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— ...

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