Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  In September 1945, he learned that Aldo Buzzi was “alive and well” and working as a writer and set designer for Alberto Lattuada and occasionally for the exciting newcomer Federico Fellini. Steinberg knew of Fellini, for they had met by chance in a restaurant in Rome where Fellini was trying to eke out a living by sketching patrons for a few lire. Aldo told Saul that Ada was in Ravenna and, as far as he knew, still married. Saul resumed contact with her, but his most intense correspondence was with Aldo. It served in lieu of a diary of his daily life, as he told Aldo everything, starting with descriptions of his life as a stateside sailor: the worst part was having to “get up every morning and go to an office” and spend most of the day “sitting still and bored.” This was not entirely true, as his career had taken off like the proverbial rocket, and he spent most of every day while in the navy doing his own work.

  THE FIRST MAJOR ITEM OF BUSINESS was to choose a title for the forthcoming book. Everyone he knew had a role in the debate, but for want of something better it remained “Everybody in Line.” One of the first groups of friends Saul and Hedda made were some of the artists and editors at The New Yorker, and because Hedda was a superb cook, they had fallen into the easy camaraderie of inviting friends for casual suppers and drinks and conversation afterward. “Those were the years,” Hedda recalled, “when I cooked for whoever dropped by.” One evening when they were entertaining Jim and Eva Geraghty, William Steig and his wife, and Alan Dunn and Mary Petty, someone said the magic words “All in Line.” They all agreed that it was a perfect title because of its many resonances, from the chronology of the drawings to the unending lines of soldiers and sailors who had to “hurry up and wait” and the truck convoys that snaked up and down winding mountain roads. Steinberg was so pleased with the title that he immortalized the tableau of all the guests as they sat around discussing it by drawing them in his daily diary for the week of April 26–May 2. He captioned it “title for book and world of future,” and noted beneath it—perhaps as his way of indicating better times to come—that this was the same week when Mussolini was hanged in Milan and Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.

  All in Line was a hit in bookstores, selling 20,000 copies before the summer ended and becoming a bestseller for the Book-of-the-Month Club. It hit all the right notes for a public eager to understand daily life in wartime but not yet ready to confront its atrocities. Steinberg’s depictions of life overseas that had appeared in The New Yorker helped to whet the public’s interest in the book; the magazine’s subscription list was ten to one military to civilian, and his low-key representations of the daily life of soldiers and sailors resonated strongly with both groups. Fan mail poured in to the magazine, as readers responded to, complimented, and even corrected his drawings. In the book, Steinberg’s Hitler and Mussolini appear as objects of amusement rather than fear and scorn; his civilians, officers, and bureaucrats are gently chided and ridiculed in equal part. The country was eager to get on with the business of rebuilding for peacetime, but it was not too soon for a nostalgic glance back at military life during the past few years, and Steinberg’s book provided the perfect venue.

  Steinberg’s success coincided with an interesting moment in the publishing history of The New Yorker. His wartime drawings brought him to the forefront of what was then known as “the department of fact” under managing editor William Shawn, who was positioning the magazine to be an intellectual powerhouse and a leader in various forms of investigative journalism. After the war, the reading public’s insatiable desire for facts led to the rampant growth of straight newsmagazines and to The New Yorker’s transformation into a curious hybrid of fact and fiction. Steinberg’s contributions fit right in with Shawn’s plans, for they were also a hybrid, of “wordless dispatches as pictorial reportage.” As such, they placed him among the other artists and cartoonists who had their fingers on the pulse of the contemporary zeitgeist, not only in the United States but in other countries as well. By 1949, Steinberg’s influence in Germany was such that two relatively unknown writers who were just at the beginning of their distinguished careers, Heinrich Böll and Max Fritsch, were asked by a magazine to write stories based on Steinberg’s drawing of a wife seated at one end of a long dinner table playing the violin for her dining husband. When the stories were sent to Steinberg, he put them aside without trying to get them translated into English, because he “may have been embarrassed” by all the attention.

