ARTS: Saul Steinberg remembered, in his own [words]

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 21, 1999 | by Mark Fondersmith

Saul Steinberg's 86th and final New Yorker cover features his now-familiar architectural and sonic letterforms spelling out HERE and NOW. Sadly, by the time the cover hit newsstands, the artist no longer was in the "here and now," having died at age 84 on May 12. It is a final irony he would have enjoyed.

The New Yorker both made and unmade Steinberg. It allowed him to prosper as a great American cartoonist but undercut his chances of becoming a great American artist. If Jackson Pollack had started out doing New Yorker cartoons, would art critics have taken him seriously?

Probably not, and that was the dilemma for Steinberg.

Obituaries (never a good time to judge talent) penned by art critics such as Robert Hughes have sought to set the record straight. While stopping short of full-blown admission into the pantheon of modern art, Hughes acknowledges that Steinberg's recognition as a major American artist is "not as generally accepted as it ought to be."

In fact, Steinberg was embraced by the fine-art establishment. His work was exhibited at numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and other prominent art galleries. His genius never was doubted. He was compared to Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Honore Daumier, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene Ionesco and James Joyce. His friend, the late art critic Harold Rosenberg, wrote an aesthetic analysis of Steinberg's oeuvre. But the effort was as futile as a philosophical treatise on the humor of Groucho Marx.

Still, the question persists: "Was it art?" Or, to state it another way, are cartoonists failed artists?

Steinberg might have taken consolation in something T.S. Eliot said to Stephen Spender about the relationship between fine art and not-so-fine art. Spender asked Eliot, then editor of the Criterion, if editors are indeed failed poets. "Yes" replied, Eliot, "but so are most poets."

A famous man: "He walks followed by his birthday and facing his death day. That dash hints at his end eagerly awaited by historians who can thus officially close the parentheses. The essential thing about him, and this is the essence of fame, is that he is between parentheses. He is not free."

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Sport: "Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate and sober self-esteem (batting average)."

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Memory: "Nothing is lost of what the memory accumulates, an immense computer that continues to register and classify data that are used only in a minimal proportion for conventional and monotone life. Life in this sense is like a huge ocean liner in which only one cabin is used."

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Top drawer: All in Line, Steinberg's book of wartime drawings, described both his drawing technique and a facet of military life. "My line," he said, "wants to remind constantly that it is made of ink." Steinberg also completed a series of drawings, below, on real, everyday objects.

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Truth: "In fact, one has to tell the truth to make a good drawing, a poetic invention of the moment, a truth that demands the elimination of all our talent (ready-made vocabulary). It demands genuine clumsiness. In fact, the best clumsy ones are Cezanne and Matisse." Critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Steinberg's talent, Even the most inanimate object or abstract thought" such as the box, right, "is teeming with feeling, aspiration and portents."

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Graphic image: "I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood has ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing -- without the traditional interruption of academic training." Steinberg's best work, right, requires no explanation.

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America observed: "I went by bus and rented car to Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, visiting hillbilly places and people. These are the ancestors of the Americans, the heroes of our best fiction -- cowboys, villains, country derelicts. I ended properly, visiting Oxford, Mississippi. I still have the phone directory -- many Faulkners and Falkners."

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Icons: "The study of architecture," wrote Steinberg, "is marvelous training for anything but architecture. The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines."

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