Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Steinberg was intrigued by the local interest in all things Jewish. He stole the telephone directory, convinced that he had taken a great risk by stealing sacred state property. After he found the name Goldberg, the only Jewish one among the hundred or so citizens lucky enough to possess a phone, Steinberg told his guide that he was Jewish and wanted to see the Jewish quarter, where he learned a new expression for the Yiddish word goy (gentile): to the Jews of Samarkand, they were all “Uzbek.”

  When it was time to leave, all flights were indefinitely grounded because of heavy fog, so his guide took him to the overnight train for Tashkent, where he could catch a plane to Moscow. As they said their goodbyes, Steinberg leaned forward with outstretched hand to give the man a generous tip. The guide, with what he thought was the polite English response, said, “Thank you my darling. I must go now.” He tipped his hat and bowed, and Steinberg said and did the same.

  On the train he sat with three other passengers, including a woman who was taking it all the way to Moscow, a journey of five whole days. Back in Tashkent, he was given the same miserable hotel room. The weather had turned, and once again there was snow and frigid cold. He was not as happy to be there the second time, seeing bestiality in everyone and finding everything primitive and ugly. Once again he was aware of a strong Jewish presence, of rug dealers from Bokhara, of peddlers hawking tinfoil pictures, of dervishes and women who covered their heads and faces. Drunks rolled around the streets while pedestrians laughed and policemen ignored the mess and confusion. He went back to the hotel, took a nap, bought a bottle of vodka, and headed for the airport, where several regional flights eventually took him to Aktyubinsk and then back to Moscow.

  Whether because of a combination of disappointment and depression or simple exhaustion, he did not want to see anyone when he returned to Moscow. As he digested his experiences over tea and caviar in his hotel room, he realized what had characterized his five weeks in the country: “The smell of fear, a curious smell. You cannot even describe it.” It reminded him of “the smell [and] the old fearful atmosphere of Romania,” and it made him shudder. Later that evening he exchanged his last few rubles, then dined alone and slept fitfully until he left for the airport at 3 a.m. He had to take a roundabout route to Paris, flying via Vilnius and Prague and not arriving until late afternoon on March 22. He went directly to the Pont Royal, where he had an early dinner and slept well. The next day he boarded the overnight flight to New York, where he arrived in the midst of a blizzard.

  His immediate task was to translate the Russian experience into sketches that would fulfill his commitment to The New Yorker. As he sat at his drawing table, he recalled the five weeks of “frozen snow, Bolshoi, caviar, by airplane over Siberia, camels and veiled women. Black Sea and the smell of fear, etc.” It made him feel “like [an] authority, inscrutable, benevolent smile.” As he worked, he remembered the experience as “a trip for my nose” that reminded him of the Eastern European smells of his childhood: “beautiful ones of winter and also of elementary school, police station, disinfectant, the terrible odor of fear which at that time, with Stalin only recently gone, permeated Moscow and Leningrad and even the countryside.”

  He worked from notes, most of which were comments about the buildings he had seen, for if there was one single thing that made the greatest impression, it was the architecture. He made a handwritten list entitled “Comments about buildings in USSR,” prominent among them his favorite structures, the “XVIII [century] wooden houses in Moscow,” which were very rare, as most of them had burned down because of household cooking and heating fires during the reigns of the two empresses. He had other “questions about places” and answered them by consulting various globes and atlases; he studied books on subjects as diverse as “Pushkin drawings” and “19th & 20th Century Foundry catalogues of Russian typography,” which he first learned about in the Lenin Library. These showed up in his Russian drawings, but mostly they came later, in the diplomas and the mock writing.

  He devoted a separate page of notes to comments about “How [the Russian] artist functions,” and, not content with the trunkload of books he had shipped home, he resolved to find a good secondhand bookshop on Russian architecture in New York and buy more. He consulted his daily diary to draw on memories of what he had seen, but he also filled two legal-size yellow pages with notes about everything from Russian politics to culture. Armed with all this information and, relatively speaking, in no time at all, he produced so many drawings that the editors decided to feature them in two separate segments under the heading “A Reporter at Large.” The first, “Samarkand, USSR,” appeared on May 12 and the second, “Winter in Moscow” on June 9.

  Both portfolios were immediate hits with an American audience eager to learn whatever they could about the secretive Soviet society. A columnist at the San Francisco News thought Steinberg deserved a Pulitzer Prize for “the best reporting to come out of Russia this year.” He echoed the general opinion of other readers and reviewers when he wrote that Steinberg’s “pen and ink sketches in The New Yorker some months ago told more about life in Russia from Moscow to Samarkand than ten million words. Uncensored words even.”

  Unlike his previous European voyage, when Steinberg had gone in search of self-discovery and personal resolution but had come home with every aspect of his life still unsettled and uncertain, the Russian trip gave him the professional renewal that he worried he might have lost, or that he might never even have had. While The New Yorker’s readers were avidly embracing what he told them about Russia, he was thinking ahead to something new, to an interpretation of what it meant to be an American. He thought it was time to refresh his knowledge of the American landscape and to observe the daily life of the people who lived in the very different parts of it. Almost two decades before, he had willingly become a citizen of this polyglot society and accepted it as his true patria, and now, if he wanted to interpret it, he needed to find out what it meant to be an American in the late 1950s. If he wanted to observe the daily life of the average American, the best way to do this was to get Hedda, get in his car, and start driving.

