Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Steinberg’s parents in Nice. (illustration credit 13.1)

  Saul and Hedda went off to celebrate Thanksgiving, Steinberg’s favorite American holiday, with Sandy and Louisa Calder in their Roxbury, Connecticut, farmhouse. It was the first of many holiday invitations with the Calders that they accepted, for they loved the way Sandy and Louisa and their daughters gathered all the guests in the kitchen to eat and drink to excess, to dance, sing, and in general make merry. Steinberg loved Calder, “the dancing man,” and on one of these happy occasions, when Saul could not hear what Sandy was telling him, he sat on his knee to hear him better. “I thought afterwards that I had not sat on a man’s knee in sixty years! And that this was the only man so happy and so innocent to give me and everybody the simple and loving familiarity.” It was exactly what he needed to get him to the end of a dispiriting year, and he returned to New York energized for the usual round of holiday festivities.

  Unfortunately, there was no prospect of any new, different, and interesting work on his horizon, only more of the same for the usual publications, and the new decade seemed likely to start as the old one had ended. Several years earlier, when Steinberg first went to work for The New Yorker, Jim Geraghty astutely assessed his personality by saying he needed “excitement.” It was never truer than it was in 1950.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE ONLY HAPPILY MARRIED COUPLE

  As artists, the Steinbergs pursue their separate ways … Both want to create a picture of America, but not the same picture. Says Hedda: “I am getting rid of images.” Says Saul: “I am unfit to do anything not funny.”

  At a party one night, Saul was introduced to an awestruck young architect who told him that he and Hedda had a near mythical reputation as the only happily married couple in New York. That a total stranger could express what so many people believed showed how well the very public couple kept their personal lives private. The architect made his remark at a time when their professional reputations were in the ascendant and they were too busy dealing with them to focus on their personal differences, which were mostly due to Saul’s inability to express emotion in person and his brief affairs and longer liaisons. However, whatever went on within the marriage stayed there, known only to the two of them.

  The beautiful Hedda and the charismatic Saul certainly made a glamorous couple, admired and envied in equal measure. Most of the people they considered their friends were luminaries in the international worlds of high society, arts and letters, politics and culture, and increasingly within the rarefied atmosphere of the financial world, as wealthy collectors competed to buy their work. To outsiders looking in, their life was a constant round of enviable parties, dinners, country weekends, and long European holidays. With their professional reputations soaring, they were sought after for interviews by all the publications that mattered, and they were on almost every list of “promising” or “important” figures in the art world.

  Much of the hoopla began when Hedda’s photograph appeared in Life in January 1950, the only woman among fourteen male artists, all of them lumped together under the sobriquet “the Irascibles.” The name was originally an adjective used to describe a disparate collection of painters and sculptors in an article that proclaimed them an “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists.” It became, for better or worse, their trademark when the critic Emily Genauer wrote an editorial for the New York Herald Tribune that grouped them together as a de facto school. Actually, the Irascibles could trace their origin to the first of a series of meetings organized by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt asking other artists to join in composing a letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum protesting the conservative makeup of a jury selected to judge an exhibition of contemporary art. The Irascibles declared the judges hostile to every form of “advanced art” but to abstract expressionism in particular.

  Hedda befriended Newman and Reinhardt at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery when she first arrived in New York, and she liked and respected them both, as did Saul when she introduced him. She thought Newman was “politically savvy about publicity” and admired Reinhardt for being “an abstract artist in the 30’s before everybody else, a very good political cartoonist and a … man with backbone.” Both painters wanted to assure maximum publicity for their campaign to get the Met to open its doors to modern art, so they invited thirty artists to the round-table meetings, but only eighteen attended. Hedda, as a painter, was invited, but Saul, seen primarily as a cartoonist and draftsman, was not. If he was miffed by his exclusion, he never expressed it to her. They both agreed wholeheartedly with the “social [that is, political] agenda” espoused by Newman, Reinhardt, and Adolph Gottlieb (who wrote most of the letter), so Hedda went to the meetings on behalf of herself and Saul. She thought he should have been invited, but he was too busy with the many commissions that were bringing increasingly large sums of money. Fleur Cowles was prominent among those who wanted to buy his work, as she was eager to woo him for her new magazine, Flair.

  Although other women attended the Irascibles’ round-table discussions (among them Janice Biala and Louise Bourgeois), Hedda was the only one who showed up for the photo session staged by Nina Leen, along with the fourteen male artists brave enough to sign the letter and risk being photographed. Hedda didn’t hesitate to embrace the cause, because “in those days I signed any form of protest.” As the only woman in the photo, and a strikingly beautiful one at that, she was from that moment on most often classified as an abstract expressionist, despite her insistence on two major points: the Irascibles in the famous photograph were “not a school and it never was,” and the only thing they had in common was that most of them were represented by Betty Parsons and “were all considered avant-garde.”

