Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Meanwhile, he had real work to do and kept himself busy overseeing the various stages of what became the 1956 Dessins, published by Gallimard. The book was a compilation of drawings from his three previously published books, and his task was to select those that would resonate best with a European audience. Making the selection created the first disagreement, for he originally wanted sixty and Gallimard only thirty. While choosing them and working on the layout, he was “horrified” by every single one, dismissing them as the work of the “clever little monster” he had been when young. At the same time, Robert Delpire wanted to publish a separate collection for a book whose working title, “Labirinte [sic],” was so appealing that Steinberg used the English version, Labyrinth, several years later for an entirely different kind of book. Delpire was the founder of the arts magazine Neuf, and later the promoter of photography as an art form and the publisher of important works about the genre. He was famous for always championing the unusual, if not the outré, and he planned to issue his selection of Steinberg’s drawings in the unusual format of a dépliant, with the book’s pages unfolding like an accordion.

  “There may be trouble here,” Steinberg worried, and indeed there was. He was never satisfied with the quality of the reproductions, no matter how many times they were redone, nor did he like the way they looked when the pages unfolded. He was “furious and confused” when both Delpire and Gallimard used the excuse of expensive publishing costs to cut his royalties, saying sarcastically, “Because, of course, I don’t need money!” He was determined to finish both books despite the insult to his income and the technical problems involved in the visuals, if only to “honor” the drawing table he had bought and installed in his hotel room. After several months, when it became clear that no matter how much Mrs. Jennie Bradley intervened there would be no resolution in his favor, he made two decisions. Gallimard was the most prestigious publisher in France, so despite the cut in royalties he would not sever his ties there and would let the company publish Dessins; but despite his need for the money the Delpire book would bring, he made Delpire cancel it, because it would never meet his high standards.

  The French publishing situation was insulting, especially after the previous two years, when he had enjoyed extraordinary attention and praise within the international art world. His reputation was in the ascendant, and his sales burgeoned after nonstop solo exhibitions in galleries and museums. He was the subject of articles and reviews in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television shows. Critics vied to dub him a cultural commentator, a visual historian of contemporary culture, and an authority on everything from the iconic to the ordinary. His work was seen in Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Basel, and throughout Germany in cities like Dortmund, Hanover, Lübeck, and Frankfurt. In the United States, there were solo shows in Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Dallas, and Santa Barbara. Steinberg’s style was so well known that the adjective Steinbergian was coined, shorthand for a new, unusual, and slightly off-kilter way of looking at the world.

  For Steinberg, it was wonderful indeed to be recognized for the sheer hard work he had put into creating, organizing, and occasionally helping to promote his drawings. On the one hand he took his reputation as his just reward, while on the other he blamed it for the turmoil and exhaustion that made him want to flee from everything he had worked so hard to create. The problem was that whenever he thought he could relax and enjoy the accolades and financial rewards, somebody needed something that only he could provide, and because of his overdeveloped sense of responsibility, he did what he could to help.

  Just when he thought he was well under way to regaining the equilibrium he had gone to Europe to find, events conspired to throw him off track once again. Parsons and Janis were pleading with him to send more drawings for shows that would enable them to capitalize on the momentum of his European reception. Requests were coming from other galleries, such as the one from Elodie Courter, who organized traveling shows for the Museum of Modern Art and who was pestering Hedda to get Saul to participate. Courter wanted to include his work in an exhibition that would take recent American art to cities where it had not yet been shown and would not accept his refusal. Saul deputized Hedda to go in person before she left for Paris and repeat to Courter what he had already told her in letters and cables: “I don’t want to be shown with just a few drawings … I hate group shows. I dislike humour in large doses and I refused constantly to participate in anthologies or cartoon festivals.” “You don’t have to feel responsible,” he instructed Hedda. “Just tell her NO.”

