Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  Another request came in August, when he interrupted his Vermont vacation to rush to New York and supervise the installation of the Bonwit Teller mural and worry about the Cincinnati project. The industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss wanted Steinberg to execute murals for the four bars on the “Four Aces” ships of the American Export Lines. Steinberg accepted, as he did every lucrative commission, but he was growing both weary and wary of murals: “The trouble is that these things give me no pleasure; from the time the first drawing is made to when the mural is finished too much time goes by for the original drawing to go on pleasing me.” Once the original was complete, he found things that he wanted to change, but by then it was too complicated to do so, “and so I say to hell with it, let’s finish it as it is, get rid of it as though it were mumps or some other illness.” Even worse was the process that followed the execution, when he had to deal with the architects in charge of installing what he drew. This part of the process reminded him of the despised GUF in Mussolini’s Italy—the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti—“because they have to combine art or idealism with business.”

  As was usual with Steinberg, however, once he got involved in the actual work, the “tribulations” turned into an appreciation of its “pleasure.” He was sorry to see the Cincinnati project end because he so enjoyed painting with oils on “very fine canvas, the best Belgian linen.” He was delighted that it turned out so well and was happy to have at least one bright spot in a year that was not ending on a high note.

  IN ROMANIA, THE RUSSIANS WERE THREATENING to close the frontiers and cut off immigration, and Rosa was growing frantic that she and Moritz would not be able to leave. Now that the country was solidly in the Soviet bloc behind the Iron Curtain, there was no possibility of bringing them directly to New York or to France, so Steinberg began to investigate whether he could send them to a South American country for several years until they could qualify for entry into the United States. “The business of visas begins again,” he noted wearily. Anything beside his work was “a bother” he did not want to deal with, nor did he have to, because Hedda took care of every detail of their daily life. She was left to plod with the mundane in order for Saul to soar. For him, “if I have to do anything beyond [work] such as life, money, supervision, strategy, then the work—quality—turns out badly.”

  Saul did secure South American visas for his parents, but immediately after, Hedda took charge. She was able to arrange for them to pass through France, where they would stay in Paris on an extended visa for as long as they wished as guests of her mother and brother. She went to Paris before New Year’s 1948 to prepare for their arrival, which, because of Rosa’s requirements, she compared to setting up a small village. Hedda left Saul to welcome the new year in yet another fit of the gloom and doom he always felt about the holiday. He was in such a bad mood that he invented a bad case of the “grippe” to escape most of the invitations from “old bores,” who were actually people whose company he otherwise enjoyed.

  He told Aldo that it was no small matter to have to face taking on the responsibility for five or perhaps seven new Romanian dependents, for besides his parents and his sister and her family, one of Rosa’s sisters and her son also wanted to come. Since he left the navy, he had tried to set up a routine wherein he worked hard for six or seven months of the year on as many commercial commissions as he could fulfill so that he would have enough money to support his dependents and then travel and do his own work for the other five. Now that he would be entirely responsible for the well-being of so many, he worried not only that the pleasant lifestyle he had created would be disrupted, but also that it might vanish if he was not able to earn enough to support everyone. Ever since childhood, he had “always looked for ways to escape and avoid families.” Now it appeared that all his efforts were for naught, and he would never be free of the familial bosom.

  CHAPTER 13

  SLAVING AWAY WITH PLEASURE

  To work, I must isolate myself. It’s a weakness of mine. I also find it very difficult to accept things from other people. I prefer to exchange gifts, or even to pay excessive sums to get exactly what I want. I realize it’s a kind of arrogance: I want to be the person in charge, the person steering the car, the one in control. If anybody does something for me, I feel used, manipulated, no longer free.

  Hedda was in France in the winter of 1948, ostensibly to prepare for settling Saul’s parents, while he stayed in New York to work on the many commissions that had spring deadlines. That was the reason Hedda gave to friends to explain her long absence, but in reality it was one of the many times she went away to give Saul time to think about the state of their marriage and the responsibility he bore for the problems within it. From the moment she left, he missed her and reverted to the wartime lover who could not live without her and worried that she would leave him, a far cry from the dominating and domineering husband who took her for granted when she was at home. He wanted to join her in France as soon as he could get his various commissions under control, but he claimed to be afraid of commercial airliners and refused to fly, insisting that he had to sail in a first-class cabin on the best ocean liner. It was difficult to secure passage when the completion dates of so many projects (most notably of the Cincinnati murals) were indefinite.

  He was surprised to find how upsetting it was to be alone in their apartment without her. At night the building was full of noises he never heard when she was with him, and sometimes he woke up in a panic when he reached for her and found her side of the bed empty. He even ate his meals in her seat at the table so that he didn’t have to look at her empty chair. He wrote to her almost every day and in each letter told her how much he loved her and how she was his dearest friend and the best thing ever to happen in his life. He wrote these letters during the time that he was at the height of his philandering; Hedda was well aware of it, and it was the cause of the first and thus far most dangerous period of tension between them.