  Leen’s photograph was indeed striking, with Hedda Sterne dressed all in black and standing at the top of a pyramid formed by the fourteen artists seated below her. The photographer staged “the architecture” before the artists arrived by arranging fourteen chairs with name tags indicating where each man was to sit. Hedda arrived late, to the consternation of Leen, who thought she was not coming and did not have a chair marked for her. Hedda knew the omission “was not deliberate,” as Leen quickly found something for her to stand on which posed her on an elevated platform at the center of the photo and made her the focal point. The entire session lasted about ten minutes, but reverberations from it never ended: when Hedda first saw the picture, she said, “In terms of my career, it’s probably the worst thing that ever happened to me.” She never changed her mind.

  Despite the fact that her method and technique were constantly changing, from then on she was branded an abstract expressionist, which meant that all too often her work was labeled and dismissed. Throughout the 1950s, when art historians looked for “sweeping trends” to define the contemporary scene and painters were embracing “signature styles, such as Pollock’s drips and Newman’s zips,” Hedda’s process was one of “uninterrupted flux.” While critics often deemed her willingness to embrace new ways of creating art “inconsistent,” Betty Parsons defended the constant change: “Hedda was always searching, never satisfied. She had many ways; most artists just have one way to go.”

  Like Saul Steinberg, Hedda Sterne was primarily interested in process. She could well have been describing how he approached a drawing when she described how she approached a painting: “Painting for me is a process of simultaneous understanding and explaining. I try to approach my subject uncluttered by esthetic prejudices. I put it on canvas in order to explain it to myself, yet the result should reveal something plus.” When she did speak of Steinberg’s work, she said that what she most admired about it was his “ability to make ideas concrete with a symbol.” For her, the mystery hovering over his work was always “where did this come from?”

  The idea of process was one they talked about constantly. Throughout the years they lived together, Sterne and Steinberg never lacked for conversation about making art, although they seldom spoke specifically about what they were
working on at the time. Hedda explained how they were “filled with ideas, and even at the worst of times, when he was at his most remote, conversation about art was without end.”

  Both were avid readers, and writing techniques often enriched their conversations about the process of making art. Sterne was keen on philosophy, particularly Schopenhauer and Hegel, and later Confucius, Lao-tzu, and other Eastern thinkers. She loved poetry, her favorites ranging from Rilke to Walt Whitman. She read fiction, but not to the extent that Steinberg did. His tastes were all-embracing and eclectic, veering from Stendhal and Manzoni to contemporary Italian novelists like Carlo Gadda, who wrote in dialect, to American regionalists such as James T. Farrell and Erskine Caldwell. He reread the Russian novelists repeatedly, from Gogol (his favorite) and Dostoevsky (whom he liked) to Lermontov and Turgenev (to whom he accorded lesser attention). He read through Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, engrossed in the turmoil and travails of the characters, and was moved by some of Zola’s novels, especially those that dealt with social inequities, like Germinal. He liked to read American history, particularly of the Civil War period and after, and he was keenly interested in the sociological and cultural studies written after World War II that he thought would help him to understand his adopted country.

  Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg worked devotedly at the visual arts every day, sometimes for ten to twelve hours at a stretch, but when they paused, words became their chosen form of communication. They were constantly seeking to enrich their art through reading, and if there was one defining quality about their work in the immediate postwar decade, it was that they strove to make others see visual truths about their subjects that were hitherto hidden or unclear.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER LIFE SINGLED OUT Hedda Sterne as “one of our most promising young painters,” Vogue followed by placing her at number 11 on the magazine’s list of “53 Living American Artists [to watch].” The article described her as “the 34-year-old abstractionist who has in paint some of the airy balances of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.” Hedda set out to read Dickinson’s poetry to try to understand what the writer meant by the comparison. Another glowing review soon followed in the New York Times, describing her show at Betty Parsons’s gallery as composed of “extremely handsome” abstractions that “constitute an authentic and impressive document of our society.”

  Hedda was pleased with the public response to her painting, but the attitude she expressed toward her own work during the war years had crystallized and hardened since her marriage. “Your work interests me much, much more than my own,” she wrote to Saul during the war, as she described the pleasure derived from a long, ten- to fourteen-hour day spent painting for her own pleasure and with no thought of presenting it for public consumption or comment. After the war, as her reputation rose steadily, she clung even more steadfastly to the idea of art as an example of personal expression rather than as a product meant for the world of commerce. In the mid-1950s, after an evening in the company of Katherine Kuh, the influential curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago; the architect-designer Frederick Kiesler; and the painter Richard Lindner, all of whom she counted among her closest friends, she told Saul that she thought their “poor little ambitions: were ‘Lamentable!’ ” As were her own, she was quick to add, especially when she had a personal encounter with “an element of the public or of museums.” Whenever “real people” or a faceless institution became involved with her painting, she believed that “all the magic disappears.” She would have been content to paint quietly just for her own pleasure, and as a “kept woman” (her semi-ironic description of how she was supported by her husbands in her two marriages) she could have done so. However, the circumstances of the early years of her marriage to Steinberg, when she was half of one of the art world’s most dynamic couples, would not allow her to do so.

