steinberg Foundation was established in accordance with the artist's will. In addition to functioning as Steinberg's official estate, the Foundation is also a non-profit organization with a mission "to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg's contribution to 20th-century art" and to "serve as a resource for the international curatorial-scholarly community as well as the general public." The Foundation has been instrumental in organizing the Saul Steinberg: Illuminations travelling exhibition, which will display original Steinberg works at various museum and galleries around the world, including Cartier-Bresson, Paris (May 6-July 27, 2008), Kunsthaus Zürich (August 22-November 2, 2008), Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, (November 26, 2008-February 15, 2009) and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, (March 13-June 1, 2009). The U.S. copyright representative for the Saul Steinberg Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.The Saul Steinberg Foundation is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York.
The New Yorker cover (March 29, 1976) “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” has come to represent Manhattan’s telescoped interpretation of the country beyond the Hudson River. The cartoon showed the supposedly limited mental geography of Manhattanites.
The image shows Manhattan's 9th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and the Hudson River (appropriately labeled), while the top half depicts the rest of the world. The rest of the United States is drawn as a square, with a thin brown strip along the Hudson representing New Jersey, the names of five cities (Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Kansas City, and Chicago) and three states (Texas, Utah, and Nebraska) are scattered among a few rocks for the U.S. beyond New Jersey. The Pacific Ocean, perhaps twice as wide again as the Hudson, separates the U.S. from three flattened land masses labeled China, Japan, and Russia.
Cultural legacy
The illustration, depicting New Yorkers' self-image, inspired many similar works, including the poster for the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson; that movie poster led to a lawsuit, Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 663 F. Supp. 706 (S.D.N.Y. 1987), which held that Columbia Pictures violated the copyright that Steinberg held on his work. Another homage was created for the cover of The Economist newspaper's March 21—27, 2009 issue entitled "How China sees the world". He is referenced in Bret Easton Ellis' cult classic novel American Psycho.
