Saul Steinberg

SAÜL STEINBERG (Romania, 1913 - USA, 1999).
Untitled.
Ink on paper adhered to paper.
Signed in the lower central margin.
Measurements: 18 x 14 cm.
American cartoonist and illustrator of Romanian origin, mainly known for his works for "The New Yorker", Saul Steinberg studied Philosophy and Architecture and began his career in Milan. In the 1940s he began his collaboration with "The New Yorker", and during World War II he worked for military intelligence. After World War II, Steinberg continued to publish drawings in The New Yorker and other periodicals, such as Fortune, Vogue, Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar. At the same time, he embarked on a career of exhibiting in galleries and museums. In 1946, he was included in the critically acclaimed "Fourteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, exhibiting alongside Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi and Robert Motherwell, among others. Steinberg went on to have over 80 exhibitions by one artist in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and South America. He was affiliated with the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries in New York and the Galerie Maeght in Paris. In 1978 a retrospective exhibition was dedicated to him at the Whitney Museum of American Art, followed by another, posthumously, at the IVAM in Valencia (2002). He is currently represented in the foundation that bears his name, as well as in the MoMA in New York, the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and other prominent collections in the United States. Since 1982, he has been represented by The Pace Gallery. A dozen museums and institutions have in-depth collections of his work, and examples are included in the holdings of more than eighty other public collections. Steinberg's long and multifaceted career encompassed work in many media and appeared in many different contexts. In addition to magazine publications and gallery art, he produced advertising art, photography, textiles, stage sets and murals. Given this dedication to different techniques, his work is difficult to position within the canons of postwar art history. He himself defined the problem: "I don't belong too much to the art world, cartoons or magazines, so the art world doesn't know where to place me." He is best described as a "modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing borders into unexplored visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, a distinction that was hotly debated in the postwar era. Steiner combined freely in a body of work that is stylistically diverse, consistent in depth and visual imagination.