by Deirdre Bair
In early September, he and Hedda were off together, flying to Brazil for a joint exhibition that opened at the most prestigious museum in the country, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and then traveled to Rio de Janeiro. The show had been in the works since 1950, thanks to the Civita brothers and two other Italian friends who had been at the Politecnico with Steinberg before settling in Brazil: Pietro Bardi, the founding director of MASP, and his wife, the architect Lina Bo Bardi. The Bardis and the Civita brothers knew that it would be an expensive exhibition and other sponsors would be needed to help finance it, so they started with the enthusiastic American consul general, William Krauss. Between the United States government and Brazilian benefactors, the money was raised and dates were set for a three-week exhibition, which opened on September 18, 1952.
Steinberg and Sterne flew to Rio the day before the opening and then spent the next ten days in São Paulo, where Bardi kept them busier than their wildest imaginings. He was a brilliant publicist who filled every possible venue with tantalizing information, and every day brought new press releases or pamphlets highlighting their work while dropping teasing tidbits about their personalities. Steinberg was described as having “invented a new world by simply judging his own world” and by knowing “exactly how to reap the ridiculousness in all things futile, all wrong headed ambitions and distorted vanities.” Sterne was touted as “an avant-garde painter … an utterly paradoxical artist, given her intimate allegiance to the real object.” By the time the show opened, the public was lining up to see it and the press was clamoring for interviews.
An issue of the important arts magazine Habitat gave them the cover and showcased their art with photos and articles. As the pressure for interviews mounted, Steinberg rebelled, insisting that “his person” was of no interest and all attention had to be paid to the work: “You could stand a matchstick in front of the camera and it would be the same thing.” Bardi saw this as another opportunity for publicity and in quick rebuttal composed a new promotional text using a passage from Habitat that declared “the man himself ” was indeed very interesting because of the way he resembled his own drawings: “His bottle-end glasses hide his eyes, turning him into one of his own pupilless characters, those empty-eyed figures that see nothing. He walks with his hands in his trouser pockets and his blazer becomes a kind of wing. As he stands there in the middle of the exhibition hall, shoulders hitched, surveying the public, he becomes a bird. At least that is how we begin to muse … It was he who taught us to transform people into animals, because it was he who turned the waiters of San Marco Square in Venice into birds, and the pigeons into human beings.”
Bardi had previously hosted exhibitions by other North American artists, among them Richard Neutra and Calder, but Steinberg and Sterne were the ones who brought the museum its largest audience to date. Everyone wanted to meet them, and Bardi invited the cream of Brazilian society to receptions at the museum and parties in his home, the famed House of Glass designed by his wife. It was the first house built in what later became a fashionable suburb but was then just a tropical forest on the outskirts of the city, a setting that reinforced Steinberg’s observation that the entire country was one huge insect infestation. On their first night in Brazil, when they were on their way from the airport to the Copacabana Palace Hotel, he and Hedda saw a traffic accident that they thought was eerily prescient of their exhibition: a car was turned upside-down, reminding them of a beetle and bringing to mind images of the machines and machinelike insects in some of Hedda’s paintings. When they went to stay in the House of Glass, they were witnesses to an “insect massacre” every night.
They were not impressed with the major Brazilian cities, which Steinberg dubbed “tropical Bucharest.” The only beauty was “among the colonial things … the usual brass, mahogany and tiles as decorations, the open trams … thousands of equestrian monuments, the vultures that circle over the sidewalk in search of carrion.” He made drawings of these, and they and other drawings he made while touring found their way into his sketchbooks; some, in one form or another, were included in The Passport.
By late October Steinberg and Sterne were back in New York, where Steinberg had to sandwich his own work in between commercial assignments. He needed thirty drawings to replace those that had been sold for the smaller version of the Parsons-Janis show that was to open at the Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills in December, and he had to amass a larger number for a more important exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris the following March. He had not done any lucrative work for such a long time that he had to spend the first three months of 1953 working on paid commissions for everything from a container corporation’s advertisements to Hallmark cards. He was furious when Raymond W. Hall and other Hallmark executives interrupted his work to insist that he go to Kansas City for personal meetings to discuss their ongoing differences.
Raymond Hall wanted Steinberg’s drawings badly enough to pay him a minimum commission of $10,000 each year, but he was a demanding employer who frequently questioned and often rejected Steinberg’s offerings. One refusal that particularly rankled was when Hall responded to his Valentine’s Day submissions through a committee memo: “The general feeling … is that this design does not express a Valentine’s feeling and it would do much better if it had some Valentine motif, or an indication of a Valentine in it.” The committee invited Steinberg to “try again.” More trouble with Hallmark came when the Museum of Modern Art placed a large order for an original design for Christmas cards that Steinberg had done before he signed the contract granting exclusivity to Hallmark. Hall was furious with Monroe Wheeler’s casual explanation that he had reordered the cards because “MoMA patrons wanted them.” It took several telephone conversations and personal meetings for Steinberg to make Wheeler desist and to placate Hall. The incident was not resolved until Wheeler promised that MoMA would not reprint again, even though he told Hall from the beginning that the museum’s sales would never be “challenging competition” to Hallmark’s.
