Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  In the first year of classes, the Politecnico students took courses that were divided almost equally between the rigidity of mathematics and science and the fluidity of art and the humanities. Analytical mathematics and advanced geometry were balanced by the history of art and architecture. Steinberg took two language courses as electives: German (then the language of science and necessary to understand technical publications) and English (the lingua franca for general international discourse). Students were required to study elements of construction, mineralogy, applied geology, and elementary architectural composition and drawing, but he also studied disegno dal vero, or drawing from life. The life-drawing courses were held at the Poli, but the student body was enlarged by groups from other area schools, such as the prominent Accademia di Brera, where painting and art history were the primary subjects. It made for an interesting mix of styles and opinions, and provided broader cultural insight into contemporary Italian art.

  In dal vero, Tomasso Buzzi taught students how to see everything with a new and discerning vision, from human models to inanimate objects and still life assemblages. He would point to a view or an object and tell the students to draw it quickly, which brought a “revelation” to Saul, who told Aldo that until he took this course, he had only drawn from “fantasy” or “imagination.” Now he was finding both “surprise” and “passion” in everything he saw and drew, because of his teacher’s unorthodox way of exploring and explaining the world around him. The work he did in Tomasso Buzzi’s class had a special meaning for Steinberg; throughout his life he always threw away drawings that displeased him, “but rarely drawings dal vero.”

  Tomasso Buzzi was not only Aldo’s cousin but also the friend and collaborator of Giò Ponti, another of Steinberg’s professors, and he was the first of several (Ponti was later among them) who told Steinberg that he had the makings of an artist as well as of an architect—heady praise for a first-year student. Toward the end of the course, Tomasso Buzzi shifted the course content away from what the Brera students called “pure art” and toward what he called “documentary” drawings. In the days of the T-square and slide rule, these included the architectural segments and components of buildings that students drew by hand before computer programs rendered such drawings obsolete. Steinberg’s versions of some of the “documentary” drawings were of interiors as grand as the Galleria, simple layouts of living rooms and bedrooms, and building facades and decorative columns. Here again, in pencil and ink lines of varying blackness and width, he subjected such concepts as distance and perspective to his particular vision. Straight walls appear slanted and off-kilter, furnishings are distorted, and hallways and corridors are either foreshortened or made to loom unnaturally large. He tried to explain what he did by saying that his work always said “something about something else” and that his intention was always to show “something more than what the eye sees.”

  Interestingly, the nuts-and-bolts courses that formed the greater part of the curriculum offered other ways for him to use what he saw to represent and describe something else entirely. Arturo Danusso, already respected for an important series of published papers on the use of reinforced concrete slabs, taught a structural engineering course that was pure mathematics combined with solid geometry. Ambrogio Annoni, a distinguished architect who specialized in architectural restoration, taught “drawing from nature” in a course titled “organisms and forms of architecture.” The student body for this course was a combined group of architecture students from the Poli and art historians and restoration specialists from the Brera, and the mix made for some exciting discussions. The eclectic Piero Portaluppi, considered one of the main protagonists of architectural culture in Milan, used his courses to provide students with practical work experience for the many important commissions he executed between the 1920s and the 1950s. Giò Ponti, in an interior design course, taught Steinberg to see every object in a room with the same sense of astonishment that Tomasso Buzzi inspired, and to commit it to paper with the refreshing originality that became a hallmark of Steinberg’s vision.

  Despite Steinberg’s insistence that the Poli had little influence on the development of his style, it is not too far-fetched to find traces of what he learned in these courses in the later drawings that puzzled and delighted legions of admirers. The classes sparked his initial knowledge of and lifelong interest in the history of art and architecture, but just by being in Milan he gained the confidence to be a snob about art and architecture, to know what was good and dismiss what was not.