  In 1951 she and Saul were featured together in Life in an article whose headline was “Steinberg and Sterne: Romanian-Born Cartoonist and Artist-Wife Ambush the World with Pen and Paintbrush.” Glamorous photos of the couple highlighted a large selection of their work, and the accompanying article was built on the several fanciful myths about his life that Steinberg had earlier created. Here he claimed that his penchant for drawing had begun when, as a young child, he watched a forger who lived in his Bucharest neighborhood make official-looking stamps and labels. He repeated the story of how he stamped his underwear “secret” while in the OSS, and added the delightfully fanciful story that the only work he did in China was to teach the peasants how to wiggle their ears. Hedda did her share of mythmaking, claiming that dancing had been her first love and she had studied it in Europe, where she had also been a stage designer. She claimed to be just returning to a career as a painter. Describing where and how they worked, Steinberg told the interviewer that every morning he went to his studio, where he often spent whole days doing nothing but lying down. Sterne said she worked at home “amid pebbles and firemen’s hats.” The only truth in their comments came when both admitted to a fascination with the United States, “he by the habits of people, she by machines and towering structures.”

  The Life article appeared after another period of frenetic work and travel. Saul’s output during the first six months of 1950 earned enough for him to follow his usual custom of taking the summer off, but then an intriguing offer came. Alan Jay Lerner and Vincente Minnelli were filming An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly playing an artist there on the GI Bill. Someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came up with the highly original idea of hiring Steinberg’s drawing hand for close-ups of scenes featuring Kelly as he was supposedly painting, so Saul and Hedda went to Los Angeles instead of Europe. They rented the Bel Air home of Annabella, the French actress and ex-wife of actor Tyrone Power, and were eager to settle into the Hollywood film scene. Saul’s hand was supposed to became a movie star, but the rest of him lasted exactly three days.

  He thought it was only his hand that they wanted to film, ostensibly drawing something amorphous, unrecognizable, and mostly unfilmed, until he read the letter of agreement he was expected to sign. He was to create “certain works of art, paintings, sketches, etc.,” all of which were to become the exclusive property of the studio, to be used to “exploit and exhibit” the movie. He was also expected to give the rights to use his “name, voice, and likeness for advertising and exploitation,” in perpetuity. And after he surrendered all rights to his own work, he was to understand and agree that the studio was giving him “special, unique, unusual, [and] extraordinary privileges,” and if he breached them, he could be held liable for damages.

  Saul told Aldo that, having been courted with “great promises of ‘a free hand, do what you want,’ ” he spent his three days on the set dealing with “gli eterni stronzi [the usual assholes] who make Technicolor musicals, stupid stuff.” He thanked the God who made it possible for him to find work elsewhere so he could refuse this contract, but he was still upset about “all those dollars I didn’t pocket.” It led to several gloomy days over “the conflict between money and honest work.

  After that he decided that he liked California, particularly the “excellent climate” and an American landscape different from anything he had experienced in Vermont, Cape Cod, or the eastern end of Long Island. The climate was so seductive that he imagined living there forever, if not for all the “huge spiders, deadly poison” that he was sure infested the entire region. As was usual wherever he went, interesting people wanted to meet him. He met such diverse personalities as Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, and the acerbic Oscar Levant and formed a lasting friendship with Billy Wilder based on their similar sardonic wit, Mittel-European sensibility, and ironic perception of American culture and society.

  Ray and Charles Eames became good friends and colleagues with whom Steinberg enjoyed several collaborations. When Charles saw some of the drawings Steinberg was making of Los Angeles, he wanted them for a movie, but the idea was abandoned when other projects took precedence, particularly one that became a spoo
f with public repercussions. Steinberg was particularly taken with the Eameses’ 1948 chrome and plastic chair, and he drew the outline of a big black cat lounging on one of them. He graced another with a naked woman’s torso similar to the nudes he drew in a bathtub and on the bathroom’s walls. Everyone who saw Steinberg’s nude-woman chair found it amusing, so the Eameses included it in a 1951 “Design for Living” show of their work at the Long Beach Museum, where it quickly caused a local scandal. The museum had a new director, whose relationship with her staff was colored by their affection for the former director, who had curated the show. The staff rebelled when the new director declared the chair to be “vulgar” and instructed them to turn it toward the wall so that only the undecorated back was visible. Each day when the new director arrived, she turned the chair to the wall, and immediately afterward someone on the staff turned it to face outward. Naturally the local papers had a field day, and the story soon became grist for regional and national amusement while viewers debated the pros and cons of obscenity and vulgarity and what constituted just plain art.

  WHEN THE LEASE ON ANNABELLA’S Bel Air house ended, Hedda took the train to New York while Saul boarded a bus that took him first to Las Vegas and then across the midsection of the United States. It gave him time not only to see the vast spaces of the American Plains states and to try to fathom what influence those who lived there might bring to bear on the collective American psyche, but also to think about the series of drawings he wanted to make about his California experience. He was having trouble finishing them to his satisfaction, because capturing their “reality” was “too peculiar.” When he tried to describe what he had seen on the streets and highways of Southern California, he compared it to a circus, saying it was just as difficult to draw because he had to “keep making an effort not to fall into clichés.” He was eventually satisfied with the California drawings, which became a series titled “The Coast” when The New Yorker published them in January 1951.