Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  At school he spoke Romanian and French, but at home and with his aunts and uncles he spoke “the secret language of my parents, Yiddish.” He remembered going into his uncles’ businesses, which were as magical as his father’s factory. Rosa’s family provided most of these fascinating uncles. Her brother Josef Jacobson and one brother-in-law, Moritz Grinberg, were both sign painters. Her sister Sali’s husband, Simon Marcovic (Marcovici after they moved to Israel), was a shopkeeper who specialized in stationery, textbooks, and popular novels. In his store Saul read tales of Alexander the Great and adventures, as well as the book he liked best and read repeatedly, “the Thousand and One Nights, with those Oriental women wearing nothing but a few veils.”

  Two other uncles began as watchmakers but branched out in different directions: Rosa’s brother Isac took the name Jacques and became the richest of them all when he added expensive jewelry to the watches he sold and repaired. Saul liked the smell of watchmaker’s oil that permeated his shop but did not go there often because he was not allowed to get too close to the table where Uncle Jacques bent over a watch’s innards; the slightest movement or the least little sneeze would send the tiny springs flying and bring down Jacques’s formidable wrath.

  Rosa’s brother-in-law Jack Kramer sold musical instruments, gramophones, and phonograph records. Saul liked his shop better than Uncle Jacques’s, because many of the clocks Uncle Jack sold played the stirring Romanian national anthem, “Réveille-toi, Roumain, du sommeil de la mort.” In the window there was an automaton in the shape of a clown that moved its head and rolled its eyes, put there deliberately to entice the peasants in the Crucea de Piatra (the Stone Cross district), poor people just arriving from country villages who had never seen such a marvel.

  Mostly, however, the Crucea de Piatra was home to prostitutes, who filled street after street in one of the largest red-light districts in all of Europe. The boy Saul learned early on that there were elegant bordellos reserved for the rich, but the ones nearest his uncle’s shop were “run-of-the-mill where … these poor little whores mingled with the children, dogs, hens, roosters, ducks, a small garden, the flowers they were growing, the ripe tomatoes.” He was entranced by all the activity, which “as is almost always the case in Romania, took place in the courtyard.” The activity was especially fascinating on Saturdays, when the farmers’ wives would come down from the country villages, not to sell their foodstuffs but to sell themselves. Young girls and older matrons came dressed in their everyday work dresses, aprons, and muddy boots, to stake out their places and wait for resident men and boys to claim them. Housewives stayed inside and shooed their daughters away from the windows but had no control over their young sons, who raced around teasing “the whores” and jousting with each other to see who could cause the most mischief and gain the best view of the goings-on. Saul was very young when the older boys in his building on the Strada Palas told him about sex, but he preferred to watch quietly from the sidelines rather than join in their teasing. For him, it was not the most fortunate introduction to the intricacies of human sexual relationships; he had no interest in the farmwomen, who were unwashed and smelly.

  Adolf was the uncle Saul liked least, the one he denoted with just his first name after he married the only plain Jacobson sister. This was probably not so unusual, because no one else in the family ever called Adolf anything but “the other bookseller.” To young Saul, he was merely “a fat lame man.” The most romantic of all was another uncle by marriage, Micu Cohen, a croupier who worked the gambling tables in a Black Sea resort town. Saul liked to watch Uncle Micu at work whenever his parents took him there on holidays, and insisted that his adult penchant for casino gambling started with the thrill he got from watching Uncle Micu’s sleight of hand.

  Saul was closest to his Aunt Sali’s husband, Simon Marcovic. He was happy when Rosa sent him to the shop at Christmastime to help sell German toys and glass tree ornaments, but mostly to help Uncle Simon by watching the customers, “almost all of them thieves.” The store was a wonderland of pens, pencils, and ink; of notebooks filled with ruled and graph paper; of sponges for cleaning slates and powder-blue paper to cover textbooks; of labels on which the pupil could write his name and the name of the school. Being in Uncle Simon’s shop was almost as good as being in his father’s factory, and both places provided memories and sensations that found their way into his adult art.

