Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  His restless mood made him seek out Elaine de Kooning, whose company he could normally tolerate only in small doses. She had begun to make frequent trips to Texas whenever she wanted to “get a gig for a workshop or a slide lecture or a commission,” and Steinberg shared her fascination with the state where everything seemed to be bursting with “frontier energy” and “everything is possible.” “Call Elaine about museum in Texas,” he wrote at the top of a very long list surrounded by doodles—always a dangerous sign that he was bored and didn’t want to do any of the irritatingly mundane items on it. After the one-sided reader response to his October New Yorker cover, he wanted to go to a place where he could look at the world with “a fresh eye, to put myself in a condition to have a fresh eye,” and there was no chance of finding a fresh eye in New York, what with all the details to which his long list attested.

  Gigi was peremptory and demanding, and he had to buy “ice-scates and easle [sic], paint and colored pencils for you-know-who.” Friends asked him to write recommendations for grants and fellowships, an onerous task because he disliked writing official letters in English for fear he would misuse the language. Despite having a lawyer who took care of such things, he personally hounded Mrs. Jennie Bradley about long-overdue foreign royalties. He had begun to see more of the group of Upper West Side intellectuals that included Diana and Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald, all of whom routinely enlisted him in social causes and political events that meant lending his name, donating art, or giving money, and usually all three at once. His Buick was not running smoothly, and many phone calls and service appointments were not solving its problems. He had to call his accountant, deal with the Stedeliijk Museum in Amsterdam, pacify Galerie Maeght in Paris, and “think about [an unspecified] Research Institute” that wanted to use his name on its letterhead. And there was also his dear friend Inge Morath, who could sweet-talk him into just about anything but whose proposed book he had been stalling for months.

  He was making desultory plans to follow Elaine de Kooning to Texas, and to use her contacts as the starting point for a jaunt to meet dealers and collectors throughout the Southwest, until November 22, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Steinberg joined the world in mourning, and going to Texas became unthinkable. The nation’s trauma left him more desperate than ever to get away in order to gain the distance he thought he needed in order to figure out how to represent it.

  Kennedy’s assassination was a stunning personal blow to Steinberg, for this was anarchy, something he thought was behind him forever when he left Europe to embrace American democracy. His politics were always liberal and left-leaning, a reaction against the punitive social inequity of his youth, and he had voted for the young Kennedy because he seemed to be cut in the mold of one of his great heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Steinberg believed in a government that offered the greatest good to the largest number of citizens, and to him, Roosevelt’s New Deal was a monumental achievement. He never forgot how it offered meaningful work to artists and writers during the Great Depression, some of which he studied in search of ideas. With the Kennedy administration, Steinberg found another cause to believe in just as fervently, a shared antipathy to segregation.

  Ever since his first trip to the South, he had been a supporter of the NAACP and CORE, and he also held separate memberships in some of the local chapters and organizations they sponsored throughout the region. He donated drawings as well as money whenever he was asked, and in some cases he volunteered to sign petitions for causes and affidavits for individuals. If he were to travel around the South after Kennedy’s death, what, he asked himself, could he possibly draw that would contribute to an understanding of, if not an explanation for, what his adopted patria had become? He had not loved his homeland for the past decade as unequivocally as he had when he had first arrived on its shores, but nevertheless, it was still the country he respected and admired above all others. He thought about the situation of the artist in a violently changed society for a week or so after Kennedy’s funeral and then decided that if he were ever to understand what had just happened in America, he needed to distance himself from it. He decided to go to Europe to see what he would find there and where it might lead him. He had the time and the money and would just let things happen.