  Many years later, when she was an incapacitated woman in her nineties, Hedda spent much of her time reflecting on her marriage to Saul. She described it as “highly interesting, occasionally wonderful, very often difficult. Saul was not prepared for conjugal life; he wanted total freedom from every point of view.” Hedda knew from the beginning that hers would be an open marriage, with “Saul having casual affairs every two minutes if he could have managed,” and she had no choice but to accept it. She did not need to read the appointment books he always left open on his desk to know when he was in the midst of an infatuation, when his only nod to discretion was to note his assignations in an easily recognizable shorthand or code with cryptic notations of single initials, room numbers, and times. Even though Hedda always considered herself unconventional, she still resented it when he casually described “interesting things” about other women’s bodies, such as “her ankles as seen from the left,” or “the inside of her upper arm,” or her “nice earlobes.” Only much later, when she forced herself to accept that his idea of marriage was “Fellini’s 8½,” was she able to feel more compassion than anger toward him: “In a way, sex was his life. He deprived himself of true union because he was not ever in love.” It took her years to arrive at this understanding, but in the beginning it was hard.

  Hedda had gone to Paris earlier than she needed to and was staying longer than she had originally planned just to give Saul time to realize what she brought to the marriage. It was the first of the many separations she instigated in order for her absence to make his heart grow fonder—a difficult course to take the first time she did it, but one she used repeatedly during the years they lived together. Indeed, as soon as she was gone, he broke off several of his more persistent liaisons with women who wanted him to commit to more than casual and occasional sex, for without the security of Hedda’s presence, they frightened him. Worried that she might retaliate by initiating a relationship of her own in Paris, he told her that they should both remember that they were married to each other and should not “harm” themselves
or their marriage in any way. Now that she was gone, he realized how much “self-confidence” she gave him, and the reason he missed her so much was that he truly loved her.

  HE WENT OUT ALMOST EVERY NIGHT just to avoid the loneliness of being in the apartment without her, but he curtailed his womanizing and socialized mostly with male friends, particularly Richard Lindner, to whom he and Hedda had become close. Within minutes at their first meeting, they both knew that Lindner would become their lifelong friend, and he did. Like them, he was a refugee who embraced all things American from the moment he arrived in 1941. They were all approximately the same age and had many things in common, from their personal backgrounds to their political underpinnings. Lindner was born in 1901 to German Jewish parents, and his upbringing in a cultured middle-class household in Nuremberg was similar to Sterne’s. Like Steinberg, he was always aware that as a Jew, he was an outsider in a precarious situation in his birth country. Lindner was educated at art academies in Nuremberg and Munich and worked for a short time in Berlin before becoming the art director of a Munich publishing house. He resigned in 1933, the day after Hitler became chancellor, and went into exile in Paris, where he became active in the Resistance, served in the French Army, and was briefly interned before he made his way to the United States. When he met Steinberg and Sterne in 1945, he was working as an illustrator for books and magazines, among them Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, but he was eager to devote himself to painting. In 1953 he put his friends into one of his most famous paintings, The Meeting, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1954, when he had his first solo exhibition, he followed them to Betty Parsons’s gallery.

  They and Lindner shared the same idiosyncratic but insightful responses to much of contemporary American art and artists. Steinberg credited Lindner with a “proto-pop [art] color sense,” one that he shared. They had many friends in common, both abroad and in New York, which further deepened their bond. Saul was a dedicated poker player and spent many pleasant evenings playing at Sasha Schneider’s apartment with Lindner and Gjon Mili. Lindner introduced them to the set designer René Bouché, and Saul and Hedda befriended him as well.

  Invitations continued to pour in while Hedda was in Paris, and Steinberg accepted most of them, but only if he was in the mood. He saw a lot of his old friends, the writer Niccolò Tucci and the photographer Dave Sherman, but he dismissed them as his “old bores” on the rare occasions when he felt like staying home alone. When Hedda was in New York, she generally accompanied him, but after she returned from the Paris sojourn, she told him she did not like the constant round of parties and dinners and preferred to spend her evenings at home reading or painting. She liked it when friends dropped in for casual suppers in her kitchen because she liked to cook and enjoyed intellectual conversations, but only one-on-one or with two or three people she knew well.

  Saul, on the other hand, liked to get dressed up and go out, to places where more and more he could count on holding the floor. He liked to dine at the home of the dancer Sono Osato and her real estate developer husband, Victor Elmale, because they always deferred to him for conversation. It was always a pleasure when the Covarrubias were visiting them from Mexico and he could steer the dinner table conversation to Hedda and her work, which they all admired. Irving Penn invited him to an opening of his photographs, where he chatted with Tatiana and Alexander Liberman about future projects he might do for Vogue, and soon he was one of their favorite dinner guests. These occasions soothed the paranoia that always lurked in his mind, that he would be a penniless failure because at any moment everyone might stop buying his work; in this instance, because he had just done a series of drawings for the magazine that did not “come out well” and Liberman had rejected them. No publication had done this in recent years, and the Libermans’ invitations assuaged his fear that Vogue might become the first of many.

