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Reflections and Shadows

Name: Reflections and Shadows
Author: Saul Steinberg, Aldo Buzzi, John Shepley
ISBN: 9780375505713

by Saul Steinberg, Aldo Buzzi, John Shepley

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Overview

We all grew up in Saul Steinberg’s America, a place he envisioned for us in his drawings and cartoons for The New Yorker—none more famous than his iconic image of a New Yorker’s view of the world. In this eccentric and unpredictable memoir, one of the twentieth century’s most intellectually nimble artists shares his view of the world, of America and his place in it.

A Romanian by birth, restless by inclination, Steinberg lived a peripatetic existence. In Reflections and Shadows, he introduces us to his family—his uncle Moritz, a sign painter, and his father (also Moritz), a bookbinder whose small factory produced cardboard boxes and ribbons for funeral wreaths. He tells us how he dodged the police in fascist Italy in 1940 and how he came to America, where he became a citizen, an officer in the U.S. Navy, and the foremost visionary satirist of his time.

No one has depicted America with all its strengths and foibles more enduringly than Saul Steinberg. In this playful meditation, based on a series of interviews with Aldo Buzzi that has never before been published in English, and interwoven with more than a dozen drawings, Steinberg delivers a laconic hymn to America: its baseball, its diners, and its exhibitionism. “It is stinginess,” Steinberg writes, speaking of his art and method, “that holds us back.” But he had none of that: the personality that emerges from these pages is capacious, acutely discriminating, full of serendipitous curiosities, and consistently engaging.

About the Author, Saul Steinberg, Aldo Buzzi, John Shepley

Born on June 15, 1914, in Romania, Saul Steinberg studied philosophy and literature at the University of Bucharest and architecture in Milan, where he published cartoons from 1936 to 1939. He fled to America in 1940 and joined the navy. After the war he settled down in New York and became an internationally celebrated artist, contributing some of his best work for more than fifty years to The New Yorker. His previous books include All in Line, The Passport, The Labyrinth, The Inspector, and The Discovery of America. Steinberg elevated the graphic language of the cartoon to the realm of fine art and came to be recognized as one of the most original artists of his time. He died in 1999.

Aldo Buzzi was trained as an architect in Milan. He worked in the Italian cinema for many years and then as a publisher. He is the author of Journey to the Land of the Flies and A Weakness for Almost Everything.

John Shepley’s translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Roman Nights and Other Stories won the first Italo Calvino Translation Award in 1987. He is currently working on a translation of Roberto Calasso.

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Editorials

The New Yorker

It seems fitting that this most sphinx-like of artists should have his memoirs written by someone else. Buzzi, a friend since the two men were students together in prewar Milan, compiled these impressions from conversations recorded in the nineteen-seventies, and the result beautifully conveys Steinberg's aphoristic panache. "Art," says the man who made cartoons into serious art and perhaps philosophy, "precedes technique, just as the smell precedes the cake." Whether describing his childhood in Bucharest, flight from Fascist Italy, or life in America, Steinberg is full of superb anecdotes and quizzical observations, but there remains an evasiveness that reflects unease about the past. Tellingly, he says that he prefers not to revisit old haunts, instead asking friends to go and photograph them for him. On one occasion, he broke his own rule: "I was afraid of spoiling the memory, and I wanted to spoil it. And I succeeded."

Library Journal

This gemlike glimpse into the world of the late artist Saul Steinberg (1914-99), best known for his New Yorker cartoons, is the result of conversations tape-recorded during the 1970s with his longtime friend Aldo Buzzi (A Weakness for Almost Everything). Buzzi transcribed and selected this material, in which Steinberg's voice really does come through as if he were comfortably reminiscing in familiar company. Glimpses of Steinberg's Romanian childhood the landscape of the poor neighborhood street, the uniqueness of a varied extended family contrast with scenes of his student years in pre-World War II Milan. Steinberg's reactions to everything American are humorously eclectic and insightful from baseball, cubism, and Washington, DC, society, to celebrity artists, eating in diners, and the Bowery. The final chapter contains touching reflections on his artistic perspective visual, emotional, and intellectual. Steinberg's words are simple, poetic, and profound, and the accompanying selection of his drawings complements the text with subtle effectiveness. This slender volume is crammed full of wit, charm, and astute observations that should leave every reader whether an artist or not wishing for more. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/01.] Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.