Manhattan's doodle dandy: Is there any depth to Saul
Steinberg's cartoons?
Saul Steinberg's cartoons came to epitomise
a sophisticated, stylish New York. But is something
missing?
By Tom Lubbock, The Independent
27.11.08
Saul Steinberg was an original. He invented a new form of
cartooning. You might call it conceptual cartooning, or
self-referential cartooning, or cartooning-about-cartooning. He had
his own style, true – a distinctive, wonky-elegant drawn line. But
he also played with style, with numerous styles, and with the
languages of cartooning and drawing generally. His images became a
byword for visual sophistication, associated with one particular
city, New York, and one magazine, The New Yorker, for which
Steinberg worked from the 1940s to the 1990s. Steinberg had
style.
Some people classed him as an artist. Unlike many 20th-century
cartoonists, he wasn't afraid of modern art. He was fluent in it.
He knew the New York scene, was friends with some of the Abstract
Expressionists, made easy references to them. His own graphic games
owed much to European artists of the previous generation – for
example, to Duchamp, Magritte and Miro. His work appealed to the
art-aware and appeared in galleries as well as in books and
publications. You can see it in an art gallery now; about 100 of
his original drawings are at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, where
Saul Steinberg – Illuminations has opened.
Here's one, which shows how Steinberg sometimes needs the wall
space of an exhibition. The Line is a strip drawing, 33 feet along,
following the mutations of a continuous, straight, horizontal line.
It becomes, in turn, a washing line, the top of a bridge, the
wainscot of a room, the edge of a table, the water surface of a
swimming pool seen in cross section, and the horizons of several
kinds of landscape, before ending up as a plain line being drawn by
a hand.
Before your very eyes, the image demonstrates the diverse ways
in which a drawing can use line. It's characteristic of Steinberg's
highly self-conscious procedures. He lays bare the working of
pictures, showing how they are made of devices and conventions by
mixing together codes that are normally kept separate. Print and
handwriting, letters and numbers, doodling, scribbling, maps,
decorative borders, speech balloons and thought bubbles, diagrams,
punctuation marks and figurative drawing all find themselves in the
same frame. Incompatibles interreact. The image
self-deconstructs.
A drawn human figure unravels itself into a free, loopy doodle.
Ornamental flourishes are planted out as a garden of flowers. Group
Photo shows rows of heads and shoulders in suits and ties, but each
head is an (identical?) fingerprint. From 1953, there's Techniques
at a Party, showing a gathering of 18 guests, each realised in a
different manner – very solid, very feint, very messy, pointillist,
Picassoid, and so on – each portraying the guest's party
personality. Bleecker Street is a freakville version of the same
idea, set in Greenwich Village, illustrating the cacophony of
Sixties bohemian identities. Style-as-character is one of his
abiding tricks.
The animation of typefaces is another. In Erotica, the number
five and a question mark lie curled up on a bed, having sex. Big
words come out to play. The phrases I AM, I HAVE and I DO are set
together in an existentialist drama. NOW confronts NEVER. YES hits
BUT. Broadway is severe comment on New York's theatreland. It's a
street whose buildings are five huge block letters. Each letter is
inscribed with critics' superlatives, "fantastic", "magnificent",
"dazzling", "sublime". But the five block letters spell out T R A S
H.
Or there's map-play. Steinberg's most famous image is an
example. View of the World from Ninth Avenue is a subjective map,
showing the New Yorker's parochial awareness of the rest of the
planet; 10th Avenue is full of detail, but beyond the Hudson river
things start to foreshorten abruptly and mainland America is a
narrow strip, the Pacific a narrow strip, Asia a peep. Elsewhere,
tourists go on about their foreign holidays with maps as speech
bubbles. The Flat Earth is a Mappa Mundi for the 20th century – the
continents squared-off and flat-packed and streamlined.
It's an admirable body of work. If you don't know it, you ought
to. It has proverbial status. Though I've never heard the name made
an adjective, Steinbergian could be a shorthand term for
pictures-about-pictures – just as Pirandellian is for
plays-about-plays. And in its achievement, Steinberg's art deserves
fame; it is intelligent, versatile, alert, apt, all that,
unquestionably. Yes. But. (You saw that coming?) But I must admit
that it leaves me fairly indifferent. I can praise, but I can't
enthuse. Something is missing, and it's an important thing.
Steinberg's cartoons are witty, but never funny. There are
sometimes figures with "funny" faces, but these figures are comic
tokens. I can imagine a Steinberg image provoking a smile of
satisfaction at its cleverness, and a smile of self-satisfaction at
getting it. I can't see one raising a laugh.
Nor does his art ever become painful. It's often bringing up
big, serious things. Steinberg is exercised by issues of self and
motives, individual and society, time and space, life and death –
but in an abstract form. In that party scene, the style-play puts
the characters at a remove; it indicates their vanities and
agonies, but keeps them from being felt. The big words remain big
words.
Steinberg's pictures have a two-way get-out clause. They don't
have to be troubling, because they're cartoons. But they don't have
to be funny, because their concerns are deeply grave. Neither this
nor that, they end up in a limbo of weightless ingenuity.
This is the trap of sophistication. Your first response to
Steinberg's work is a sense of exhilarating freedom. Here's an art
that, aware of all the rules, is bound by none. It exists in a
state of complete detachment, irony, free play. Anything seems
possible. Ah, if one could live like that, playing all the roles
and all the games! It embodies the ideal of a free city life – and
for all its critique of New York manners, Steinberg's art provided
New Yorker readers with a very flattering mascot.
But this freedom becomes empty and programmatic. The artist is
totally in control. He never meets reality, the resistance that can
generate comedy or tragedy. He doesn't touch the ground. He's
operating a self-contained world of signs. Which sounds like the
scenario of one of Steinberg's own pictures. He often did cartoons
about artists, their hubris and helplessness. His knowingness about
the creative process was one of the things that got him called an
artist himself – or even a creative who outflanked art by doing
lightly and effortlessly what artists did ponderously and
pretentiously. And there's sometimes truth in that.
But in general, the work of Steinberg should return us to the
artists he borrowed from, with a strengthened admiration. It makes
you see how much more is going on in Magritte, Miro, even Duchamp;
how their games are imbued with a mystery, melancholy, violence,
that you never find in Steinberg.
He does the same for the true cartoonists. Just a glimpse of
Charles Addams's brooding malice, or Robert Crumb's bug-eyed
grossness, or Roz Chast's beady-eyed fragility, is enough to show
up Steinberg as a highfalutin straight man. Artist/cartoonist? Or
falling between the two stools?
Saul Steinberg – Illuminations, Dulwich Picture Gallery,
London SE21 (020-8693 5254; www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk), to
15 February