Illuminating images, words, wit and genius

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Cartoonist Saul Steinberg, subject of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's traveling "Saul Steinberg: Illuminations," tickled America's funny bone from the 1930s until his death in 1999 at age 84.

Despite many covers and cartoons for "The New Yorker" magazine (plus minor sculptural assemblages, collages and mural designs), his only previous major gallery retrospective was at New York's Whitney Museum in 1978.

Coordinating exhibit curator Joann Moser says Mr. Steinberg is "one of the greatest draftsmen of the modern era" and a "comic genius." The organizing museum, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, calls the artist a "modern-day illuminator, putting word and image into play."

Like Honore Daumier, the famed 19th-century French satirical painter, Mr. Steinberg wanted to be known as a "fine artist," a reputation Daumier earned by painting and in sculpture as well.

But Mr. Steinberg was no Daumier, as the exhibit's 113 smallish works show. (About half of them are from the Saul Steinberg Foundation in New York City.)

There's no denying Mr. Steinberg's line can be economical and deft, as the flourishes of his 1991 self-portraitlike "Signature" (magic marker, carved and stained wood glued to paper) reveal.

Like many Chinese calligraphers, the artist presses in a deep black at center and flares two light gray flourishes outward into empty space. "Signature" could be a Chinese work, except for the cutesy carved wood piece glued at the bottom -- a surrealist touch.

Mr. Steinberg loved drawing detail-filled pictures from different perspectives, such as "Motels and Highway" (1959, ink and ballpoint pen on paper) in which he spoofed America's auto mania. Drawing the cars from side viewpoints, he made them "roll down" their respective hills, adding sparely drawn words such as "flamingo," "motel" and "diner" at back and front and accompanied by a crocodile, a symbol of savagery.

The Romanian expatriate's love of detail may have come from studying architecture in Milan before fleeing fascist Italy in 1942, first to Santo Domingo and then New York, where he began creating "New Yorker" illustrations, in addition to greeting cards for Hallmark and set designs for the theater.

Judging from the exhibit, he may have been one of the most imaginative artists of his time. Note the way he draws his family in Bucharest.