  THE SUDDEN SPURT OF WORK WAS once again turning him into the “deflating balloon” he had been at the beginning of his European wanderings. He was having second thoughts about staying in “the misery that Paris has become” but had made too many appointments to leave. The main reason he could not leave was that the “Lica troubles” were starting up again. The Romanian government had relaxed restrictions slightly, allowing a larger quota of Jews to immigrate to Israel, and once again it seemed that the Roman family might be among them. Steinberg learned of this in a roundabout way when an official from the American embassy left a brusque message for him to appear at the Israeli consulate early the next morning. Fearful that his insomnia would cause him to miss the appointment, he took a strong dose of sleeping pills and went to bed early. He still slept so fitfully that he was groggy throughout his appointment.

  It was a total frustration, a bureaucratic formality of filling out thirty new forms with the same facts he had been attesting to for years. After he verified his income and raised his hand to swear financial responsibility for the Roman family, the Israelis told him to go home and await further notice, while the Americans shrugged dismissively, implying that there was nothing more they could do. It was another stress-inducing runaround, but if this one held the possibility that his sister’s family might actually emigrate, he wanted to be in Paris, where it was easier to leave at a moment’s notice if the Israelis granted the visa that would let him shepherd them from Bucharest to Israel.

  Hedda had dropped everything to come to Paris, and now it appeared that he might have to leave her alone yet again. He considered it one more depressing example of how external realities hindered him from having what he wanted, in this case the “Paris Honeymoon” he was counting on. What angered and frustrated him most was the way intimations and influences of Rosa and his Romanian upbringing surfaced during these times of stress— especially Rosa’s maxims to keep his head on his shoulders and keep making money. Moritz added to Saul’s confusion when he wrote that Rosa was having a serious nervous breakdown and making him ill with her negative thoughts and changes of mind. Saul’s comparison of his own erratic behavior with his mother’s was unavoidable.

  The only time he felt “a wave of warmth and security” was when he was drawing for his own pleasure, and once again pleasure was eluding him. He complained that whenever he had to draw to make money, there was “displeasure that can last for many months, linger like an illness.” Now he refused to see anything good in work that had originally pleased him, and to prove his point he made a list of all the projects that he claimed were responsible for making him impossible to live with. When he and Hedda had spent the summer in Vermont, he blamed the “cute mural for Bonwit Teller.” Hollywood was “hell” because of the need to earn money by decorating a swimming pool. Stonington was “silly” because he resented having to work alongside Jerry Robbins in the same room, claiming he was “never able to work properly” unless in his own work space.

  Brooding over the conflicting claims on his time and energy led him to seek the company of Alberto Giacometti. The artist lived and worked in an atelier that was one step removed from a hovel, and despite the money his sculpture was commanding, he had no desire to live elsewhere. The best part of his life was his work, and he communicated that joy to Steinberg, who after one of their evenings would spend the next day exclaiming, “I want to become a clochard” before fretting over the impossibility. �
��I don’t want to be what I was but how can I change? I have to make money.” He decided that one way to lighten his load would be to enlist Hedda’s help, which he had never done before for several reasons. Hedda was “never one of those artists’ wives who make a profession of promoting their husbands.” She already had her own esteemed professional life when Steinberg met her, and throughout their marriage, he respected her need to practice it. However, the main reason he never asked for her help was that he needed to be in total control of every aspect of his work. He found it impossible to delegate the authority to anyone else—not even Hedda, the person he trusted most—to make decisions on his behalf. These shifting attitudes collided when he told Hedda that as soon as she arrived, she would have to concentrate on helping him learn to live in such a way that he would not have to do any work but his own. Almost immediately he changed his mind, and for the first time he worried that he was not taking her needs into consideration, asking, “What about you? Do you want to live with [such a] monster?” He apologized for all the moaning and complaining he had done in the past several months, saying that he was embarrassed because he had done nothing for her while she was always so kind and reassuring toward him.

