Saul Steinberg

1933c Saul Steinberg with his mother Rosa.

Saul Steinberg (1914 – 1999) was a Romanian / American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker magazine, most notably “View of the World from 9^th Avenue.” He described himself as "a writer who draws.”

Steinberg was born in Râmnicu Sărat, Buzău County, Romania to a family of Jewish descent. In 1932, he entered the University of Bucharest. In 1933, he enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano to study architecture where received his degree in 1940. In 1936, he began contributing cartoons to the humour newspaper Bertoldo. Two years later, the anti-Semitic racial laws promulgated by the Fascist government forced him to start seeking refuge in another country.

In 1941, he fled to the Dominican Republic, where he spent a year awaiting a US visa. By then, his drawings had appeared in several US periodicals; his first contribution to The New Yorker was published in October 1941. Steinberg arrived in New York City in July 1942; within a few months he received a commission in the US Naval Reserve and was then seconded to the Office of Strategic Services. He worked for the Morale Operations division in China, North Africa, and Italy. Shipped back to Washington in 1944, he married the Romanian-born painter Hedda Sterne.

After World War II, Steinberg continued to publish drawings
in The New Yorker and other periodicals, including Fortune,
Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s Bazaar. At the same time, he embarked on an exhibition career in galleries and museums.In 1946, he was included in the critically acclaimed “Fourteen Americans” show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibiting along with Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell, among others. Steinberg went on to have more than 80 one-artist shows in galleries and museums throughout the US, Europe, and South America. He was affiliated with the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries in New York and the Galerie Maeght in Paris. From 1982, he was represented by The Pace Gallery. A dozen museums and institutions have in-depth collections of his work, and examples are included in the holdings of more than eighty other public collections.

Steinberg’s long, multifaceted career encompassed works in many media and appeared in different contexts. In addition to magazine publications and gallery art, he produced advertising art, photo-works, textiles, stage sets, and murals. Given this multi-levelled output, his work is difficult to position within the canons of post-war art history. He himself defined the problem: “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me.”

He is best described as a “modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination.”

After Steinberg's death on May 12, 1999, The Saul Steinberg Foundation was established in accordance with the artist's will. The Foundation’s mission is "to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg's contribution to20th-century art” and to "serve as a resource for the international curatorial-scholarly community as well as the general public".

biography from Wikipedia

This is part 1 of 13-part series on the works of

Saul Steinberg:

1929 Head
zinc cut 36.2 x 47 cm ( image )
Museum of Modern Art, New York

1929-40c Perspective rendering of an Interior
gouache on board 29.4 x 19.7 cm
Angelini Collection

1937 Bertoldo newspaper "Busti"
"No, dear sir, It's the other half you were supposed to make..."

1937 Bertoldo newspaper
ARTE PURA “I’m telling you, madame, for my watercolours I use eau de Cologne.”

1938 Bertoldo newspaper
"Panorami di Steinberg."

1939-40 Dynamin il Super Shell advertisement
Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

1940 Persiflage from Paris Harper's Bazaar
"Very clever, M Durand, your camouflage."

1940 Sombra ( Brazil )
December 1940

1940 Sombra ( Brazil )
December 1940
"They are my ancestors: the summer is so hot that I removed the frames."

1940 Top: Modern Interior
sketch on paper mounted on card 11.4 x 20.3 cm
Bottom: Interior / Exterior
pencil, ink and gouache on card 29.4 x 21.6 cm
Angelini Collection

1941 Bertoldo "Disegno con Battuta"
“That’s my husband, he has an inferiority complex.”

1941 El Pianista
ink and gouache on paper32.4 x 24.2 cm
Fundación Granell, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

1941 Teatro Julia / Grand Festval Artistico
poster

1941 The New Yorker
“But it is half man and half horse.”
Steinberg’s first drawing in the magazine

1941 Villa Sacerdotti, Rapallo ( Liguria )
gouache 50.8 x 50.8 cm
Collection of Giò Pozzo

1942 "Balance of Nations"
American Mercury

1942 Anti-Fascist cartoon in PM

1942 Fortune magazine
"Who'll be drafted when?"
painting and collage

1942 Strada Palas
pencil, ink and watercolour on paper 37.8 x 55.2 cm
The Saul Steinberg Foundation

1943 Hitler's Program for 1942
Anti-Fascist cartoon in PM

1943 The New Yorker
March 6 1943

1944 OSS Morale Operations office, Algiers:

1944 Der Schuldige (The Guilty One) in Das Neue Deutschland,
a fake Resistance newspaper produced by the OSS Morale Operations

1944 OSS Morale Operations office, Algiers
"Algiers"

1944 OSS Morale Operations office, Algiers
"Rome"

1944 OSS Morale Operations office, Algiers
"Naples"

* * * * *

1944 Propaganda drawing with Hitler as a two-faced wolf

1944 The New Yorker
February 5 1944

1944 The New Yorker
April 1944
"North Africa"

1944 The New Yorker
June 10 1944
"Italy"

1944c Portrait of Bernard Rudofsky
27.3 x 20.9 cm

1945 The New Yorker
January 13 1945

1945 Bombing China
pen and brush and black ink, over graphite and erasing, ruled in graphite, on ivory wove paper 36.8 x 58.9 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1945 Christmas card for The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1945 Hen
ink on paper 36.8 x 58.8 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York

1945 The New Yorker April 28 1945
"India"

1945 Mounuments: The Important People
pen and black ink, with graphite and erasing, on ivory wove paper 36.7 x 59 cm

1945 Two Fighting Women
pen and black ink on ivory card 36.8 x 58.8 cm

1945 Untitled ( Bar Scene )
pen and black ink, over graphite and erasing, on ivory wove paper 59 x 36.9 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1945 Untitled
The New Yorker February 3 1945

1945c China Theater: An Informal Notebook of Useful Information for Military Men in China.
Produced by the Reproduction Branch of the OSS
The Saul Steinberg Foundation