  HE WAS EAGER TO SEE HIS SISTER and observe firsthand what her daily life was like now that she and her family were so contentedly settled. He wanted to visit his mother’s grave and see the headstone that had been laid according to Jewish custom since his last visit. His primary need on this trip was an intense desire to renew himself through contact with other creative persons, especially non-Americans such as Eugène Ionesco and Jean Hélion, with whom he had developed sustained correspondence about their personal philosophies and their impact on their work. Steinberg wanted to avoid anything that smacked of actual work while he was in Paris, so he went out of his way to avoid having to see his publishers and gallerists. He thought, and rightly so, that they were more interested in the commercial prospects for work he had already done than in any new ideas he might have. He wanted to talk about this with Hedda Sterne, who was in Venice on a Fulbright scholarship.

  To live in Venice was expensive, even with the stipend from the Fulbright, so Hedda rented her New York house for the year she was to be away. She was counting on sales from her exhibition at Betty Parsons’s gallery in December, and because she was not able to attend to the details in person, she asked Saul to do it for her. As she was particularly worried about the photographic reproductions in the catalogue, he worked hard with Betty before he left to make it what Hedda wanted. Unfortunately, despite excellent publicity and a beautiful catalogue, not a single painting sold. Hedda hesitated to tell Saul, because she was determined not to take any money from him, but he knew and quietly deposited $1,000 into her bank account, telling her not to worry.

  He accomplished everything he wanted to do in Paris in less than a week, so he flew to Milan and went directly on to Venice. Hedda had rented the house where the poet and painter Filippo De Pisis had lived during and just after the war. He had amassed a huge personal library that featured such works as Casanova’s memoirs and other “mild pornography” that Hedda was sure Saul would like. She joked that she would steal one of the volumes of Casanova’s Intrighi di Francia for him, and when he saw Di Pisis’s collection of erotica, he asked Hedda to look for erotic paintings of nude women, particularly the legend of Susanna and the elders. Like Hedda, he was intrigued by illustrated periodicals of the 1880s, and together they spent hours in De Pisis’s library turning pages and searching for his annotations, sometimes touching, sometimes very strange (he died insane).

  Saul was worried about Hedda while he was with her, not because of her financial needs, which he intended to take care of, but because of her health. She had arrived in Venice wearing a black eye patch because her sight was impaired, and for the entire year she was there she had to be careful not to damage her vision further. As soon as she moved into the house, she came down with a lung infection, which she called pleurisy, bronchitis, cold, or flu, depending on the symptoms of the moment; whatever it was, it did not go away for the entire winter. Her health was run-down and her mood dispirited, mostly because everyone praised her work but did not buy it. In a gossipy letter to Saul about the Biennale, she told him that the museum director James Johnson Sweeney raved “enthusiastically” about all her “periods,” which led her to ask acerbically “why he don’t buy ten?”

  However, it did them good to see each other, for it was apparent to both that once they had stopped being lovers they had become each other’s closest friend and most valued sounding board. Now that they no longer lived together as man and wife, they could talk about anything—and they did, from their views about the way art had become a commodity to their personal philosophy of how an artist should conduct him- or herself in an increasingly philistine world. At the Biennale, Hedda found “such poverty of spirit, imagination, or even simple t
alent” in so much of the art world, “and what savagery, brutality, in the fight for a prize, recognition!” She told Saul about “Castelli’s revenge,” as “the triumph of pop [art]” was being touted that year in Venice. She thought there were too many “fat middle aged ‘enfants terribles’ ” parading themselves before the press, with Robert Rauschenberg leading the lot with his “phony enfant terrible statements.”

  Mostly, however, they talked about themselves. Hedda feared that she would sound pompous when she told how the luxury of a fellowship year was letting her clarify her views about art in general and giving her insights into what she valued about her own work. She was reading some of the volumes of art history in De Pisis’s library, and it made her feel “vaguely nauseated” when she came across critics who would say (as she paraphrased) “the painter speaks a truth he does not know,” implying that the work of art had no validity until the critic pronounced upon it. She went to an exhibition and was horrified to find that there were two names printed in the same size type and given equal prominence in all the advertising: the artist’s and that of the critic who wrote the introduction to the catalogue. Hedda said she made up her mind then and there that she would have no more of “this ‘career’ business” in her life. When she painted, she would transfer only the purity of her thoughts to her canvases, and the world would be free to evaluate the paintings on those terms. She told Saul she hoped this did not sound “pompous” and said how grateful she was to have these conversations.