  Another of his favorite schoolboy pastimes was to visit the widowed Mme. Stibal and her paralytic son, who lived several houses away from his own on the Strada Palas. Mme. Stibal collected postcards to entertain her child, and she always welcomed Saul because he was content to pore over them for hours on end, putting them in various arrangements that would allow him to comment and create stories for his own amusement as well as the boy’s.

  What with all these outlets for his imagination, it was not unusual that Saul would develop a natural proclivity toward the visual arts, and so too did Lica. One of their first exposures came though the chromolithographies of famous paintings that Moritz chose to decorate the candy boxes and other specialty boxes. He selected the ones he wanted to use from a collection of reproductions he kept at home, fat bound volumes that contained everything from Renaissance madonnas to what constituted modern art before 1920 that was deemed suitable for Romanian consumption. Moritz often spent his evenings looking at the books, and Lica and Saul liked to sit beside him. It marked the first time that the children saw such paintings as Raphael’s Dresden Madonna, with what they called the “thinking angel,” or Millet’s Angelus, which was to become another of the many totems Saul used in his mature drawings and painting.

  Lica’s interests were more specialized than Saul’s: she was fascinated by process, by such formal, rule-bound expressions of creativity as etching and engraving. She wanted to understand how art was done, whereas Saul was more interested in what the artist was thinking when he created it. As an adult, when Lica strove to master the techniques of printmaking and etching, he called her actions a preference for a “suffering profession.” From childhood he preferred to draw freehand, and one of his earliest images became one of his most varied and lasting, repeated in many different versions and guises in his adult art. This he called simply “a man on horseback,” and the first time he drew it was after he saw King Ferdinand I in a parade with Queen Marie and their children, the king decked out in the finery of a fairy tale and riding a sweaty black horse, followed by the royal carriage drawn by six white horses with white-and-purple plumes on their heads. Inside the carriage sat the queen and other members of the royal family, all of them heavily made up, all the males dressed in military uniforms loaded down with decorations, all the women glittering with jewels and crowns and tiaras on their heads. “Remember,” he instructed himself many years later, recalling how the streets were covered with fresh sand for the parade; how policemen stood alert, ready to blow shrill whistles at the crowd that was bursting against ropes and barricades as people strained to see; and especially the dog, for there was always a mangy cur who wandered onto the street just before the king’s carriage passed by, to everyone’s consternation. Steinberg heard his mother and aunts discussing for days afterward the details of the queen’s dress, and how one of the princesses was getting fat, and how the king was so old he must be dead, embalmed, and stuffed with straw to keep him upright.

  These were all images that Steinberg used in many different forms throughout his mature career, and there were many times after he became a celebrated artist that he was asked—or even that he asked himself—about the origins of such childlike simplicity. Critics compared him to everyone from Picasso to Joyce, Mozart, and Kafka, but most often comparisons were made to Paul Klee. It seemed as if, no matter who or where, an interviewer or a critic could not ask Steinberg about the sources of his art without facilely invoking Klee’s name, which was unfailingly irritating. “Too many geniuses—Steinberg claims only his own,” declared an Italian television interviewer, one of the many wh
o tried but could not slot him into a particular category or ism.

  “To solve once and for all the problem of Klee,” Steinberg told the art critic Grace Glueck, “I want to say this, that Klee did not influence me. The relationship between Klee and myself is that we are both children who never stopped drawing.” Steinberg believed that he and Klee both derived ideas from the original source of children’s art. He insisted that every sort of spontaneous or stylized drawing, such as the folk art of primitive peoples, originated there, and he placed himself and Klee among the primitives: “They are the ones who truly used the line in order to say something—it’s a form of writing—so this is the relation between Klee and myself, this love of graphology, popular graphology, children’s graphology, and so on.” And as far as he was concerned, that was it; there would be no further comment about Paul Klee’s influence coming from him, because “every explanation is an over-explanation.”

