Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Anyone who asked Steinberg to contribute to a protest against the war knew he could be counted on, as long as he could do it quietly and behind the scenes. He was still grateful to America for taking him in, and he balanced his gratitude carefully against his disagreements with political policy. He agreed with his old friend Ad Reinhardt, whom he had met when they worked together as cartoonists for the leftist paper PM during World War II, that they could not use the same excuse the Germans had used against Hitler and the Nazis—that they did not know what was going on—and that it would be criminal to stand by and do nothing. Steinberg quietly stepped up his activity in early 1967, and his work on behalf of antiwar protests continued for as long as the conflict lasted. Among the first to enlist Steinberg was the group Artists and Writers Protest, when Dore Ashton and Max Kozloff, both members, asked him to contribute to a “Collage of Indignation,” which was exhibited the same week he left to take up his residency at the Smithsonian. From then on, Steinberg gave money and signed petitions, but mostly he donated art or designed posters that were auctioned to raise funds.

  There were significant changes to his work at the beginning of the war and subtle touches as it dragged on. Instead of drawing the seals and stamps on the false documents by hand, as he had been doing, he began to have them made to order. In addition to the official-looking seals, signs, and stamps, he had figures made—of men on horseback, soldiers on foot, and other figures and animals in various poses and activities. All told, an informal count of his collection numbers around four hundred, but he insisted that he needed only a core group of fifty “to render space, nature, technology” in what he called “a computerized form of art.” He told this to Grace Glueck when she had interviewed him in 1966, well before computers were in general use; he also told her that he liked to use rubber stamps because they helped him to “avoid the narcissistic pleasure of hand work.” He said he kept his vision fresh by “making these simple elements and then arranging them.”

  He used other “simple elements” as well, many of them as collage objects. Graph paper became hulking skyscrapers, airmail envelopes became ominous warnings of possible bad tidings, and postcards were given new meaning when he drew people, animals, or landscapes on top of the original picture. This posed a problem for The New Yorker, because the magazine did not use color until the 1990s. However, it was the rubber stamp—the “cliché,” as Steinberg called it—that gave the real “political meaning” to his work. For him, “the cliché is the expression of the culture of a period,” and in his “territory, which is satire,” he served up both “mediocrity and clichés” whenever he criticized the things he did not like. Uppermost among them was the Vietnam War.

  Steinberg’s contributions to The New Yorker increased steadily throughout the decade of the 1960s and continued to grow at the same steady pace throughout the 1970s. The sixties were truly the decade when his name and the magazine’s became synonymous, when his drawings were used to lure advertisers and subscribers alike. Under William Shawn’s editing, the magazine had come to exemplify a “greater social and political and moral awareness” and was a haven for writers who explored and exposed the clashes in culture and society. Steinberg’s work paralleled the shift, especially after the magazine began to feature essays that dealt specifically with Vietnam by writers such as Richard Rovere, Neil Sheehan, Richard Goodwin, and Jonathan Schell. Steinberg replaced his abstract and cerebral ponderings with what he saw on the city’s streets, heard on the nightly news, and read in the underground newspapers that proliferated in Greenwich Village, where he walked the streets every day and observed the passing scene. Bleecker Street became a bizarre psychedelic playground populated by wailing police cars, cops brandishing phallic billy clubs, wigged-out druggies, and costumed counterculturists. Anthropomorphic animals roam Steinberg’s streets, some of them bearing a vague similarity to Mickey Mouse on their threatening visages. His women sport overblown helmeted hairdos, sprayed to the nth degree, their mouths spewing aggression and their bodies dissolving into long legs and killer stiletto shoes or boots.

