Forget for a moment the New Yorker covers and ubiquitous posters; forget
the Saul Steinberg with whom almost everyone is familiar. As the evidence of
the magnificent exhibition “Drawing into Being” at PaceWildenstein
demonstrates, Saul Steinberg was an endlessly inventive, whimsical artist of
a very high order. While drawing remains the show’s focus, Steinberg’s
peripatetic imagination led him from the drawing table into a number of
media: collage, watercolor, wood sculpture, and oil paint among them. There
are no overbearing masterworks in this show, no one piece that usurps center
stage; it is rife with the inspired tinkerings of a talent so generous, so
encompassing in its drive, that it leaves nothing it encounters
untransformed. He makes masks of brown paper bags. He draws on black and
white photographs, turning a kitchen into a cityscape, a challah loaf into a
car. Famously a creator of idiosyncratic maps, Steinberg—
who
immigrated to
the U.S. in 1942~dashconsistently provokes our solipsism, our point-of-view,
which, as New Yorkers, usually begins at Lexington Avenue. In
Looking East, an imperial
gold-foil sun spreads over a vista that stretches from New
York City through the Hamptons, Europe, a sliver of Asia, to California and
back to New York again. Like our own mental cartographies, Steinberg’s maps
are composed both of the details that matter to the individual—hotels,
traffic, well-known buildings—and those random things that stray into
consciousness, such as the date on a particular edifice or a few antlike
people on the street. When
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Exhibition notes
On Saul Steinberg: Drawing into Being at PaceWildenstein, New York
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 18 Number 4, on page 53
Copyright © 1999 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com