  His courses fed his imagination but did not become illuminating experiences until he began to take the required field trips that complemented classroom instruction. Students went to several factories throughout the Piedmont region that specialized in manufacturing various materials used in construction, among them a cement factory in Ferrara where they saw the practical application of Danusso’s research. One of the best trips was Steinberg’s first to Rome, where the students were taken to monuments, ruins, and buildings old and new, then left free to let their imaginations carry them on waves of creativity. Steinberg became “a very, very precise observer of the world, a profound and precise draftsman” as he drew the required “documentary” drawings. His line became firmer, more assured, and to his surprise his personal sketchbooks filled far faster than those that were required. His creativity overwhelmed his course work, and because he was not concentrating on class preparation but was branching out into other, more artistic areas, he was not prepared for most of his examinations and delayed them.

  He thought he had plenty of time to deal with bureaucracy whenever he was ready to confront it, even though the years from 1933 to 1936 passed with astonishing speed. He worked hard during term time but was still relieved when he went home to Bucharest every summer to satisfy his parents’ questions with vague replies that he was making progress toward his degree and everything was proceeding smoothly and on schedule. He usually traveled by ships that sailed from Genoa or Venice, sometimes up the Danube, other times via the Black Sea. Occasionally he wended his way to Vinkovich in Yugoslavia, where he transferred to the Orient Express, which came from Istanbul. He didn’t work to earn money during his vacations, so when he returned to Milan, the over-solicitous Rosa usually stuffed his suitcase full of salami, halva, peach preserves, and cakes. His friends were happy to share the “pink, green, and blue box of sugary treats” that was usually piled on top of what Saul dismissed as merely “some drawings.” He filled sketchbook after sketchbook as a way of coping with his family and a way of life that had become foreign and distasteful. He saw himself becoming more Italian than Romanian, and just as he postponed his exams, it was easier to evade thoughts of having to return to Bucharest.

  ONE OF THE THINGS SAUL CHAFED at during his early years in Milan was the constant lack of money, a problem that was partially solved one day at the end of 1936 when a brittle, fast-talking woman “just sort of appeared” in the Bar del Grillo, gave a hard, appraising look at all the men, and took a seat by herself at the bar. Ada Cassola had blue eyes and dark blond hair and wore her skirts a fair bit shorter than modesty required. Aldo remembered her as “tall, thin, angular, and not really a beauty; many would say she was not even pretty, but there was something striking about her, and her personality fused with what Saul was looking for in a woman.” Like Saul, Ada was an exceedingly private person. She allowed the habitués at the Grillo to believe that she had come to Milan from a small town somewhere to the west or south, perhaps in Liguria, but she had no trace of an accent and did not speak a dialect native to that region or any other. She spoke Italian with a cultivated accent that sounded both practiced and acquired, and when she did lapse into the Milanese dialect, she was able to speak it fluently. She evaded Saul’s questions, especially about her age, but he eventually discovered that she had been born in 1908, which made her six years older than he. She told him she had no family and stuck to the story that she had come alone from an unnamed small town to seek her fo
rtune in the big city. She never spoke of how much education she had or whether she was prepared for anything other than menial work. In the beginning, Ada helped out as a waitress at the Grillo and as a cleaning woman for the rooms above, but she had bigger dreams and did not do such work for long.

  Ada Cassola Ongari, Steinberg’s “beloved Adina.” (illustration credit 5.2)

  Her mysterious comings and goings provided irresistible gossip for all the regulars at the bar, but neither Saul nor Aldo could get a straight answer about how she suddenly seemed to have all the money she needed without ever appearing to do any work. Aldo thought she might be a fence for stolen goods or a smuggler. Both possibilities gained credence when she gave Saul a cigarette case and wristwatch and shortly afterward was arrested for smuggling contraband cigarettes. A bribe to a local official got her off that time, but she did have to lie low for a while, and Saul and Aldo had to pitch in to help cover her expenses. Nothing daunted Ada: she was fearless, always up for a dare, and after World War II began, she smuggled contraband right under the noses of the Nazis.