  Were they funny? Were they comic? Many readers thought so, even though so many more objected to the magazine’s increasingly overt political content. Steinberg wanted to make them aware of the criticism as well as the humor, and many times it was tough going to get the point across. Humor was a way of somehow telling the truth, but he knew that humor could also be “subversive” when he used it to camouflage the political meaning of a drawing and make it a shade or two more palatable than it would have been without its slight disguise. He believed that most of his audience would not be able to grasp a “political response” to his work, because “the response to art comes a generation or two later.” As for what he was trying to convey, he saw the drawings as having “two levels—entertainment and morality.” He held the idealistic view that “any artist has a basic morality and responsibility. Morality doesn’t mean ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts.’ One learns morality during a lifetime.”

  CHAPTER 33

  LIVING IN THE PAST

  I work and see few people, of my mafia, a sign of advanced age. I live twenty years or more in the past.

  Steinberg was in New York for one month before the urge to travel struck again, but he had no one to travel with, because Sigrid was in Paris. She told him to invite Aldo to spend the summer, but instead he began to collect want ads and hired a real estate agent to show him apartments, this time concentrating on the Upper East Side, in the same neighborhood where Hedda lived. He was still in real estate limbo at the end of the year when he invited Sigrid to go to Mexico, where nothing was the same as he remembered it from his 1948 trip with Hedda and the Cartier-Bressons. “Things change,” he concluded, and he began to think about making some of his own changes at home. He decided to put an addition on the Springs house that would give him a large ground-floor workroom with a bedroom behind it, and he also decided to find studio space in the city that would include living quarters so that he could leave Washington Square Village. Once again time passed, he dawdled, and he did nothing concrete except renew his lease.

  In April 1968 it was almost as if the perfect studio space dropped into his lap without any effort on his part. When he heard that the eleventh (and top) floor was available in the building at 33 Union Square, near 16th Street and Broadway, he acted quickly and secured the lease on 4,500 square feet of raw space. It was in an office building, but the view was so beautiful and filled with light from windows that looked out on the Consolidated Edison Building’s famous clock tower that he wanted to live there. He secured permission to use part of it for his residence and planned to move in the following spring, which would allow time for a leisurely departure from his apartment. His intention was to build walls for a bedroom and kitchen in the part of the loft that already held a staircase leading to a small tower room overlooking Union Square. It reminded him of “a pavilion, a kiosk with windows halfway between Turkish and Venetian,” and he planned to use it to sit and think and to gather ideas from watching the street life down below. “Isn’t it sumptuous?” he asked all visitors who toured his raw space before he took them to lunch at one of his favorite neighborhood places, Max’s Kansas City. His building took on extra glamour when he learned that Andy Warhol’s Factory was three floors below his studio, although it was disappointing never to see Warhol or any of his regulars in the elevator because they did not keep the business hours that he did.

  Before he could move in, there was much to be done to make the space livable. He got as far as making a list of tradespeople whom he asked for plans and estimates, but mostly he left the space in the condition he found it in while he spent the summer dealing with adjunct events that arose from the numerous exhibitions held that year in Europe, South America, and the United States and preparing for the two important ones the following year at the Parsons and Janis galleries. In Springs he was content to work and see old friends like the Rosenbergs and Hedda, who had her own house nearby, on Hog Hill R
oad. He had renewed his friendship with Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, a wealthy woman whom he met when she worked at MoMA and who invited him to her salons in the city, and during the summer he accepted numerous invitations for dinners at her house in Wainscott. Occasionally he visited Betty Parsons in Southold, where she had a house on the beach, and he and the Nivola family were casually back and forth across Old Stone Highway.

  Friends on Steinberg’s porch: left to right: the Nivola family (Claire, Ruth, Tino, Pietro), Evelyn Hofer (seated on porch), Saul Steinberg, Dore Ashton holding her daughter. (illustration credit 33.1)

  It was a low-key life, and as summer lengthened into fall, the country was so pleasant that he stayed on longer than usual. Sigrid was with him occasionally, happy to be there to harvest her garden and take care of “the little house,” a small cabin similar to the early cabin motels that used to dot Long Island highways. Steinberg had bought it for her as a birthday present and had it moved onto the property just below his house. It was a simple wooden shell of four walls and a roof, without utilities or facilities, but she loved it and planned to use it as her studio. “We’re going through a nice period,” he told Aldo, “maybe because we’re both learning to be less testardi [stubborn].”