  He did, however, speak more kindly and fully of Klee’s influence in private conversations with friends, but only when he was the one to introduce the topic, usually with a particular remark of Klee’s that he never tired of misquoting. Klee said “a line is a dot that went for a walk,” but Steinberg changed it to “a line is a thought that went for a walk.” This, he told his avid audiences, was well worth pondering.

  Probably the closest he got to a thoughtful and truthful response to questions of origin and influence came during the 1970s, when he engaged in rambling conversations with his trusted friend Aldo Buzzi, which were published as the book Reflections and Shadows. Steinberg volunteered that he had once asked himself “how children and lunatics used to draw” and described himself as an “illustrator” whose style had not changed since he was a small child, when he drifted through his father’s factory and his uncles’ shops and tried to re-create what he saw there. He believed that this was what made him different from other artists, who often encountered problems when they approached maturity, because all too often their tendency was “to stop drawing in a childish manner—or to stop [drawing] entirely, or to begin drawing in an academic style.” That had not happened to him, he insisted, because he had trained himself to retain the attitude of a child who looks at the external world and sees things as if for the first time. Equally important, he had not changed what he called his way of describing what he saw. He used the term line loosely, to describe both his technique and how he chose to portray his subjects and express his ideas, and insisted for the rest of his life that the most important thing about his line was that it was “the same one I acquired back then.”

  Steinberg’s earliest extant drawing is one he made at age eleven and dated October 24, 1925, on the back of a photograph of his kindergarten class. It appears to be of an authority figure, a bearded man in a high-collared jacket and uniform cap with a visor. Two other drawings exist from his schooldays, probably done when he was fifteen or sixteen. Both are charcoal and show his awareness of and attempts to create line and shadow, an indication that they were exercises done for a high school art class. One is a six-sided pyramid, both shaded and with its own shadow; the other is a profile portrait of his father’s head. Despite being the rendering of a beginning artist, the drawing portrays a good man beset by the cares and woes of daily life and shows the artist’s early ability to convey emotional complexity.

  There is an aura about the portrait that, with hindsight, conveys sadness, probably because the adult Steinberg believed that his father had had a sad life and he himself had been a sad little boy. He said it was not until he became a teenager that he understood why he was sad, and how, in order to survive, he had to become an observer of rather than a participant in his daily life. When his friend the critic Dore Ashton told Steinberg that she thought the mature drawings he made of his Bucharest childhood mimicked the style of some Middle European children’s book illustrations, he said he made them with an air of incredulity, because he could not believe that he had originated in such a land of “pure Dada,” a “masquerade country,” an “Art Deco World peopled by Byzantium man.” Being Romanian was a complicated matter, Steinberg told Ashton, for it didn’t matter how long a Jew had lived in Romania, he was still a foreigner.

  CHAPTER 3

  A WUNDERKIND WITHOUT KNOWING IT

  Saul liked to tell the story about how a Romanian man was sent by his family to the U.S. on a ship, with everything they thought he should have from his homeland: pots, pans, pillows, mattresses. This was his entire luggage, and when he left the ship, somebody stole it all. There was nothing left to remind him of Romania, and he was gloriously happy.

  Steinberg described himself as “a culturally born Levantine [whose] country goes from a little east of Milan, all the way to Afghanistan.” His reflections on being brought up Romanian were surreal enough to convince him that Dada could not have been invented anywhere else, and that was why everyone from Tristan Tzara to Eugène Ionesco had to come from Romania, the implication being that like so many other compatriots who later became his friends—Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Norman Manea, and especially Ionesco —he too had to get out. From his earliest schoolboy memories, he thought of himself as an outsider and an observer who looked at his “patria” from a distanced perspective. Like most children, he wanted to fit in and be like everyone else, but he found it impossible. He received no feeling of normality from interacting with his peers; that came only when he was drawing.