  Even though he was still “a bit insane” in the midst of so much indecision, he resorted to the animal imagery he often used to describe their intimate relationship. “Rabbit” was his favorite term of affection for Hedda, and he called himself a “crocodile,” both of which became iconic images in his drawings. Continuing with animal metaphors, he told her he was sure that in a few days his struggle to be either “worm or butterfly” would be over, and if she wanted him back, he would fall into her lap as her “old messy crocodile, loving and sedate.”

  HEDDA ARRIVED ON MAY 3, 1955, and moved into his room at the Hotel Pont Royal. Saul was sick of hotel living, and when their friend the painter Roberto Matta told him of an apartment at 26 Rue Jacob, he rented it sight unseen. In a spurt of happiness, they moved to what was then a shabby street on the Left Bank. They were several doors away from Natalie Clifford Barney’s extraordinary house in the courtyard of no. 20 and the building of the same number in which Ellen and Richard Wright had an apartment. Hedda was fascinated by all the existentialists, members of the haut monde, and beatniks she saw coming and going at no. 20, but Saul told her they had friends enough already and she should concentrate on them, him, and her painting. However, for the next two months they led a highly social existence, their calendars filled with luncheon and dinner dates. They saw a great deal of Germana and Roberto Matta, and Saul went alone to visit Geer van Velde at his home in Cachan, outside Paris. Janet Flanner invited them to dine with her and the visiting James Thurber. On a single day they had drinks with Eugène Ionesco and his wife and dinner with the Giacomettis, and capped off the evening with a late-night viewing of La Ronde. Sonia Orwell demanded their presence at several dinners, and they went along cheerfully because they were amused by her imperious manner. Among the writers they saw were Georges Bataille and André Breton, who along with Matta introduced them to the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Eugène Ionesco introduced them to the aged Tristan Tzara, who liked them so much that he invited them to lunch several days later. He also introduced them to Stéphane Lupasco, the Romanian-born logician and philosopher whose dense and elliptical writings fascinated them both, but especially Hedda, who puzzled over them for years afterward. They spent a great deal of time with the photographers Robert Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, and Steinberg dined alone with Paul Rand and later with Le Corbusier.

  Wedged into their social program were several visits to Hedda’s mother and brother in Paris and an overnight visit to Nice to see Saul’s parents, which was all they could tolerate. At the same time, several of Lica’s “heartbreaking” letters reached Saul. Hardships and restrictions had made her “mean and ugly,” and she did not know how much more she could stand. Between her anguished letters and his mother’s hysterical ones, he was feeling suffocated by half-truths, and the two women chose this moment to introduce a new wrinkle. Under the Romanian Communist government, the only acceptable destination for any Jew who wanted to leave was Israel, and the only acceptable reason was to reunite with family already there. Since Lica’s parents were in France, the government now wanted to know why the Romans had not applied to go to Israel, although of course they would not have been permitted to go there if they had. “On top of that, they are in Bucharest—a complete family with children of their own,” the government decreed, and therefore they had no valid reason for emigrating. Most damaging of all in the government’s view was Lica’s rich brother, who lived at the epicenter of decadent Western civilization and who had already corrupted them by sending luxury goods and money on a regular basis (less than half of which ever reached them).

  “I don’t know what to do,” Saul said, fearing that he was running out of options. He contacted “Rothschilds, Romanians, Israeli Consul,” and then asked Maeght and other “art people” to use their influence with influential Jewish philanthropists and benefactors of Israel. He left nothing untried, in the hope that someone could open useful political doors. As he was working to secure the Roman family’s passage to Israel, Lica dropped another bombshell, telling him for the first time that despite his years of efforts to get her family to Israel, what she had really wanted all along was to come to France. She sent frantic appeals for him to get them a French visa, and this, he said, was “after I troubled the whole Palestine, consuls, etc.” Embarrassed by all his earlier efforts to enlist the help of influential Jewish advocates for Israel and not knowing whom to ask for France, he turned to Hedda’s brother for advice.