  Ada remained a major presence in both men’s lives until her death at age eighty-nine in 1997. For Aldo and later for his wife, Bianca Lattuada, she was a “mystery to the very end: never once did she speak of her family or her origins; never once did she reveal anything personal about herself.” Saul was utterly besotted with Ada; she was the first woman to captivate him totally. He begged her repeatedly to marry him, but time after time she stalled, giving one reason or another. She was so elusive that when he was not drawing or going to classes, he was almost always trying to track her down so that he could be with her. However, fidelity was never his strong suit, and there were other female diversions at the Grillo. The regulars did not hesitate to let Ada know that Saul had gone off with “the little red-haired girl,” and she was furious when she went to mail a package to him and the postal clerk smirked, saying that she “knew” him. “Naturally you will say you don’t know her [but] I know you have a soft spot for fat blondes and unfortunately I am not one,” Ada wrote to him. She didn’t like it when he went off with other women, but as she had her own reasons for secrecy, she seldom complained; however, in this case she was so angry she said she could not write to him again until she “cooled down.”

  Ada and Saul before the war. (illustration credit 5.3)

  Ada may have been a fearless and independent woman, but in Mussolini’s Italy she had to practice discretion. Saul did eventually spend nights in her room, although for a long time he had to pretend to be visiting her at various girlfriends’ apartments, from which the girlfriends would then conveniently absent themselves. For the most part, Ada quietly arranged their assignations for somewhere other than Milan. She liked the tourist towns in Liguria, and Varazze was a favorite destination. She would stop there on her way back to Milan after one of her mysterious absences—usually to Genoa—and send telegrams and letters asking Saul to meet her in a certain boardinghouse where she had reserved a room in his name. She cautioned him not to tell anyone where he was going and to avoid being seen by anyone who might recognize him when he walked from the train station. What she didn’t tell him, in these letters or in person, was the primary reason for her discretion: that she had a fiancé—if not actually a husband—Vincenzo Ongari, who lived in a nearby town in Liguria that she regularly visited.

  The relationship between Saul and Ada was intense from the beginning; it developed in fits and starts all rife with passion and was punctuated by drama, fueled by both their deceptions, large and small. Meanwhile, Saul’s money problems continued, until Bruno Leventer grew tired of listening to his woes and gave him a push to do something about selling his drawings.

  WHILE SAUL AND HIS FRIENDS WERE spending the 1936 summer vacation in Bucharest, a new satirical newspaper called Bertoldo made its Milan debut, on July 14. The publisher, Angelo Rizzoli, thought there would be a market for a paper that toed the Fascist line but occasionally flirted with censorship by poking fun at the regime and making people laugh. It was patterned after a similar paper in Rome, Marc’Aurelio, but instead of pitching it toward the working class, Rizzoli aimed for a solidly bourgeois readership. Leventer was a fan of Marc’Aurelio, and one morning shortly after the fall term started, he was lazing about and reading Bertoldo. After listening yet again to Saul bemoaning his poverty, Leventer forced his reluctant roommate to gather up some of his drawings and take them to one of Bertoldo’s two editors, Giovanni Mosca. “I remember how stubborn you were and how you were firmly against going to Mosca, but fortunately, you eventually gave in,” he later recalled during a conversation with Steinberg.

  Giovannino Guareschi was the managing editor and Carlo Manzoni a staff writer, and both were in the office on the day Steinberg walked in. Manzoni saw “a young man with a blond mustache and glasses” who stepped up to Guareschi’s desk carrying a large portfolio: “He puts the portfolio on the table and pulls out a paper with a drawing of a little man, a cartoon cloud exiting from his mouth: ‘I would like to illustrate a short story by [Giovanni] Mosca,’ says the cloud.”

  Guareschi barely glanced at the artist or his submissions as he gave Steinberg his standard answer for would-be contributors: to leave the drawings along with his name and address, and he would show them to Mosca when he arrived. Manzoni overheard “the young blond man” say his name was Saul Steinberg and he was an architecture student living in the student residence.

  Mosca liked what he saw, and on October 27, 1936, a Steinberg drawing under the pseudonym Xavier (chosen for the “absurdity of the initial”) appeared in Bertoldo. The reader response was immediate and positive, and the editors asked for more, telling Steinberg to sign his own name from then on. Steinberg was astonished by his success: “I only discovered my talent when my first drawing was published … It took me ten minutes to do, but when it appeared in the paper, I looked at it for hours and was mesmerized.”

