The man who put the inking into thinking
By Laura Cumming, The Observer
07.12.08
Americans regard Steinberg as a true
artist - so why is his elegance and wit so little known
here?
The cartoonist Saul Steinberg is so famous in America and so
little known here, by comparison, as to merit a cartoon of his own:
the genius of the New Yorker who towered over a whole continent for
60 years (he died in 1999) yet barely casts a shadow on our own
tiny island.
He would have drawn it very stylishly himself of course, being a
connoisseur of the visual paradox, and in a way you might even say
that he did. For Steinberg's most famous cartoon, View of the World
from 9th Avenue, is all about the rampant parochialism that makes
other cultures invisible.
From 9th Avenue the world is laid out thus: a bit of 10th
Avenue, a strip of Hudson River, Jersey to LA compressed into a
ballpark and the rest of the globe as a couple of remote islets
marked Russia, China and Japan. It may not sound terribly funny to
us but Americans found it hilarious; it was a bestselling poster
throughout the Seventies.
The original can be seen in Dulwich and it combines most of
Steinberg's virtues: elegance, wit, a fascination with maps,
letters, numbers and parallel worlds, a droll and calligraphic line
that has often been associated with Paul Klee. Steinberg's brisk
retort to this comparison was that the two merely shared the same
influences: 'children's drawings, peasant embroideries, insane art
... and Bauhausy philosophy', plus a deep and thorough knowledge of
modern painting.
These influences converged to produce a self-consciousness that
might have been called postmodern if the term had yet been
invented. Steinberg, who was born in Bucharest in 1914 and managed
to escape Mussolini's Italy in 1940 on a passport he liked to imply
he had deftly forged, made images that spoke of their own making.
The little man who hangs on to the very pen that draws him, the gun
that fires a round of pencilled dots, the figure that emerges on
the page out of a single line that represents both itself and a
trapdoor.
In one of his most celebrated works, The Line, which stretches
panoramically across sheet after sheet, the horizon line becomes a
laundry-line, shoreline, bridge, prairie and road, the surface of a
swimming pool, the edge of a table and so on, upon which float,
sprout and march a world of people and places that all begin and
end with the tip of a nib. It is a conceit rather than an act of
conceitedness - Steinberg was far too sophisticated ever to
congratulate himself - and what it celebrates is the magnificent
versatility of a line that can conjure an entire world from the
starting point of a dot.
This must have seemed an extraordinary advance on the
single-frame cartoon in the early Fifties and indeed the original
was not made for the New Yorker but as a mural for an international
art show. Steinberg was wary of such categories - he simply called
himself 'a professional' - but to many Americans, then and since,
he was an artist first and foremost.
This is very much how he is portrayed at Dulwich, with a close
focus upon experiment and innovation. Steinberg used rubber stamps
to populate pictures with armies of identical artists fighting off
soldiers (which, with some foresight, he referred to as a
'computerised' form of art). He made collages, including a mordant
fake passport in which the head is perfectly implied, and at the
same time blotted out, by a thumbprint.
His photo-cartoons, in which objects are drawn upon and then
photographed, can be captivating; especially the snap of a bath in
which a hand-drawn nude reclines like a parody of Madame Bonnard
immobilised in her tub. And he invented a whole strain of
picture-making that fits word to image with imaginative logic.
Thus, for instance, I Do is painted in rainbow letters that
scintillate in the sky, already fading; I Have is a rickety
structure that looks ready to collapse; I Am, on the other hand, is
carved out of the very ground itself: our essential being the
philosophical bedrock of all existence.
It is an unusually trenchant work for Steinberg, who is rarely
ever so direct, still less satirical. This is one reason he is such
an unusual cartoonist, being equally remote from the scarifying
genius of Gillray or the black humour of Charles Addams; another
reason is that he is just not funny.
Nor does he intend to be, as far as I can see. Gales of laughter
would be a completely alien response to his work. You are not
supposed to look at Steinberg's cocktail party full of guests all
drawn in different styles - Pointillist, Cubist, tremulously
Impressionist - and do more than smile at the analogy proposed
between art idioms and psychological types.
Conceit rather than comedy, intellect over observation: as a
cartoonist, Steinberg is much easier to admire than love, which may
explain the impulse to venerate his drawings as works of art. But
here comes what may be a serious obstacle for British viewers.
The late American critic Harold Rosenberg once wrote that
Steinberg was 'the only major artist in America who is not
associated with any movement or style'. That may have been true
over there. But one cause of the transatlantic delay in our
appreciation of Steinberg as a giant of modern art, steeped in
Picasso, Magritte, Klee and all, is that he just looks so European
- so like them.