  When he reflected upon how his patria influenced his art, he tried to recall his earliest childhood so that he could assign blame to his circumstances, but almost every time he did, his account conflicted with similar ones. In some he thought he had probably been happy because he was simply too young to recognize the deep-seated anti-Semitism that permeated his “sewer” of a country. He was happy at Christmas, for example, when he joined neighborhood children of all religious persuasions to make bouquets of artificial flowers out of filmy pink and mauve paper, all highlighted with gold sparkles and tied with wire to wooden wands that they waved as they went through the streets singing Christmas carols and touching people on the shoulders to wish them a good year. He thought the flower wands were “the most beautiful colors” he had ever seen, and when he was an old man, they remained one of his “most important and strongest memories” of childhood. And yet in other accounts he insisted that his sadness had begun in infancy and by the age of ten had become his dominant emotion, even though he did not understand what caused it until he was a teenager. It was only then that he learned through personal experiences how restricted daily life was for Romanian Jews, and when he began to seek what he thought of as normalcy, he found it only through drawing and reading.

  The society into which he was born was a complex one, especially for a transplanted Jew of Russian origin whose family spoke Yiddish as their common language. Romania had been a Turkish colony and part of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries, during which it became home to what Steinberg called “Levantine people—Lebanese, Turks, Persians, Egyptians, not to mention Greeks.” His compatriots were an ethnic blend of peoples who looked not to Western Europe but to the East and to Asia for cultural sophistication, even as they conducted themselves according to the rigid Austro-Hungarian code of manners, beliefs, and behavior that had been superimposed by the ruling Hapsburgs. And yet despite the cultural mishmash of all these conflicting “Levantine” cultures, Bucharest took so much pride in patterning itself after all things French that it was known as the “Paris of the Balkans.”

  The physical city of Steinberg’s childhood was one of contrasts and contradictions, of huge villas lining broad avenues that bore the grand French name chausées even though they were really dirt roads, obstacle courses marred by piles of horse dung and scoured and rutted by the wheels of carriages. The mansions were patterned after the imposing homes in the faubourgs of Paris from which they took their French names, with the most imposing lining the Calea Victoriei, the only street with a Romanian name because it was home to the king’s palace and
the most important government buildings. It too was a study in contrasts, rutted with cobblestones that did not deter luxury cars such as Lagondas and Hispano-Suizas from hurtling along, forced to swerve often to avoid hitting oxcarts or clusters of Gypsies who were cooking their dinners over patches of burning tar in the middle. Steinberg called such visions “a mixture of honey and shit, from which, as in real life, only happy memories remain.”

  YOUNG SAUL LOVED THE HOUSE WHERE he grew up. His happiest memories were connected with life at Strada Palas 9, a one-story house built into an interior courtyard of apartment buildings, much like all the others in the Antem and Uranus neighborhoods. It was “a society with no mysteries, where daily life was conducted in the courtyard and where doors were always open and anyone could look in the windows.” Trees surrounded the house, and in the daytime, the light coming into the courtyard was “luminous.” He was “charmed … by sundown reflected on walls, colors,” and as an elderly man was moved when certain colors gave him momentary pangs of happiness because he remembered them from childhood. There were vegetable and rose gardens that created “all sorts of smelly perfumed places.” Children played on roofs or in attics, and there was a constant parade of noises, friends, and neighbors. Animals roamed freely; chickens were treated as domestic animals and were permitted to wander in and out of houses as easily as dogs and cats; ferocious geese could also go wherever they wanted, but local lore considered it outrageous to have a duck inside a house.

  No domestic animals dared to enter the impeccable Steinberg kitchen or the heavily furnished, ornately wallpapered dining and living rooms. “Everything had to appear nice,” and the house was layered with embroideries, curtains, drapes, and antimacassars. Rosa dressed Saul and Lica “like cabbages”; Lica wore fussy dresses with big collars and huge hair bows that held back her straight bobbed hair, while Saul was stuffed into stiff white shirts and fawn-colored suits with short pants. Even as a child he recognized that in comparison with Rosa and her immaculate household, her house-proud sisters “lived like pigs.” The Steinbergs were prosperous and could afford a servant, so Rosa engaged one of the many Romany girls who came down from the dirt-poor mountain villages. Rosa was a tough and frequently abusive taskmaster, but despite occasional shouting matches and hurled crockery, the girl stayed with her for all the years they lived on the Strada Palas.