  Steinberg’s art captured what his friend Harold Rosenberg called “the problem of identity as central to the work.” Rosenberg, the scholar and critic with a larger-than-life personality, placed Steinberg among the American artists who began to dominate the scene in the 1940s and 1950s, among them de Kooning, Rothko, and Hans Hofmann, all of whom either immigrated to America themselves or whose parents brought them as children, giving them roots in the immigrant experience. For these artists, Rosenberg wrote, “The issue ‘Who am I?’ was sharpened by ‘Where am I?’ ” Those he named as examples were different from previous generations of traditional American painters because they were not only determined to “realize” themselves, they were out “to make a name for themselves.” They made their work take on a new function as they strove to create themselves socially (that is, within American society) “as well as metaphysically.”

  In the last decades of his life, when Steinberg was collaborating with Aldo Buzzi on editing the dialogue that became the book Reflections and Shadows, he looked back at the decades of the forties and fifties, the years he believed were the time when American art began to flourish after a long period of neglect. He thought that because the artists who were his friends had spent their youth “in poverty and neglect,” by the time they became famous they were already “almost posthumous.” That, he determined, was “the cruelty of Art History.”

  Steinberg was paramount among those artists in his desire to “milk that huge cow,” as he described the United States. He told the French journalist Alain Jouffroy that it would be “stupid” not to want to milk this particular cow from time to time, but the interviewer was astute enough to recognize this as a “gentle cynicism” that hid something much deeper: “What really attaches him to the United States is not its ‘milk,’ but the quantity of ideas and the spectacle of its streets, towns, and its contradictory customs … the mixture of burlesque and tragedy, false and true, old fashioned and modernism and even utopianism, which makes this country the most aberrant cultural kaleidoscope of the western world.”

  In the exchanges with Buzzi, Steinberg verified Jouffroy’s contention when he compared the American art world to the kaleidoscopic Tokyo Ginza. Once an artist became a part of this difficult and mysterious world, he found that “it contains the two most important and poisonous things of life, fame and money. One desires them and one fears them.” In his case, he had not become an artist primarily for fame and money, although “it’s true. I wanted them, too.” All his life he was suspicious of young artists who devoted themselves to the “nobility of art,” finding it far more reasonable to consider art “as a stage for visibility.” If this attitude was “cynical,” he still thought it was “truthful and logical.” For Steinberg, “Art with a capital A makes me suspicious.”

  IN STEINBERG’S CASE, AND ESPECIALLY IN the immediate postwar years, “milking the cow” was essential for reasons other than furthering his art. There had been a slight opening in communications with Romania, but it usually took as long as four months for a letter to reach Bucharest and equally long for a reply. Owing to “political circumstances” after the Soviet occupation imposed harsh restrictions and penalties on all aspects of life, it was difficult to send anything, even through legitimate channels. Neither money nor certified mail was permitted until international relief agencies such as the one known by the acronym HIAS were set up. Even then, despite the list of approved items that could be shipped, the chance that money or goods would reach the intended recipient was low. Armed with the official approved list, Hedda shopped for items
that Saul paid to send every week, among them bolts of woolen or cotton material that his relatives could sew to make clothing, coats, shoes, and household supplies. He wanted to send medicines, everything from cold remedies to aspirin, but initially they were not allowed. When medicines were finally approved, he sent penicillin until Moritz told him that the crooks involved kept and sold more than half of it. For Lica he sent cosmetics and dresses, and when he was permitted to funnel cash through the agency, he sent several hundred dollars both to her and to his parents several times each month. He begged for news that they had received it in every letter, but like the dresses and cosmetics he sent to Lica, they received it one time out of every three or four.

  Moritz would have been content to soldier on with life in Romania, but Rosa wanted to leave. Saul investigated and found that it would be “fairly easy” to bring them to the United States, because they were his parents and therefore not subject to the quota. It would be different for Lica and her family, because they would qualify for the quota and would have to wait their turn. He filed an affidavit of support for all of them, which meant that he would assume full financial responsibility for everyone.