  CHAPTER 20

  COVERING 14,000 MILES

  Back from Alaska … Covered 14,000 miles like a good Babbit, saw the whole country including part of Mexico.

  The first order of business was to get his financial affairs in order so he could take the cross-country trip he had promised himself. While he was away, much had happened that required his attention, starting with his annual first-of-the-year assessment of finances (postponed because of the Russian trip), which he had to complete before he could decide how much time he could afford to devote to travel and his own work. A check had come in from the Swiss magazine Du for drawings it had used in its January edition, so that was a start. His annual $10,000 stipend from Hallmark Cards was safely deposited, as were several other routine payments and retainers. Added to all these, his lawyer, Alexander Lindey, had settled two infringement claims, against Time and the Grey Advertising Agency, which together brought close to $3,000.

  Steinberg made it clear to anyone for whom he worked, whether advertising agency, business firm, or publication, that he would not sell the ownership, only the rights to use his drawings, and only in the manner Lindey specified in his meticulous contracts. With the exceptions of Hallmark and the various fabric companies, which insisted on holding the copyrights, everyone accepted this stipulation. Every year, for example, The New Yorker sent him a contract made “in consideration of the sum of one dollar,” in which the magazine agreed to receive credit as the original publisher of the drawings while Steinberg retained the rights to resell the work as he saw fit.

  The two infringement cases Lindey settled were about contract violation. In the first, Time used several drawings originally commissioned to illustrate a single article for multiple and different uses besides the one originally contracted for; in the second, Grey did the same, but in a far more egregious manner.

  Grey had commission
ed Steinberg to make several drawings for its client, the television division of Emerson Electronics. The Grey campaign, unveiled under the general title of “Wherever you look … there’s Emerson,” was aimed at women who were housebound and therefore most likely to be watching television at any hour of the day. Steinberg’s first drawing was a striking departure from the realism of previous campaigns aimed at women, all of which routinely depicted a human model smilingly doing household chores while wearing a crisp dress, starched apron, and high heels. His drawing was of a deliberately noncontroversial caricature woman, middle-aged and sexless, having breakfast in bed while watching television. The set she watched was a popular Emerson model with a man’s face on the screen, rolling his eyes discreetly upward and not looking directly at her. It was completely without innuendo and eminently successful in every print medium, but it was Grey’s use of the second ad that inspired Steinberg’s lawsuit.

  In that one, Steinberg drew a naked woman seated in a bathtub, similar to his drawing of the Paris bathtub. Instead of reclining in full frontal nudity, however, the cartoon woman is seen from behind, as she scrubs her back with a long-handled brush and watches a television set placed at the foot of her tub. On the set is a photograph of a real man with a monocle and a slightly lascivious expression on his face, holding up a book he does not read because he is too busy glancing sideways at the woman. Like the “Woman in Bed,” the “Lady in the Bathtub” was a huge success in whatever print medium Grey placed it, which Steinberg’s contract permitted. However, the contract did not permit the agency to place it, without his knowledge or permission, on forty-five billboards across the country, where it drew complaints of obscenity from various civil and religious groups. Lindey settled the case for $1,500 and Grey’s agreement not to use Steinberg’s future work in any way other than what was specified in his contracts.

  Steinberg’s work for Grey was typical of the commercial work he did throughout the 1950s, particularly in the last half of the decade, when he was one of the artists at the forefront of the creative revolution in advertising that dominated the 1960s. His contribution to the genre’s evolution was with innovative drawings that departed from the expected and took the viewer into the realm of the surprising and unexpected. Although a Steinberg ad might have seemed at first glance to be a drawing chosen mainly for its shock value, in reality it was the lead-in for a carefully orchestrated plot to make the viewer read the copy that went along with it. “Operation Steinberg,” as the Swiss critic Manuel Gasser dubbed his commercial work, was replete with “advanced nonsense.” There was no smiling housewife pushing a vacuum cleaner or loading a washing machine; instead, his whimsical cartoon people stopped just short of being grotesque when he juxtaposed them with real objects (the lady scrubbing her back while watching an Emerson being just one example). Many of the ads Steinberg drew appeared in The New Yorker, and most of them for one time only, so that each week brought something new for viewers to chuckle over. When House and Garden advertised itself as a publication “for the House Proud,” one week’s ad showed a little man smelling a vase of flowers on a table and the next week’s featured a woman climbing a ladder propped against a tree to pick an olive for her martini.