Steinberg hated personal dealings such as these, but often there was no way to avoid them, since many employers insisted on dealing directly with the artist with the quirky vision. He tried to shunt them off onto his lawyer, Alexander Lindey, but if they persisted, he simply ignored them, thus earning a reputation for being cranky, prickly, and exceedingly difficult. Actually he was an inordinately polite man, sometimes upset for days over having to be rude when people who worked in advertising or publicity would not take his no for an answer and hounded him to change it.
STEINBERG WORKED STEADILY BY DAY, but every night he partied. More and more he was at the center of the most interesting and important social, intellectual, and artistic groups in New York. It was the beginning of the era of the iconic dinner table, when a hostess would mix and match guests from different worlds, wooing some from, say, Park Avenue society or national politics by hinting that important names in art or literature would be gracing her dining room. Quite often Steinberg’s name was dangled as the magnet to attract others. It was also the beginning of the era when modern American art became a commodity with significant market value, and for every letter Steinberg received from a commercial firm wanting to pay for his work, he received at least two from people who wanted to buy and collect it.
Hedda recalled Saul’s reaction at a small informal supper with Mark Rothko in her 71st Street kitchen, when Rothko bemoaned the way artists were being turned into “marketable mills, workers who produce something buyers want.” She remembered Rothko telling how “people used to come into the studio and look at the work and you would have real engagement, a discussion before you made the transaction, the actual sale and purchase. Now, they just come in and buy. They hardly look at it. No discussion, no transaction.” Steinberg sat silently while Rothko spoke, but after he left, he muttered something about how it was all very well for those who did not have dependents to complain about how buyers devalued their artistry and respected only the high prices; as for him, he
had responsibilities and no time to kvetch about the attitudes of buyers or the prices they paid. Knowing full well the financial pressure he was under, Hedda wisely said nothing.
Besides supporting his parents and his sister’s family, he steadily received requests from relatives, and just as steadily he sent checks by return mail to four or five in Israel. If one of them made a slightly barbed comment comparing Saul’s wealthy and successful American life with their own poverty in Israel, he ignored it. He was also trying to find discreet reasons to funnel money as regularly as he could to Aldo, and now to Ada as well. She had resumed fairly regular contact with Saul, and although she never asked directly for help, each letter contained an account of some new tribulation with a hint that she could use money; here again, he always sent a sizable check by return mail. And as his feelings of civic responsibility deepened, he felt an obligation to contribute money to everything from Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign to the fund drives of suburban Jewish congregations. His friendships with Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald grew, and both had a strong influence on his naturally left-leaning and liberal political sensibilities; in years to come he would quietly observe the positions taken by writers for the Partisan Review, The Nation, and the Reporter and often adopt them for himself. He gave freely to all the causes they embraced.
STEINBERG HAD ACCEPTED SO MUCH COMMERCIAL work that he found himself giving short shrift to one of his most important solo exhibitions, the one being mounted by Aimé Maeght for March 1953. In the few short years since its founding, the Paris Galerie Maeght had become one of the most prestigious in the international art world. Maeght wanted 110 drawings, but Steinberg had so many other deadlines that he did not finish his selection until early February. Because more than half were small, he decided to carry them by hand; the rest were shipped by Parsons and Janis, and he could only hope they would arrive in time for the opening, which Maeght had had to delay until April 17. Maeght planned to dedicate an edition of Derrière le Miroir, the exquisite oversized publication that featured lithographs of the artist’s work, with an accompanying text by a distinguished writer. When he asked who should write the preface, Steinberg chose Le Corbusier, but time was short, and if Maeght actually asked Le Corbusier to write it, his reason for turning it down remains unknown. This DLM became one of the few without any text.
On March 1, with his new passport in hand, Steinberg boarded a plane to Paris, not sleeping during the fourteen-hour flight but “eating chicken, drinking highballs, and reading Orwell.” He checked into the Hotel Crillon, planning to stay overnight to catch up on sleep, make appointments, and give himself a quiet day before telling Aimé Maeght that he had arrived. Then he planned to check into a smaller hotel on the Left Bank, where he could have an incognito week before surrendering for publicity engagements. He told Hedda he had not done anything but go to the movies, when in fact he was out all the time.
