Steinberg, Saul (1914-1999)
Steinberg, Saul (1914-1999)
Best known for the hundreds of enigmatic, captionless drawings and frequent covers he has contributed to the highbrow New Yorker magazine since 1941, the Romanian-born, world-traveled Saul Steinberg has employed in his long career an eclectic range of media and styles that are rarely straightforward and frequently attest to his literary and philosophical musings. Steinberg has often incorporated the likes of unintelligible calligraphy, watercolor, rubber stamps, tracings, thumbprints, graph paper, and collage into his pen-and-ink drawings for books and magazines. Recurring themes have included the relationships among abstract concepts, as in "Ship of State" (1959), and places he has known, such as "Bleecker Street" (1971), in which a parade of street characters are rendered in dozens of cartoon styles. Few have so successfully blurred the line between popular and high art as Steinberg.
—Craig Bunch
Further Reading:
Rosenberg, Harold. Saul Steinberg. New York, Alfred A. Knopf and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978.