  Steinberg’s ads for Simplicity, the largest manufacturer of home sewing patterns, illustrate just how integral his nonsense drawings were to the sensible copy that came below them. A headline beneath his elaborately curlicued and swirled caricatures of women proclaimed “And she did it all by herself.” The copy that followed explained what the product could do, but the product was not pictorially represented. In the ads he designed for Comptometer, the largest manufacturer of adding machines, he showed a man lying on a chaise longue in a garden, fanning himself on a hot summer day while an umbrella shades him and a pitcher of cold drinks rests on the table beside him. “It isn’t the heat,” the caption reads, as the copy explains how the man can afford to relax because his Comptometer is doing the work for him. If the picture is puzzling, the text explains it, so that, as Manuel Gasser noted, “in the final analysis, the picture is the riddle and the copy is the answer.”

  In one ad for Noilly Prat vermouth’s highly successful “Don’t Stir Without Noilly Prat,” Steinberg has an elegant thin hand stirring circles and squiggles that rise above a photo of the bottle in a crescendo of imaginary writing. Only the vermouth bottle beneath the slogan is literal; everything else is conceptual. For Schweppes, he created a comedic double take when he drew a man and a woman in a living room whose furnishings resemble one of his interiors in The New World. They hold glasses as they stand, each with one leg hitched onto a low bar rail—but there is no bar between them, just the rail.

  Perhaps the most wildly imaginative print ads were those Steinberg created for Lewin-Mathes, the St. Louis firm that manufactured copper pipes and tubing under the general heading “We Teach Copper New Skills.” In one, a man’s head very much like Steinberg’s is turned into an angel who sports a halo made of copper tubing; in another, circular rows of copper pipe look like the repetitive writing exercises grade school children were taught when they learned the Palmer Penmanship method.

  The agencies that commissioned Steinberg’s ads generally sold them first to The New Yorker, where sophisticated readers lapped them up as if they were part of the magazine’s visual content rather than a commercial adjunct. The art editors were well aware of the enthusiastic response to Steinberg’s commercial work, and Jim Geraghty’s impassioned letter of several years earlier in which he had expressed frustration that the magazine and Steinberg could not reach an agreement where the magazine’s “demands coincide with your aspirations” still rang true. With the exception of the two Russian spreads, most of Steinberg’s artistic contributions to the magazine were still “spots” or “spot-pluses,” the filler drawings editors pulled from the files to round off a page or fill a column. Ever since Steinberg had completed a last-minute assignment to make the portrait drawing that accompanied a profile of Le Corbusier, William Shawn and the art editors had fallen into the habit of sending assignments that had strict deadlines, because they knew they could count on him to meet them; but when it came to printing the kind of work he wanted to do, such as his spreads of daily life in the segregated South, it seemed as if he and his patria had not yet found the common pathway that would allow his aspirations and their demands to go forward in harmony.

  All Steinberg’s ads were print, with only one exception, a television commercial for Jell-O. In the days of black-and-white transmission, his line drawing of a woman has her shuffling along on a treadmill while a frazzled female voice-over intones, “Busy, busy, busy.” The woman runs faster and faster as images bombard her: of a demanding child, a ticking clock, a man whose needs she is obviously not meeting. A black scrawl swirls across her and becomes deeper and darker until the screen fades to black while a sonorous male voice tells the viewer that there’s no need to be embarrassed or ashamed about not making dessert on a busy day now that Jell-O has a new line of instant puddings. The scene cuts from Steinberg’s obliterated cartoon woman to the midsection of a real woman, who pours milk into a bowl of powdered pudding and whips it with an egg beater so easily that even “the children can make it themselves.”

  Steinberg’s contributions to advertising were not only easily recognizable but also ubiquitous. His work was so well known that Hallmark featured him as one of its famous artists in ads touting contributors to their “Hall of Fame” collection, a campaign that featured photographs of artists such as Norman Rockwell and Winston Churchill. Described as a “comic draughtsman of outstanding genius,” Steinberg stands out in a sea of dark suits, looking stiff and uncomfortable in a beige deerstalker hat and matching tweed jacket, in a pose reminiscent of something between an English country gentleman and Sherlock Holmes.

  Unquestionably he had arrived commercially, and the boxes and boxes of business correspondence he saved throughout his life attest to his commercial popularity. Requests literally poured in dail
y, with offers of complete freedom for him to create whatever he wanted, if only he would agree to create it. Clearly he ignored Marcel Duchamps’s advice either to answer or to burn letters as soon as he received them, for often the initial requests led to a series of increasingly impassioned others in which the writers begged Steinberg please to respond, if not by mail, then by telephone or telegram. In most instances he was given the option of naming his fee, choosing his delivery date, and setting any other condition he wished to impose. His talents and abilities placed him in a fortunate situation: because he could deliver the goods, so to speak, he had the luxury of being selective, taking only those commissions that were intellectually appealing or so financially rewarding that he could not afford to refuse them.

  At the same time as the demand for his commercial work rose, so too did the demand for his creative drawings. Only The New Yorker remained picky and selective, while galleries throughout the United States were eager to exhibit his work. He planned to visit several of them on his upcoming auto trip. International collectors were lining up to buy, and European offers for exhibitions and projects were also coming in a steady stream. All in all, much of the financial pressure that had contributed to his flight from New York the year before was fast becoming a thing of his past. He was on the verge of becoming a very wealthy man who had the luxury of doing exactly what he wanted to do.