Saul Steinberg: Illuminations

Best known for his barbed and brilliant art for The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) did much more. He executed public murals, designed fabrics and stage sets, was an inventive collagist and printmaker, and turned his magic touch to the fields of painting, sculpture, advertising, and even wartime propaganda. This is the first comprehensive look at Steinberg’s extraordinary contribution to 20th-century art, which was that of a modern-day illuminator, putting word and image in play to create art that spoke to the eyes, and minds, of readers.
An introduction by poet Charles Simic tracks the origins of Steinberg’s darkly comic sensibility in the “Balkan bazaar” of his native Romania. Joel Smith shows how architectural training and an early rise to fame as a cartoonist in Fascist-era Milan honed the artist’s gift for subtle graphic invention, and explores why one of the most visible, prolific, potent, and cosmopolitan careers in postwar American art has so thoroughly evaded serious study. Tracing the evolving motives that underlie Steinberg’s multi-layered activity, this handsome volume also raises fundamental questions about the historiography of modernism and the vexed status of “the middlebrow avant-garde” in an age of museum-bound art.
Previously unseen sketches, documents, and printed matter from the artist’s papers illustrate the essay, career chronology, and entries for 120 objects featured in this important book.

Best known for his barbed and brilliant art for The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) did much more. He executed public murals, designed fabrics and stage sets, was an inventive collagist and printmaker, and turned his magic touch to the fields of painting, sculpture, advertising, and even wartime propaganda. This is the first comprehensive look at Steinberg’s extraordinary contribution to 20th-century art, which was that of a modern-day illuminator, putting word and image in play to create art that spoke to the eyes, and minds, of readers.
An introduction by poet Charles Simic tracks the origins of Steinberg’s darkly comic sensibility in the “Balkan bazaar” of his native Romania. Joel Smith shows how architectural training and an early rise to fame as a cartoonist in Fascist-era Milan honed the artist’s gift for subtle graphic invention, and explores why one of the most visible, prolific, potent, and cosmopolitan careers in postwar American art has so thoroughly evaded serious study. Tracing the evolving motives that underlie Steinberg’s multi-layered activity, this handsome volume also raises fundamental questions about the historiography of modernism and the vexed status of “the middlebrow avant-garde” in an age of museum-bound art.
Previously unseen sketches, documents, and printed matter from the artist’s papers illustrate the essay, career chronology, and entries for 120 objects featured in this important book.

Publishers Weekly

Steinberg (1914-1999) is best known for his New Yorker drawings, but he also created murals, advertising art, collages, fabric designs, masks, greeting cards and stage sets, all of which are represented in this copiously illustrated volume published in conjunction with a traveling retrospective. Born in Romania, Steinberg emigrated in 1942 to the United States, where he quickly rose to fame with drawings that employ the visual language of the cartoon but add an inventiveness that Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Simic lauds in his introduction. In the lucid text, art curator Smith (Steinberg at the New Yorker) calls these calligraphic drawings "illuminations," since, like illuminated manuscripts, they combine word and image, and also because they throw light on subjects "too small to be noticed." Immediately understandable yet infinitely complex, the drawings combine art and joke, and have unexpected depth that Smith explores in his commentaries. Steinberg created these visionary drawings in such a wide variety of styles that art critics have always found them impossible to categorize by turning up surprises in unlikely places. Smith compares him to the little dog he added to scenes in old picture postcards absorbed in his own world, sniffing out details others miss. This splendid catalogue is a worthy tribute to Steinberg's genius. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Joel Smith is curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum and author of Steinberg at The New Yorker. Charles Simic is professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.