by Deirdre Bair
Another of his iconic totems, the crocodile, makes an appearance as “a monster—a dragon—who is the real essence of beauty.” The crocodile had fascinated Steinberg since his trip through Africa, and he tried to describe it to Grace Glueck, saying that he was frustrated by wanting to get “some sort of idea of what a crocodile looks like, and I didn’t.” A surprised Glueck replied, “But you know what a crocodile looks like.” Steinberg said, “I know, and I don’t know … The main thing is to find out what sort of technique the crocodile is employing to show itself.”
By the time of Stein’s interview, the crocodile had become a recurring symbol, and in this book he depicts it as an “ambiguous line” in which the creature’s backbone becomes “the horizon line on which a gooey, disgusting, so-called beautiful landscape appears with all the elements of beauty: moonshine, moon, clouds, palm trees reflected in the calm water, a swan—the true elements of beauty.” That may be, but Steinberg meant the drawing to convey a sarcastic message: “Beauty is crocodilian.”
He returned to a theme from the Tillich book when he pictured people coming up from somewhere underground to find themselves adrift in a landscape. He called this “a sort of sadistic play on perspective,” because the people cannot locate themselves in space and therefore have to learn how to become located in time. “Time,” said Steinberg, “is much quicker and plays tricks with us. Space is more reasonable; it has to be accounted for; it has to be logical.”
He returned to the subject of the individual adrift in the middle of life when he placed two drawings facing each other on adjacent pages. In the first, a man walks on a horizon line toward a tree, a house, a windmill, and other objects denoting civilization, while behind him the line that was the horizon curls into a spiral. This was “his past; there is nothing; it’s completely canceled.” The man is walking toward his future, but the past is following dangerously closely in order to “eat him up.” In the facing drawing, the man cannot look to the future to keep himself alive because he is inside the spiral of the past and it threatens to engulf him. “This is a sort of frightening drawing,” Steinberg concluded. It represented “the expressionist who lives by his own essence … unconnected with the political and moral life of people or of the artist.”
He returned to the sadness of people who are unable to communicate when he represented several conversations “in a stenographic way.” On a sofa and several chairs he seats a “fuzzy” spiral, a “boring labyrinth … with a hysterical line,” a “giggling, jittery bit of calligraphy,” and several comic-book symbols for speed, noise, and confusion. When Steinberg lost his usual precision and drifted into a convoluted explanation of the many meanings a spiral could have, Stein asked if this was because he saw himself in any of the stenographic figures. “No,” he said emphatically, “no place.”
Various kinds of drawings representing uncommunicative conversations follow, from thought bubbles with his unreadable false writing to the paper-bag cutouts of figures spouting maps of their travels. They all lead up to one of his most popular drawings of all time: a boss who sits behind a big desk, smiling sadistically at a timid worker while over the boss’s head a huge NO looms, entirely filled with unreadable false writing. When it appeared in The New Yorker, so many people wanted to buy the original that it generated the most fan mail Steinberg had received in all his years with the magazine.
Stein wanted Steinberg to talk about the many drawings that featured question marks, but he cut her short: “Let’s not talk about question marks; it’s boring. They are obvious by now, I’ve made so many.” He wanted to talk instead about three other drawings that he thought were vitally important for an understanding of the book’s general thesis. The first was of another of his fear-inducing spirals, this one a “misleading” series of concentric circles in front of a man who holds a pen in his hand and is visible behind it. In a nod toward his architectural background and the riddle of spatial relations, Steinberg called this drawing “a form of perversion.” Because the man behind the spiral is visible, “actually this space does not exist … This is a spiral line that contains an even mass of space instead of opaque and transparent space the way I indicate here.” What he had done in drawing such a picture, he insisted, was beyond perversion: “It’s a form of cruelty.”