  As such talks had always done throughout the twenty-some years of their relationship, the discussion turned specifically to Saul’s version of his current unhappiness, of his inability to concentrate on work, his constant need to travel in search of new places, his inability to tolerate most of the people he knew, and his frustration over the lack of communication with others. Hedda was no longer afraid to risk offending him, so she told him that from here on, no matter what transpired between them, she felt the obligation to tell him the truth as she saw it. In this instance, she hoped it would lessen his despair when she told him that his current state of mind was nothing special or unusual; it was the same malaise that infected any creative artist worthy of the name, and rather than fighting it, he should accept it for what it was, a tribute to his genius.

  HE LEFT VENICE IN A FAR BETTER MOOD than when he had arrived. Being with Hedda was restorative and gave him the energy to push onward in search of “the fresh eye,” which still eluded him. The entire trip became something far greater than he had originally envisioned after he attended a reception for the diplomat Carlo di Bugnano, who was then the Italian ambassador to Indonesia and who invited him to visit. Steinberg had not thought about where he would go after staying in Rome for a week or so, but while in Venice he mentioned offhandedly to Hedda that he sometimes thought about returning to the places in North Africa where he had been stationed during the war and that retracing his postings might help him to put the past fifteen years into perspective. She told him to think about it, because he could always cross North Africa and fly back to New York from Algiers. At the time he shrugged it off as a whim, but after he met Bugnano, he decided to expand the trip to include many places in Africa he wanted to return to or to see for the first time. It made him think of India, where he had flown across the Hump; China was off-limits to Americans, but there was British Hong Kong, and if he went to Hong Kong, he might as well go to Japan. The next thing he knew, he had a round-the-world itinerary.

  On the spur of the moment he decided to leave Milan and go to Florence on his way to Rome, to spend several days as an art tourist. He did not plan his African itinerary until he got to Rome, so he decided to get there via Athens, because he wanted to see the ruins again and smell the magical flavors he always associated with Greece. He flew from there to Cairo, where his main sightseeing was of the Pyramids. They inspired him to visit his old friend from the Politecnico, Sandro Angelini, in Ethopia. Steinberg flew from Asmara to Gondar, where he saw the royal compound of Fasil Ghebbi. He stayed briefly in the capital, Addis Ababa, and then went to Lalibela, where he toured the rock-hewn twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches built by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. It was always a pleasure to see Angelini, but as a trained architect himself, Steinberg thought the churches in Lalibela were “stupidly made,” poor imitations of Coptic Christian churches. His only praise was for the setting, “a terrific plateau with purity and magic, a concept of heaven.”

  He flew from Lalibela to Nairobi, Kenya, where he saw for the first time “gazelles and giraffes and hippos and crocs and so on,” and with the “fresh eye” he was thrilled to find had been rejuvenated: “By cutting my bridges, by being in a condition that is new to me, I suddenly have the eye that sees, the nose that smells. All my senses are active. I’m not taking for granted anything the way one does when living day after day in the same routine.”

  His next stop was India—first Bombay, where he was most impressed by the architecture of a railway station that the natives insisted had been built by Rudyard Kipling, and then Calcutta, where his flight, “Great Eastern 229!” touched down at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1964. He spent the next day at the New Market, happily engaged in one of his favorite pastimes, buying “junque.” Early the next day he boarded a Swissair flight to Bangkok, where he visited temples during the day and went to the movies at night. Thailand did not impress him, so the next day he flew to Hong Kong. On January 6 he flew to Tokyo, where he checked into the Imperial Hotel. He played tourist the next day, visiting the Ginza with “Mary,” whose name appeared in his datebook during the eleven days he toured the country. He stayed at inns as well as posh hotels, visited geisha houses, took trains into the countryside, played pachinko, visited temples, and saw sand gardens that reminded him of some of his own drawings of labyrinths and mazes. From Tokyo he circled to Osaka, Nagasaki, Beppu, Kobe, Kyoto, and Saigo before returning to the capital city on the nineteenth. On the twentieth he went to American Express and found a letter from Gigi. He had done enough traveling to regain his fresh eye, and now it was time to go home and put it to use.