  He was working hard every day and drawing constantly, but much of what he submitted to publications that had hitherto accepted everything he sent was now being culled, sometimes with a high percentage of rejections. When a politically themed drawing he was trying to make for a New Yorker cover during the forthcoming election cycle was rejected—“something corny with eagles and floating allegories”—it made him look back with the eye of a critic at the earliest drawings he had done for the magazine; he concluded that they were “mediocre,” and he could not see any genuine progression or development in his work since then. He worried that he might become “forced by necessities to perfect my mediocrity.” A qualified joy came when various commercial firms accepted without comment a dozen advertising drawings because they made “lots of money (no Victor [Civita] involved).”

  Every morning he went to his studio and worked on commercial projects and his own drawings; each afternoon he returned to the apartment, where he took over Hedda’s workspace and tried to paint with oils to amass enough canvases for a show at Betty Parsons’s gallery. He told Hedda he was amazed by how much he had to learn about using oils and how difficult it was. He was pleased when he taught himself to spread color with a knife and with the tricks he picked up from studying the work of other painters in museums, particularly Matisse. When he was invited to a “private selected pre-preview” of his friend Joan Miró’s show at MoMA, he went to see what techniques he might copy, but he left after ten minutes, sure that he would learn nothing while surrounded by a “sad bunch of snobs.”

  WITH HEDDA AWAY, HE HAD LOTS of time to worry about his general health, as he had still not fully recovered from the illnesses and bad diet of the war years. He tended naturally toward hypochondria, and so he took care to give Hedda the details of each whinge and twinge in every letter as a ploy to elicit her sympathy and perhaps an earlier homecoming. Without her, it also seemed as if every illness that made the rounds of the city felled him, and he had various forms of “flu” or “grippe” throughout the winter. Worst of all were the problems with his teeth, which had been seriously neglected for years. He was now consulting dentists, endodontists, and dental surgeons for months on end, a situation that lasted every year for the rest of his life. Because his teeth gave him his worst “real hell,” he was delighted when his primary dentist took a skiing vacation and he got a respite from the several-times-weekly sessions, which sometimes lasted several hours. When the dentist returned, his only relief came on the several occasions when he went to Cincinnati to supervise the installation of the Skyline Restaurant mural in the Terrace Plaza Hotel.

  Steinberg took Constantino Nivola with him, because he needed help with the installation. He had absolute trust in Tino’s vision of how it should be hung but was irritated by his old friend’s devotion to his wife and children, who were the main subjects of his conversation as they worked. He believed he had to baby Tino by listening, and he found it a little boring, especially after long days of being polite to the local people, who treated him with “silence from the upper classes and big insulting laughter and scorn from the uncultured.” It made him furious when they asked how much he was paid for the mural and what it represented. He told Hedda that Cincinnati was a miserable city and thanked God that they did not “have to depend on or flatter people like that … ruthless, fat, and strongly intent on the most modest and vulgar things of life.”

  Of the mural itself, he went back and forth with the usual gamut of emotions he felt during large and long projects, first liking it enormously, then wishing he could make significant changes, and finally throwing up his hands and wanting to walk away from it. Eventually he decided that he liked the way it turned out, because he could stand in the enormous room and see almost the entire length of the mural with a single sweep of the eyes, and “that’s a pleasant surprise.” It inspired him with new ideas about adding to and improving everything about it, but it was too late to make changes, so he left it as it was and caught the train back to New York.

  It was beginning to seem as if murals were going to be the most constant form of expression in his career, as Henry
Dreyfuss was pestering him to come to lunches and meetings to discuss the ones for the four ships. When Steinberg compared the murals for the ships to those for the Cincinnati restaurant, he felt more secure about the new project, because the shipboard setting was on a smaller scale. He thought he could do the full-scale drawings while he was in Europe with Hedda and have them shipped back to New York, so he began to investigate a definite sailing reservation. Just as he started, a request for another mural came from an architect in Washington, D.C., who wanted him to make a large one for a hotel there. Even though Steinberg was worried about not having enough money to be able to spend two or three months in Europe in fairly affluent comfort, he turned down the offer.

  There were, however, lucrative smaller commercial assignments that he thought he could dash off quickly before he left. House and Garden editors asked for twelve drawings they could use to advertise their magazine in The New Yorker. They told him what they wanted, but he thought their ideas were silly and convinced them to use his, which were “a lot funnier.” Holiday magazine wanted to sign him to a contract that would guarantee him a certain amount of work each year. He wanted to do it but thought he should first consult the editors at The New Yorker, who let him know they disapproved of his working for any other magazine on anything but a freelance basis. He gave up the idea, but only after they gave something in return: correspondent credentials that he could use whenever he traveled.