The second drawing depicted “a completely droll situation,” an art lover standing in full emotional thrall in front of painting in a museum. Steinberg ridiculed viewers who gaze rapturously for long periods of time at art: “It’s something intellectual that must be perceived in a fraction of an instant; the true lover of art going through a museum goes on roller skates and is extremely tired after five minutes.”
The last one he wanted to discuss was the top one of two drawings on the same page, this one representing “the hero fighting a giant baby.” On what appears to be an altar or the plinth of a gigantic monument, there stands one of his “mechanical” drawings, a doodled Don Quixote complete with shield and spear who points his horse toward a gigantic upside-down baby that is balanced on top of the plinth by its wiry strands of hair. In one hand the giant baby dangles a kitty-cornered midget version of itself. Steinberg said there was a “key” to this drawing: “the dragon the hero picks out for himself to fight, and anybody who fights a giant baby is really a dragon; it’s not a hero.”
For the cover, he found a sheet of the marbled paper used on the inside covers of old books and created what could easily pass for a journal, ledger, or diary, a blank slate on which readers could affix their own personal meaning. Steinberg left the marbled paper plain and unornamented except for “real gummed labels.” The one in the center of the page that bore his name and the book’s title could have graced any ordinary file folder. On the upper and lower edges he placed triangular blue protectors used to mount photos in albums, and he ran a red leatherized protective strip down the length of the spine. When his publisher questioned why he used such things to make a simple cover for a complex book, Steinberg said, “I liked them and they stuck and that simplified the whole thing.” Stein was also puzzled by the simplicity of the jacket, especially because it gave no indication of the often startling content within. She asked why he chose not to use a drawing that would immediately identify him as the book’s author, as he had done on his previous books, especially The Labyrinth, the cover of which showed a drawing that became one of his most famous, the man with a rabbit inside his head. In The New World, this drawing appeared on the back jacket flap, which Steinberg defended by saying that he had “no business to put a drawing on the jacket of a book of drawings.” He thought it best to leave the rabbit man where he was, where he would be the reader’s last (and lasting) impression as he closed the book.
STEINBERG WAS PROBABLY WISE TO CHANGE the title of the book from “Confessions” to The New World, for when the drawings are taken as a whole they create a very different impression from when they are viewed individually. Like the man with the rabbit in his head, the reader cannot help but wonder what was going on inside the head of the artist who produced them. The wit combined with seriousness that Steinberg portrayed so elegantly in the Tillich book is certainly present, but the overall message is darker, the tone harsher, and the subject matter progresses in almost unrelieved starkness. When taken all together, the words Steinberg used to explain the drawings become—to use his word for the “Gog” drawing—an “interesting” way of interpreting the book. He labels some of them “satire” and says they are “sadistic,” “frightening,” and “unconnected,” with components that are “hysterical,” “giggling,” and “jittery.” In the conversations with Stein, he uses the words destroy, destroying, and destruction repeatedly to describe what is happening within various drawings. He is pleased that a number are deliberately “misleading,” and “cruelty” is a recurring and satisfying theme. In short, the drawings in The New World convey a far different message from that of the illustrations in Tillich’s Search for Absolutes.
STEINBERG’S EXHIBITION AT G
ALERIE MAEGHT WAS to open in March, and he went to Paris a month beforehand to oversee the work connected with it. Sigrid assumed that she would go with him and was stunned when he told her he planned to go alone. She flew into a rage when he refused to discuss his reasons, but when he stayed silent and would not engage in argument, she grew still herself. She was hurt, but she was also afraid of provoking him to an irreparable breach.
He went alone to Paris, where he burst into a flurry of activity, going every day to the printer in Levallois to oversee the production of Derrière le Miroir, the original lithograph for the exhibition posters, and the series of lithographs and prints that would be sold along with the drawings. Le Masque had become a much larger book than the one he had originally envisioned, but he was pleased with how it looked. He also liked the preliminary plans for the accompanying DLM and was content with the studio space in the gallery that Maeght set aside for him, where he could work on his mural and the panels on which Inge Morath’s photographs would hang. Everything conspired to give him pleasure, and he was surprised to discover that even though he was exhausted, the work made him happy. All around him were “tables, light, cabinets for drawing, all my familiar objects.”