  WHEN WINTER FINALLY ARRIVED, IT WAS a brutal “Romanian winter” that seemed unlikely ever to end and brought illness and depression with it. Steinberg, who liked to think of himself as “healthy as a crocodile,” caught a grippe that would not go away, and with it came uncharacteristic migraine. On top of the headache, there were ongoing problems with his teeth and another onslaught of dental appointments. When he finally conquered everything that he lumped into the single word ailment, all he had left was “the fear,” his name for free-floating anxiety. While he lingered on in the country, being alone there gave him so much time to brood intensely that the physical symptoms caused by worrying made him give up his customary daily bottle of white wine and several scotch whiskeys. However, he intensified his smoking to several packs a day. “I function poorly these days,” he told Aldo, “because I have doubts and uncertainties that leave me paralyzed.”

  His sleep was interrupted, so he spent long nighttime hours rereading Joseph Conrad (an old favorite) and books that Hedda recommended: a biography of Richard Wagner (“written for those who know music”) and the memoirs of the revolutionaries Aleksandr Herzen and Pyotr Kropotkin. The only way he could alleviate his stress was to work, and he kept himself busy preparing for the two New York exhibitions and making what was for him a veritable deluge of drawings for The New Yorker. He thought it ironic that by presenting the magazine with so many offerings he was “sabotaging the show and art with a capital A, maybe so as to free myself from that commercial world.”

  STEINBERG MADE OCCASIONAL TRIPS INTO THE city as fall turned to winter, going mostly back and forth between the studio and the apartment. With each trip the stress mounted as he saw the work piling up in both places and knew he could not handle it. He was not good with his hands, so there was no one to take care of mounting and framing the drawings for the exhibitions. His correspondence was a mess, as letters remained unopened and dunning letters warned of bills seriously overdue. An occasional series of part-time secretaries came and went with swift regularity, overwhelmed by the mess of so many papers. He had better luck with a studio assistant when he found the Dutch artist Anton van Dalen, who stayed with him for thirty years. Steinberg was walking down 57th Street on his way to his galleries when he passed van Dalen and asked if he knew anyone who was looking for work. “Why not me?” van Dalen asked, and the partnership began.

  Steinberg was greatly admired in Holland, and van Dalen had been one of his fans while growing up there. They met for the first time in September 1965, on van Dalen’s second day in New York, when he found Steinberg’s number in the phone book and called to ask for a meeting. Steinberg said he was busy and asked van Dalen to phone again in two weeks. When he did, Steinberg invited him to the apartment, where they talked about art for more than two hours. When they met again on 57th Street and Steinberg told van Dalen how much he needed help now that he had a studio, van Dalen offered to begin work the next day.

  Anton van Dalen and Steinberg in the Union Square studio. (illustration credit 33.2)

  To van Dalen, Steinberg was a man “who lived largely in his own head [and] was really not good with his hands. He was of the society where to work with your hands meant you were of the laboring classes, and he thought himself above that. He would watch me carefully, fascinated by simple things like mounting his artwork on boards, or gluing strips of wood together.”