  As if on cue, Rosa chose this moment to vent her frustration over Lica’s troubles by chastising Saul for buying such an expensive refrigerator, laying all the blame on Moritz as the one who put him up to it. She saved a portion of her ranting for Hedda, blaming her mother for “hiding” her and Saul in Paris and selfishly refusing to let them go to Nice. Whatever Saul did, he knew it would always be “the wrong thing” for Rosa, and of course it was. When he stopped on the street to watch a funeral procession pass by, he “envied for a moment the principal.”

  HE CONTINUED TO WORK ON GALLIMARD’S Dessins, going frequently to the print shop and fussing over every single detail as both the printer and publisher tore out their hair over the constant changes his meticulous demands necessitated. Even though he did whittle the book down by twenty-two drawings plus “cutouts,” no one was happy as he dragged the process on. Despite feeling that he was wasting his time, Steinberg still slogged away. “I’ll never learn,” he scolded himself each time he returned to the print shop. Eventually he and Gallimard agreed on a compromise: the publisher would agree to his final selection and allow him to paste the layout providing that he drew a new jacket and front and back covers. He agreed, and when the book was published, he was content that all his slogging had changed the “kind of anthology of old drawings” into a good book filled “with many new ones.”

  WHILE HE WAS AWAY IN EUROPE, his friends at The New Yorker had not forgotten him. Shawn and Geraghty had both rejected his idea for drawings of the southern trip, but they had a more ambitious project in mind for him. They were trying to secure a visa from the Soviet Union for him to go there and prepare a significant collection of drawings based on whatever he saw as he traveled wherever the government would permit. He was excited by the idea and eager to go. Originally he thought the visa would come swiftly and easily, so he completed all the detailed paperwork at the American embassy in Paris, patiently doing it on top of all the forms he had to fill out for his sister there and at the Israeli consulate. He had not counted on all the bureaucracies moving in their own good time, which was at a glacial pace, and by the middle of June there was still no word about his visa. Confronted with bureaucratic slowness, worried about the need to bring in some cash, and not wanting to spend the summer in the heat of either Paris or New York, he sent Hedda home with instructions to rent a house
on Cape Cod or anywhere else that had a sand beach but definitely “NO Stonington.”

  He spent his last days in Paris adding up the money he had earned from gallery sales and book dividends, a grand total of $868.34, which he spent at Hermès buying farewell presents for his friends.

  HE LEFT PARIS ON A HIGH NOTE. At least one of his two books—Gallimard’s—would turn out to be what he wanted, and despite canceling the other he still had cordial relations with Delpire, who was ready to publish another whenever Steinberg wanted. Most of his interaction had been with artists, and much of their talk had been about work. These conversations had given him some interesting new perspectives on his own work, and he thought about them on the flight home, but the one that resonated most had been with Geer van Velde. Steinberg was fascinated by the simplicity of van Velde’s modest little house in Cachan, saying that he lived a life that reminded him of Voltaire’s admonition to Candide to cultivate his own garden. As they talked after dinner, van Velde confessed that he was confused and troubled by the new direction his painting had taken, becoming stark, dark, and veering from abstraction toward representation. Van Velde thought it was changing spontaneously, without his being able to explain exactly how or why. Steinberg offered that it was moving from “pleasant semi-abstractions” to “things that are not pleasant looking.” Van Velde responded that he was struggling through his painting with issues in his life of “moral problems” and “truth.” Steinberg suggested that nonrepresentation was merely a way of “avoiding easy ways out (the old Jewish taboo of the human figure in art).” He offered the possibility that such struggles often led artists to “become inevitably Jews at heart and mind,” and thought that this might be happening to the Dutch Protestant van Velde. Their initial discussion ended unresolved, but the subject of morality and truth in art became one they returned to frequently whenever they met from then on. That night, when Steinberg returned to his hotel room, he made a cryptic entry in his datebook: “Note: alone, people will become Jews. Abstract painting. Jewish.”