  And then, when the reality sank in of what it would mean to his own life if his parents were in New York, Saul experienced some highly conflicting emotions until, as Hedda said, he realized that “he didn’t want them here. He knew that wherever they were, if they were outside Romania they would be unhappy. So he sacrificed himself anyway: by bringing them out, he set them up to be unhappy and to blame their unhappiness on him.”

  The obvious choice of a place for them to settle was Israel, where more than one hundred thousand Romanian Jews had gone and where both Moritz and Rosa had siblings and other relatives as well as friends and former neighbors. Moritz wanted very much to go there, but Rosa had other ideas. Saul called her a snob when she insisted on France, preferably Paris, and as the years passed, he held her “responsible for the unhappiness” that resulted. However, “No matter how much loneliness and suffering [she had] from French xenophobia, she had the satisfaction of thinking that she was envied by her sisters and some despised [Romanian] neighbors.”

  Saul knew it would be an expensive process to get them resettled, and he got to work with a vengeance, taking up most of the offers of work that were made by advertising agencies representing businesses, manufacturers, and corporations and that sometimes came directly from these entities. The commercial requests intensified at the same time that his work was selected by the influential curator Dorothy Canning Miller for a group show at the Museum of Modern Art titled “Fourteen Americans.” The exhibition had several far-reaching repercussions as it traveled extensively: first, it brought his work to the attention of midwestern industrialists and businesspeople, all of whom were quick to offer lucrative commissions; and second, it led to lifelong friendships with Robert Motherwell and Isamu Noguchi, who were also featured.

  Miller’s approach was to select artists who were just beginning to be recognized (although youth was not her primary criteria) and to present their work in depth. Of Steinberg (then thirty-two), she wrote that his work revealed “the oddities of everyday italicized with the razor’s edge of humor.” He, like all the artists, represented a strongly American idiom, but to Miller it was coupled with a “profound consciousness that the world of art is one world and that it contains the Orient no less than Europe and the Americas.”

  Miller’s editorial essay was brief and to the point, and rather than just expressing her interpretations, she allowed the artists to offer theirs in personal statements in the catalogue. Steinberg was the only one of the fourteen who did not provide one, choosing instead to let the work speak for itself through a drawing that featured the unreadable handwriting of one of his “phony documents.” Miller kept it for her private collection but chose not to reproduce it in the catalogue, so his page was blank. In the years that followed, whenever he was asked to explain what his work was about or where his inspiration came from or what he was trying to convey, he did one of two things: he either made up answers on the spot (such as the ones about stamping his wartime underwear “top secret” or inventing the official-looking rubber stamps to forge the documents that let him leave Europe) or he chose not to reply at all. In 1961, when his friend Katherine Kuh asked him to sit for an interview in a series with American artists that she was conducting for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, he initially agreed but almost immediately changed his mind. He told Kuh he could not collaborate “to create a complicity in which I would play my part according to popular expectations.” He thought it would be a “dangerous” exercise to do this: “The man involved in his own history becomes himself a work of art. And a work of art doesn’t permit changes and it doesn’t paint or write.”

  In “Fourteen Americans,” Steinberg’s major presentation was an ink drawing titled The City, executed on a scroll fifty feet long and twenty inches high. He also showed humorous images of birds in cages and a larger-than-life hen, but he faced the harrowing aspects of the war head-on as he chose to exhibit images of the destruction of Monte Cassino and the vaporization of Hiroshima. A year before the exhibition, he told an interviewer from Newsweek that he feared that being in the service had damaged his art: “There is an inside discipline which does not allow me to do freely what is not logical. I cannot think of what is absurd anymore.” He also told Aldo Buzzi that because he had spent the past three years in uniform, all his impressions were “from the military point of view, or anyway, in uniform. I hope it influenced me.”