  In the cartoon entitled “Barbe” (“Beard”), a dandy who wears a top hat, carries a cane, and sports an enormous black beard is leaning against a Corinthian column. Behind him is a similar male figure, disproportionately large compared to the small horse on which he is riding. Behind the rider are two barren twiglike trees (or perhaps flowers), stuck in urns in the middle of a small plot of grass encircled by bricks. One of the twigs sports a singing bird. The dandy leaning against the column has one hand beneath the beard that drops almost to his waist and in the caption berates himself for having forgotten to wear a tie. It was the first of more than two hundred drawings Steinberg would publish until June 1938, when the racial laws imposed by Mussolini forbade Jews, particularly foreign Jews, to work in Italy.

  Steinberg and Bertoldo were a perfect fit. Under Mosca’s editorship, the paper aimed for “a public that almost immediately was in on our game of allusions … once Italian readers, especially the young ones, became aware of fascist ‘speech,’ they saw its ridiculous side. Bertoldo, a mischievously comic paper, became a school for gravity.” The poet and writer Attilio Bertolucci noted how Steinberg’s mature “fabulous graphics that are the extreme results of the most advanced humor today” might have originated in his apprentice years at Bertoldo during the most troubled period of Mussolini’s regime.

  Almost immediately Steinberg was caught up in the excitement of journalism. The paper appeared twice each week, so two deadlines loomed, and he was expected to present a large selection of new drawings at each. The editorial committee met in one of the upstairs rooms of the Bar del Grillo, where Saul waited as they perused his drawings. They paid on the spot for those they took. Aldo waited downstairs in the bar: “If Saul got money, we would eat. At first all the money went for food, because he was a poor student and the drawings gave us a good dinner. Sometimes he sold so many that we would take the money elsewhere and then we dined first-class.” Steinberg enjoyed the life of a boulevardier. He updated his wardrobe, treated his friends to drinks and meals, and passed the time leisurely in the Galleria’s restaurant
, Biffi. His weekly submissions provided the rare, beautiful pleasure of “making money out of something I enjoyed doing and then spending it as soon as I made it,” he recalled.

  Soon after his earliest publications, Steinberg was given pride of place on what the editors called “the interior page,” one devoted solely to cartoons. Not only was it the place to be, but often there were no other drawings but his. Suddenly Saul Steinberg was a recognized name and a well-known figure among the glitterati of Milan’s chattering classes. He formed friendships with the Bertoldo writers and editors and was soon spending his days bantering with them, either in the Bar del Grillo or in their offices. He befriended Cesare Zavattini and Achille Campanile, who had come to Milan from Rome to coedit the rival humor newspaper, Settebello, and the designer Bruno Munari, who was their friend and frequent contributor. That led to an important friendship with Cesar Civita, who was then working as an editor for the esteemed publisher Mondadori. Steinberg became as popular among all these journalists and writers as he was among his classmates at the Poli, and he grew accustomed to being hailed by strangers in the bar or on the street who wanted to offer suggestions for drawings or cartoon captions. However, even though he had become a celebrity, success did not change his demeanor. He remained coolly polite and observant, distant and slightly detached from the banter of those around him, although he liked the attention and, even more, the security that came with being paid regularly for his work. Having money provided a kind of security he had never before enjoyed.

  Steinberg still shared a room with Leventer, who was about to graduate because he had taken all his examinations in a timely fashion and who was looking forward to beginning his practice in Bucharest. Aldo often spent time in their room, where Saul had commandeered the only large wall for his Bertoldo drawings. Aldo studied them, “in wonder, as one idea led directly to another, and then to another, and so on, and so on. Saul liked to review the evolution of his characters, his subjects. He needed to see the chronology of what he had already drawn as his ideas unfolded. He liked to see how he changed things as he went along. No, he actually needed to see how he changed things as he went along.”