  HE WAS BACK IN NEW YORK early in February 1964, but it took several weeks to get used to being there. “I’m still confused,” he told Aldo on February 19, because returning to New York was akin to being back in Romania. He had seen so much that it was difficult to find the words to describe such things as the wild animals in Kenya and the hot baths in Japan. It would all come out eventually in his drawings, but for now, “as always, I was more interested in myself (that is, trying to understand what sort of man I am) than in seeing outside things.” He thought his confusion at returning to so-called familiar circumstances might have been as disorienting as that of explorers who returned to civilization after long stays in primitive lands. Steinberg wondered if they felt as he did after “coming home and finding myself no longer the same.”

  A short time later he was still questioning his role and place in New York, in the United States, and, by extension, in the art world. He made another list, on which he noted that he had given money to an organization that wanted to do away with all organized charities, because he detested all the “monks and missionaries of bureaucracy.” But most of all he had his own mission: “Artists of the World Unite. You have nothing to lose but your balls.”

  CHAPTER 29

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY DOESN’T STOP

  The fact that stuff gets printed even if not perfect is a blessing. It clears the path and lets us go forward toward things never thought of before and still based on stuff from the past. So one’s autobiography doesn’t stop.

  When Steinberg returned to New York in early 1964, the requests were piled up and much work was waiting if he wanted to take it on, but he was mostly concerned with reentry into what passed for ordinary daily life. His main creative activity was fiddling around “rediscovering Cubism” and making collages, but “not the usual ones of course.” When he actually finished making drawings, they were mostly “jokes about art history and the
conventions of drawing, still lifes representing not objects but elements of drawing and painting combined with ‘speech balloons’ placed on the tables of still lifes.”

  On the personal side, he was worried about Hedda, whose eye problems had been exacerbated by a winter of debilitating flu that left her with chronic fatigue, low blood pressure, and stubborn infections that lodged in her eyes. One was so badly inflamed that she had to cover it with a black eye patch, and she had to coddle the other by limiting how much she read or painted. She tried to joke that the patch made her look as sophisticated as the male model in the ads for Hathaway shirts, but she told Saul more seriously that nearly all her “allowance,” the monthly stipend he put into her account, went to pay for prescriptions and doctors. Hedda was so worried about money that she was trying to extend her Fulbright until the autumn of 1964 so that the renter could stay on in her house. It led Saul, who never discussed money concerns with her, to confess that he was in a temporary bind and feared running short himself.

  When not worrying about Hedda, there was the nagging question of his relationship with Gigi and how it should progress. She was still taking occasional courses at Columbia, where she had befriended a group of fellow students with whom she spent much of her time. It gave her warm satisfaction to know that she was welcome among interesting people of her own age and also the jolt of self-confidence she did not have in the early days of the relationship with Saul. While he was away, she had several brief affairs with men she met at Columbia, but she ended them when he returned, managing to keep the lovers as good friends. Throughout the affairs, Gigi made no secret of her relationship with Saul and how dependent she was on his largesse; when she ended them, she told her lovers that his disapproval was the reason. She always behaved with discretion, and even though Saul knew that she regarded their relationship as he did— open, to use the word that came into increasing prominence in the sixties—he was still not pleased about it. This time, however, he managed to keep quiet, because he realized he bore some responsibility by going off around the world and leaving her alone.