  This show was also the first time he attempted to show the public what Hedda called his “phony documents,” now generally known as the “false documents,” inspired by calligraphy and books about handwriting analysis (he had a large collection) and replete with official-looking rubber stamps and seals of his own creation. At various times he gave them to friends to celebrate everything from diplomas (as to Primo Levi, whose diploma from the University of Turin also bore the detested “raza Hebraica”) to travel passports (Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Hersey, and Janet Flanner), and he made two separate ones for Hedda, to celebrate her talents in cooking and dishwashing.

  “Fourteen Americans” was also the first time that his place in the postwar art world was questioned. Howard Devree, reviewing the show for the New York Times, thought it “a safe guess he never dreamed his cartoons would someday be ‘museum pieces’ ” and went on to list the questions he felt were bound to be asked about Steinberg’s inclusion: “Why do they include him? What’s that stuff got do to with art? What do they mean, art?” Actually, Devree was wrong: these questions did not end when the show was over; they plagued Steinberg for the rest of his career.

  Steinberg held a curious position among such friends and luminaries as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Phillip Guston, Alexander Calder, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Lindner, and a host of others. Milton Glaser saw him as a cartoonist “who by some extraordinary series of shifts became a major artist.” Glaser thought him the only visual artist who had been able to achieve the highest status as both. And yet as one of Steinberg’s close friends, the artist Mary Frank, noted, “He was somehow not treated as the great artist he was. People would say, ‘Yes, he’s fantastic,’ but then they’d call him a cartoonist and the word cartoonist had a bad edge to it.” As an intellectual and an artist of ideas, Steinberg was out of sync with the reigning genre of abstract expressionism, in which emotion was the primary response to the blank canvas. Frank assessed his curious position: “Here he was, in the sixties and seventies, when he was an extremely famous artist, but when there were big shows of U.S. art in Europe, he was not included. He was distinguished but not the same as people like Motherwell and de Kooning.”

  Frank thought this was “very hard for him,” but Hedda Sterne disagreed. She thought many of the artists who befriended Steinberg “felt safe with him because they did not consider him a competitor. They looked down on him becau
se he was a cartoonist, but what they didn’t realize was that he was a genius. He knew exactly who he was, and he knew that he had to make money. He could do anything, from wallpaper to fabric design to greeting cards. He was not happy doing these things, but no matter what he did, it was always brilliant. He could not put his pen to paper without doing something marvelous every time.” Still, although Hedda and other good friends sometimes expressed anger or dismay that Steinberg was somehow outside the mainstream of American art, he never commented or expressed his own frustration.

  Steinberg had become an “AA” artist at The New Yorker (“most wanted, highest paid”), which put him in the company of William Steig, Charles Addams, and Sam Cobean, all of whom became his friends, but it also put him a cut above them. All the artists who worked for the magazine had private agreements and contracts with “different pay scales, different arrangements,” so that none knew what the others were being paid, although all were eager to find out. Steinberg was one of the two highest paid, with a “special deal” shared only by Peter Arno. When Steig learned of it, a competitive tension on his part soon disrupted their friendship. After 1950, Steig was no longer part of Saul and Hedda’s “New Yorker circle,” which had grown to include Geoffrey Hellman, A. J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell. Charles Addams, however, remained the artist to whom Steinberg was closest. Charlie, as Steinberg called him, was “a quiet and elegant man, in both the physical and moral sense.” Steinberg’s “quiet friendship” with Addams began in 1942 and ended with his death in 1988.

  The ever-cheerful Addams was never bothered by discrepancies in status or pay. He was too busy enjoying the puns and practical jokes, the naughty postcards and witticisms they exchanged, but most of all their mutual love of automobiles. Addams helped Steinberg buy his first car, a 1947 gray Packard convertible with a red leather interior. Saul and Hedda drove the behemoth to Jamaica, Vermont, in the summer of 1947, where they rented the house of a painter and hoped to do work of their own. Despite the company of Ruth and Tino Nivola, the summer was not their happiest: “We went up there in complete ignorance, and you can imagine what successes we were,” Hedda recalled, “what with those accents and that car.”