He had been living in a hotel but was tired of it, and Morath insisted that he move into her apartment when she and Arthur Miller returned to Connecticut. He was happy to be there after a full workday, when he was too tired even to go to the movies. He stayed in and read books about the Greek islands, because he had relented and wanted Sigrid to come to Paris and go there with him on vacation after the show was safely launched. “I’m happy,” he wrote to her, enclosing a check for apartment expenses and an airline ticket, “NYParisNY.” If she wanted to do him a favor before she came, she could buy a pair of his favorite English shoes at a Madison Avenue store, but she was not to bring “too much stuff” for herself, because he wanted to buy her whatever she needed in Paris.
Sigrid was wary of his sudden change of heart and did not join him in Morath’s apartment. She booked a room at the Hotel d’Angleterre and said she would “show up at the opening for a moment.” She assured him he would have “nothing to worry about. I don’t expect you to stand there holding hands with me but I have to do what I consider right.” In her last letter before her flight, she told him she was “very hysterical and full of anxieties,” especially after the people she occasionally worked with at the design firm gave her tranquilizers as a going-away gift, and only half in jest. It was not the most soothing message he could receive on the eve of a reunion that was bound to be tense.
The exhibition opened to great success, with large crowds, good reviews, and excellent sales, especially to new collectors. All his friends were there, among them Hélion, Geer van Velde, Matta, Ionesco, and Sandy and Louisa Calder. Lica came with her family, and Sigrid spent much of the evening standing quietly with them instead of near Saul. She was ill at ease, and he made it worse by simmering angrily over her lack of poise and self-confidence. Some years later, when she was trying to relive the events of their relationship in a journal meant to help her understand it, she wrote about the strain of this opening and others that followed: “I never fitted, never was quite at ease with his friends. I don’t have enough manners, class. And I don’t have the clothes. I only embarrass him and myself.”
Sigrid stayed on in Paris after the opening, but things remained strained when they took their holiday in Athens, Salonika, and Crete. Afterward, Saul went on alone to Rome and Milan before returning to Paris and Morath’s apartment, while Sigrid flew there directly and moved back into her hotel. Saul let himself be caught up in the whirl of Paris socializing and did all that he had been too tired to do before the opening, dining out every night with old friends and new, especially with Maeght and the flock of collectors who had purchased drawings from the show and wanted to be seen with the Paris art season’s current sensation. Sigrid was mostly on her own until May, when she went to Trier to see her father for what turned out to be his last birthday (he died in September).
Things continued to deteriorate badly between them. In a cryptic entry in her journal jottings, Sigrid wrote the single sentence “This is when he hit me.” She neither explained the comment nor referred to it ever again. Saul never did either. Whatever happened remains known only to the two of them.
WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES, Steinberg holed up in the country, spending the summer and early fall hard at work on the Parsons and Janis exhibitions, which loomed in November “like an exam in a French Lycée.” He knew from the start that the joint show was “going to generate a lot of interest and excitement” because it came on the heels of the French one and was his first American exhibition in thirteen years. The year 1966 had indeed been a memorable one, overwhelmingly full of new experiences generated by the two successes, the exhibition in France and the publication of The New World in the United States. Both gave him a huge boost of self-esteem; as he said tongue-in-cheek to Aimé Maeght, “Seeing the book always makes me realize how great I am.”
He used this combination of arrogance and self-confidence to deal with the onrush of reporters and photographers who clamored to interview a suddenly newsworthy artist who had just received two exceptional honors: he was about to become the first ever artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institution and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French government. The medal was conferred in September at a ceremony in the French embassy in Washington, where Steinberg’s “embarrassment” was eased by the French cultural counselor Edouard Morot-Sir’s “very nice speech” about him. The Smithsonian appointment was widely viewed as “another medal of honor,” which Steinberg was to earn by spending two to three months in Washington, beginning in January 1967. He had to begin to think about the details involved in making the move as he juggled all the work for the joint exhibition and a host of other projects. Steinberg told Aldo that he was “in that state of trance of soldiers or actors who must do something without any longer knowing why.”
