'Picasso of cartoonists' comes to FLLAC

Marcella Veneziale Staff Writer

Saul Steinberg is primarily known as a prominent artist at The New Yorker. But he produced a huge body of work not only for the magazine—no less than 87 covers, 333 cartoons and 71 portfolios containing 469 drawings—but in other media as well. Saul Steinberg: Illuminations at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center showcases more than 100 works by the prolific artist, representing a 60-year career that spans from the 1930s through the 1990s.

The exhibit includes murals, collages, drawings and sculptures by Steinberg. “His appreciation for materials was uncanny,” said exhibit curator Joel Smith. “He understood that wood means one thing, and a photograph means another, and ink on a piece of paper means still a third thing.”

Smith attributes Steinberg’s ability to move so fluidly between genres to his architectural training at the Reggio Politecnico in Milan. “[An architect] has the need to be very precise and very stylish. The sensibility is that of an architect creating a world all of his own,” said Smith, who is the curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum.

One of Steinberg’s most famous New Yorker covers, the “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” published on March 29, 1976, shows his New York-centric perspective. The topographical drawing seems like a blueprint come to life. Steinberg characterizes the world beyond 9th Avenue as miniscule and without definition in comparison to the detailed evocation of the buildings, cars and people that populate Manhattan.

Steinberg was once described as “the Picasso of cartoonists,” which Smith thinks aptly sums up his popularity. But he noted that Steinberg would have probably disliked “being associated so exclusively with one artist and [the idea] that what he did was reducible to cartooning.”

Working with cartoons gave Steinberg greater public exposure. “He took the complexity of personal complications of modern art and turned it into something people felt free to laugh about,” said Smith. “Nobody’s intimidated by a cartoon.”

The last major exhibition of Steinberg’s work before his death in 1995 was at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978. Smith finds exhibiting an artist’s work to be significantly different from a posthumous show. “At the 1978 show, [Steinberg] had a great deal of control. There was little attention paid to the work he had done in the ’40s and ’50s,” noted Smith. “If he were alive today, I don’t think he would necessarily agree with [this show’s] emphasis on post-war works.”

Steinberg grew up in Romania and studied philosophy for a year at University of Bucharest before transferring to Milan. He was forced to leave Italy during World War II because of anti-Semitic laws, and awaited U.S. asylum in the Dominican Republic.

The poet Charles Simic wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, published by Yale University Press. Both Steinberg and Simic “grew up in Eastern Europe in a place influenced by Russia, the former Ottoman Empire, and Western Europe,” said Smith. Their shared background “affected both of their imaginations.” The catalogue offers a comprehensive supplement to the already sizable exhibit, and includes more than 300 rarely exhibited Steinberg illustrations and sketches.

Vassar is the final stop on the exhibit’s nationwide tour. The exhibit has received critical acclaim at institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

“It was very well received in New York, and the coverage in The New York Times and New York was very gratifying,” said Smith. The large number of visitors to the exhibit in New York is a testament to Steinberg’s lasting impression on the city. “We arranged a tour that began in New York City, which was appropriate for an artist who’s connected with the city in so many ways and who was so devoted to the city,” said Smith.

The opening reception for Saul Steinberg: Illluminations, accompanied by a lecture by Smith in Taylor Hall, will take place on Nov. 2 at 5 p.m. The exhibit will run through Feb. 24, 2008.