During his two months in Paris, his calendar was filled with every glittering name in the worlds of art and culture. He met many luminaries through Maeght at his gallery or his home, among them two artists to whom Maeght was devoted, Georges Braque and Joan Miró. Braque remained a cordial but formal and distant contact, while Miró became a good friend. Mme. la Baronne Elie de Rothschild liked his show and invited him to dinner, which led to other invitations from members of the French nobility. The German publisher Rowohlt courted Steinberg by going to his hotel several times to discuss possible projects and to introduce him to some of his writers who were passing through Paris. Steinberg met several times with his European agent, Jennie (Mrs. William) Bradley, who tried to interest him in various documentaries that were never realized. On the personal side, Janet Flanner entertained him at lunches and dinners. He dined separately with Marcel Duhamel and Yves Tanguy and saw his friend Cartier-Bresson. He went to the home of Meyer Chagall, where he conversed with Roland Petit about the ballet and cemented his lifelong friendship with Jean Hélion over conversations about techniques of painting. In the short time he and Steinberg knew each other, Hélion became such a close friend that Steinberg initiated a correspondence in which he exchanged more personal information than he did with anyone else but Hedda Sterne and Aldo Buzzi. Among the other guests at Chagall’s were Jean Dubuffet (who also became a cordial friend), the art historian Charles Estienne, and the wealthy English art collector Peter Watson, whose money was largely responsible for the creation of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. There were also lunches, cocktails, or dinners with Robert Doisneau, Giacometti, and Giò Ponti. And Steinberg still managed to save several long afternoons to browse for rare books, which he had begun to collect.
On this trip he was especially interested in books about Turkey, because he had made several visits to study the Louvre’s exhibition “Les Splendeurs de l’Art Turc.” It was homework in a sense, because he had long wanted to visit Turkey and it inspired him to make a spur-of-the-moment decision to get away from his frenetic Parisian life and go there. He crammed the trip in before the one of several weeks when he had to be in Rome for work connected with an exhibition of Hedda’s paintings. The journey began with a brief stop in Nice to visit his parents, where he stayed once again in a hotel to escape from Rosa’s complaints. Then he flew to Istanbul via Zurich and Athens, as there were no direct connections at the time. The weather was bad and he was delayed in Athens, but he didn’t mind because he liked the “beautiful and civilized city” and fantasized about returning for several months. It brought back memories of his first year at the Politecnico, when he studied Greek architecture and was so fascinated by the Temple of the Winds that he spent six months drawing it. But what impressed him most of all were the smells of Athens: “black olives, garlic, cheeses, placinta, sweets … a real treat for the nose.” Istanbul, by contrast, was “terrible.” He had trouble finding a hotel room and slept the first night in a “nameless inn, filthiest bed.” When he finally got a room, it was “modernistic and cubistic Turk.” The food was inedible and the city was “full of shapeless people.” Everything gave him nightmares and he could not wait to leave.
He flew to Rome, where he saw Aldo alone and was relieved that the reunion was filled with their old joshing camaraderie. He was happy when Aldo agreed to come to New York in the fall and stay for three months, but otherwise he worked mostly on the arrangements for the Hedda Sterne show at the Galleria dell’Obelisco. The hardest part of the work involved writing letters to persuade her that even though it was only a ten-day exhibit, it was well worth doing. She thought it was too much to do for too a short time, with too much of their money being spent on expenses for unlikely sales; he said the final decision was hers but he would be unhappy if she refused. To compensate for the show’s brevity, he ordered the gallery to make “an especially beautiful catalogue” that he would pay for, and he gave specific instructions for the artist to be identified simply as “Hedda Sterne, painter,” and not as “the wife of Steinberg.” When she heard of how much money he had already spent and how hard he was working on her behalf, Hedda agreed to the show.
STEINBERG RETURNED TO PARIS, PLANNING TO BE “invisible” while the exhibition was running, but as usual his calendar was too full for him to hide out. This time he only saw people who had become good friends: Janet Flanner, Giacometti, Hélion, and Miró. His only business dinner was with Mrs. Bradley, but here again he turned her into another of his foreign representatives, all frustrated by the inability to get him to commit to any of the projects on offer. She wanted him to “settle a book or two, a documentary, drawings for a tapestry, [and to] decide on shows in Torino, Zurich, Stockholm, maybe in Germany, etc.” He was too frazzled to make decisions and begged her indulgence as he postponed everything. He was actually relieved when he found out how many other requests he had avoided by running away to Istanbul, such as when his new German-language publisher, Daniel Keel of Zurich’s Diogenes Verlag, made a spur-of-the-moment trip to Paris to meet his new author, only to find that Steinberg was not there.
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By the middle of June and despite his resolve never to spend the summer in New York again, he was there for most of it, almost submerged by work and taking on many more projects than was reasonable because once again he needed to make up for all the time he had lost while in Europe. He had sold some drawings at the Maeght show, but not as many as he hoped. As he had left instructions with Maeght’s accountant to send all monies directly to his father in Nice, he had to earn more for his own support. Once again the commercial work interfered with preparations for an important upcoming show. This one, of forty-five drawings at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, required much more personal involvement than usual: after selecting the pictures, he had to get them ready for shipping, fill out the insurance valuation forms, and then respond to the many requests from museum personnel for everything from publicity about himself to captions for the work. Clearly he needed an assistant, but he had no time to find one. At the same time he was dealing with legal issues concerning Aldo’s forthcoming visit: his lawyer had to prepare an affidavit that Steinberg would be financially responsible if Aldo overstayed his visitor’s visa, and this meant gathering various tax forms and earning statements from his accountant and attorney.