  The gratefully relieved Steinberg called van Dalen “Saint Anthony,” and once he was on board, their way of working fell into a pattern. Van Dalen went to the studio every Wednesday and did whatever needed to be done that day. Sometimes Steinberg would ask him to go to the downtown galleries or the uptown museums to see and report on shows he did not want to attend himself. When he became intrigued by an idea, such as the shape and color of New York taxicabs, he sent van Dalen out on the streets to “just snap pictures,” after which he used what he wanted. Steinberg asked van Dalen to walk the entire length of Canal Street and take photos of buildings and people. When Steinberg saw a tree growing in the most unlikely space outside a Chinese dry cleaner’s on 75th Street, he made van Dalen photograph it at every season of the year. “He seemed always to be trying out things,” van Dalen remembered. “I had to pay very close attention to everything he did in order to figure out what it was that I was supposed to do.” Steinberg was fascinated by some of van Dalen’s tools, particularly a chisel that allowed him to cut wood in forms that resembled books. He raved about it to Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, two friends whom he saw a lot during his early days on Union Square and who shared his fascination with tools as toys. When Gross bought a glue gun, Steinberg insisted that Grooms had to demonstrate it, and together they built an arch out of Styrofoam blocks. And when Steinberg discovered the Staedler eraser, he bought one for Gross, who told him truthfully that it was one of the greatest presents he had ever given her. It pleased him more than any of the compliments she paid when he gave her presents of his own creation.

  Very quickly van Dalen observed that despite such working friendships, Steinberg was an extremely private man who expected him to be the same. If anyone talked in the studio, “it was usually Steinberg, in a monologue; my job was to listen and not interrupt. The only time I could ask questions was if they were perfectly phrased for what I needed to find out, and if they were minimal, brief, short.” Steinberg’s favorite topics of conversation were the books he read and the movies he saw. He also liked to talk about his sister, Lica, and much of what he said was to marvel over the joy she expressed now that she was exposed to the Paris art world and exploring new directions in her own work. Sometimes he would leave van Dalen alone while he kept a luncheon engagement or dropped in at another artist’s studio, often that of Mimi Gross, who worked nearby. He would stand quietly and patiently observing whatever she was doing, and if she was impatient with something difficult, Steinberg usually made the same response: “The true artist never takes any shortcuts. You deal with the work no matter how hard it is until you get it right.” In his own studio, he exhibited the same sort of patience with van Dalen, who learned early on to hide any frustration he might have felt.

  One very important part of Steinberg’s day was his telephone conversation—and sometimes multiple conversations—with Hedda Sterne. Usually they talked about the books each read, with Hedda being the one most likely to recommend the writings of a little-known philosopher or the memoirs of revolutionaries. She kept up with the literature of their native Romania, and despite Saul’s supposed disinterest, she passed it along to him and he read it, so that even though he never spoke of contemporary Romanian culture, he was well informed about it. Van Dalen learned to keep busy in another part of the studio while Saul and Hedda talked, as their conversations could last a very long time.

 
Mostly, despite Steinberg’s love of music and van Dalen’s wish to hear it, they worked in companionable silence. Steinberg had an “old-time record player” but seldom used it, he kept his violin in the studio but seldom played it, and he never talked about music. A major part of van Dalen’s job became keeping order in Steinberg’s life. He made the phone calls to set up appointments with workmen and tradesmen, he settled the overdue bills, and he spoke to the near-hysterical petitioners who wanted something from Steinberg, everything from accepting an advertising project to selling a particular drawing that the person wanted to buy. Even though Steinberg appreciated what van Dalen did, he was still uneasy about having someone in his workspace: “It was very hard for him to have people around him. He wanted his own space, his solitude.” Van Dalen noted how this attitude dominated Steinberg’s “arrangements” with women, not only Sigrid and Hedda but the constant procession of others as well: “He saw them in his own time, on his own terms. They were never a daily part of his life.”

  AFTER “SAINT ANTHONY” TOOK OVER, Steinberg thought his life was in good order at last. The dunning letters from Sam Flax, the Union Stamp Works and Printing Company, Kulicke Frames, and Mourlot Graphics stopped, as Anton wrote the checks with regularity and Steinberg duly signed them. He was well taken care of in the city, but there were still problems at the house in the country. It needed a new water pump and well, and the expense of a new roof was looming. He spent so much time there that although he no longer had sufficient work space, the studio addition had to wait because so much needed to be done to the existing structure. Money became a concern again, although not nearly to the degree it had been when Steinberg’s parents were alive, but he still kept a separate daily calendar to list his income and earnings.