On top of the work connected with the gallery shows, he was overseeing the curators who were installing some of his other work in several museums. Maeght moved most of the Paris drawings and murals to St.-Paul-de-Vence, where his Fondation Maeght hosted another show after the one in Paris closed, and the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels planned to show the mural panels from the 1958 World’s Fair. The Cincinnati Art Museum exhibited several of the murals Steinberg had made for the restaurant in that city and wanted to know if he would consider making several others. He sent a telegram saying, “My fee today would be seventy-five thousand dollars,” and there the matter rested.
Money was pouring in from the sale of his drawings and the reprints that he had authorized as illustrations for books and articles. One of the many buyers was the Hamburg, Germany, newspaper Die Welt, which used them to illustrate John Steinbeck’s article “America Today.” Steinberg was pleased to be associated with such a distinguished writer and gave permission readily.
With all these requests came a new series of legal concerns. Steinberg objected that he would have no control over the drawings sold in the Parsons-Janis exhibitions, as the owners would normally have the right to do whatever they pleased with them. He wanted the same agreement with the galleries that he had always insisted on with publications, that he sold the drawing for one-time use but all rights of reproduction remained with him. This was fine for periodicals but was not usually the case with gallery sales. Alexander Lindey told him that copyright was “a complex subject that resists simplification” and his only option would be to rely on “statutory copyright” if he insisted on retaining all other rights. He advised Steinberg to draw the standard symbol for copyright (the letter c in a circle) somewhere on each drawing, and to photograph every one, making sure that the symbol showed clearly. He also advised him to make a rubber stamp reading “© 1966 by Saul Steinberg. The sale of this drawing covers only the physical drawing itself. The artist reserves all other rights in it, including cop
yright.” And he warned Steinberg to make sure that the catalogue was copyrighted in his name and not in the names of the galleries.
In retrospect, Steinberg was wise to retain control of his drawings, for the works in the Parsons-Janis shows sold even better and for much higher prices than those at Maeght. He bragged about it to Aimé Maeght: “I sold eighty pictures at respectable prices— even more and at higher prices than Paris. Naturally, this gives me great pleasure.” He told Aldo it gave him “paternal satisfaction” to watch his drawings being “sold at high prices.” Even the articles and reviews gave him pleasure, particularly two he singled out for their “high quality,” Vogue and the New York Times.
By the time of the American exhibitions, the publicity bandwagon was clipping along at an astonishing speed. Journalists were first alerted to the possibility of a good story when Time and L’Express wrote about the Maeght exhibition. Time described crowds who rubbernecked, chuckled, and occasionally snorted, saying that the scene was “ready-made for a Saul Steinberg cartoon.” The article also noted that Steinberg was “breaking a 13-year self-imposed ban on exhibitions,” and journalists lined up to find out why. When Pierre Schneider took Steinberg on a walking tour of the Louvre and published their conversation as “an unsettling trip through art history,” the flood of requests took off like one of Steinberg’s cartoon rockets. Many interviewers came from Europe, and before the year ended Steinberg had been filmed for programs dedicated to his life and work on German and Italian television networks, and others were in the works. In the United States, in the heyday of magazine popularity, some of the leading cultural critics ensured that he was everywhere: Jean Stein’s long article appeared in Life, he was photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, Hilton Kramer wrote about him in the New York Times, and Harold Rosenberg published one of their conversations in Art News. He was actually disappointed when the Times story did not feature him or his work on the cover, as he had been led to believe. Rosenberg commiserated, but only slightly: “Congratulations on your non-appearance on the cover of Times. By this time you must be sick of this whole business of appearances and realities.”