Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  To Steinberg, a retrospective held the specter of another kind of death: of a career that had reached its zenith and was all but over. Since his sister’s death, he had certainly been in almost constant biographical reflection, especially about “the brutal image of the end of life.” Now he would have to reflect on personal brutal images as he sorted out which works belonged to each of the “lives” that represented Milan, Santo Domingo, New York, and the places where he had been stationed during the war. It meant dividing the work into geographical as well as chronological periods and setting up categories within each. It meant finding terms and titles to define various works and periods and perhaps disputing the terms and definitions critics and scholars applied to it.

  He had to make the initial selection of works to be shown, and in some cases he and those who worked with him had to track down works that he had given away or his galleries had sold. He had to become the scholar of his own life, and as Maeght’s staff took over to scrutinize what he selected, they naturally disputed the facts and events of it. There were the ongoing questions of how other artists influenced him and corrections for all the biographical obfuscations and falsehoods he had given out to interviewers over the years. There were the apocryphal stories to deal with, such as how Steinberg often wore one of his paper-bag masks to cocktail or dinner parties just to draw attention to himself while pretending to be doing just the opposite. And there were the by now boring arguments about how to categorize his work, whether he was a cartoonist, a magazine illustrator, or a museum-worthy artist. All this had been reported or debated in so many articles and interviews that he was sick and tired of it. He did not want to do the external work that a retrospective required, and he was not sure that he was strong enough to face everything internal that he would have to dredge up and relive. It was almost too staggering to contemplate.

  THE YEARS 1974–76 HAD TRULY BEEN watershed years in Saul Steinberg’s life. He thought of them as a time of life-changing events, the two most meaningful being the death of his sister, Lica Steinberg Roman, and the coming into his life of the beloved cat Papoose. Such a linkage may have struck others as falling somewhere between the shocking and the superficial, but he spoke of it with such seriousness that no one dared to question it, at least directly to him. There were other changes as well, but perhaps with hindsight they were not so much changes as solidifications of his interactions with others. Sigrid’s role as the principal creator of Sturm und Drang intensified, while Hedda’s role as the level-headed sounding board who told him the worst about himself but loved him the best held steady. Ada remained her lusty, cheerful self in the face of constant adversity (always needing money, seeing doctors for one ailment after another, having to move house often); she reminded him of how lovable he had once been as her youthful olino caro and of how much she still loved the sad older man he had become. But instead of cheering him up, all this attention and affection made him feel old, especially when he discovered that it was getting harder to lure nubile young women into his bed for the brief flings he still needed and wanted. He still had his steady bed partners in every one of his cities—New York, Paris, Milan—but even that was depressing. It convinced him that there was diminution on two important fronts, his creative powers and his sexual prowess. All he had to look forward to was gradual death, his own and others’.

  His close friend Sandy Calder died suddenly in November, the day after they had dined together at one of their favorite hangouts, Joe’s Italian restaurant on Macdougal Street. When Steinberg was notified, he went immediately to give what comfort he could to Louisa and the two daughters, Sandra and Mary. He spent the entire day with them, all the while trying not to let them see the “many emotional reactions” that engulfed him. The primary one was how difficult he found it to accept his friend’s death without the finality of a religious ceremony. As Steinberg had aged, his Jewish identity had become stronger and his thinking of himself as a religious Jew had deepened. He always honored Passover quietly and alone, preferring not to participate in a seder. He went to temple on Rosh Hashanah and fasted at Yom Kippur. Although he did not formally sit shiva for his friends, engaging in the funeral obsequies had come to be the most important part of his acceptance of the death of a dear one, so he was dismayed to learn that there was to be no religious ceremony for Calder, only a memorial service at the Whitney Museum of American Art several weeks after his death.

  As one of Calder’s dearest friends of longest duration, Steinberg was invited to speak. He recalled the happy weekends and holidays at the house in Roxbury, when there was music and laughter and everyone danced, especially Sandy, who would dance with a chair or his Labrador retriever if there was no other partner. Steinberg told of an evening when the noise level was so high he had to bend down to hear what Calder, sitting in a chair, was saying. To hear him, Steinberg “comfortably and naturally” sat on Calder’s lap, and he thought afterward that it had been sixty years since he had sat on a man’s knee.

  After he spoke, he was relieved to find that he had delivered his oration without “getting tongue-tied, fainting, laughing hysterically, etc.” He was happy that he had finally overcome his shyness at having to stand before a microphone in front of a large crowd and a phalanx of reporters. He called it a combination of “duty and age” but it served him well once he decided that it was akin to religious expression and all he had to do to get through it was to bear down and speak. When it was over, however, he had to retreat to the country to deal with the pain of this newest terrible loss.

  IT WAS NOT THE HAPPIEST OF HOLIDAY SEASONS, and to get over it, he made a hasty trip to Paris at the start of 1977, to tell Maeght that he could not face a retrospective but would help the staff mount an ordinary exhibition. Maeght more or less accepted his decision but still called the show “The Retrospective,” which it was. Maeght also insisted that Steinberg had to meet Italo Calvino, whom he had asked to write a critical essay for the catalogue because he wanted Steinberg to be elevated to the pantheon of European intellectual thought and he wanted Calvino to do it. Steinberg had forgotten that they had been introduced ten years previously, but Maeght, who was determined to bring these two iconic figures together, reminded him. Steinberg was irritated and puzzled by Calvino’s desultory conversation until he suddenly blurted out that he wanted very much to write a preface and was volunteering to do so. It made Steinberg wonder if his initial response to such a respected writer might be due to his increasing intolerance for meeting new people. He thought Calvino’s preface was “not bad,” mostly because it was filled with quotations about Galileo, Michelangelo, and other luminaries but, most important of all, because he was “not praised directly.”

  The show was to open on May 11, 1977, and he planned to be there for the opening before taking his niece, Dana, to visit a cousin in Israel whom he did not know and “who rather scares me.” Still, he liked being in Israel, where he was comfortable surrounded by people whom he thought he resembled and whose lives reminded him of his Romanian youth. He never passed up a chance to go there.

  DESPITE STEINBERG’S APPREHENSION, IF NOT REVULSION, over the idea of a retrospective, he could not avoid the one proposed for New York in 1978, which seemed a natural outgrowth of the 1977 show in Paris. Harold Rosenberg and Tom Armstrong, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, were the instigators of the American show, which gave Steinberg such “big worries” that he delayed for several months before eventually allowing them to persuade him that he had to do it, although he was perturbed that the “damned flatterers and confounded old men” would get their way. Astonishingly, they were all younger than he, and he was not at all happy about being “venerable.”

  It took the always succinct and direct Alexander Lindey to put the occasion into the proper perspective: “A retrospective usually comes toward the twilight of an artist’s career. In your case it has occurred at a time when you are at the height of your creative powers. What a happy circumstance!” Steinberg wasn’t so sure
about that, but it was always difficult to refuse Harold Rosenberg, who recognized his old friend’s deepening depression and saw the retrospective as a tremendous opportunity for personal and professional renewal. Steinberg remained convinced that it was just the opposite, downhill all the way. In that glum mood, he began one of the hardest-working, most grueling years of his life.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE MAN WHO DID THAT POSTER

  There is no frontier in America. If you want, the nearest thing would be Weehauken. The frontier goes from New York to New Jersey.

  From the moment it graced the cover of The New Yorker on March 29, 1976, until Saul Steinberg’s death more than two decades later, he was known to most people (as he lamented later in life) as “the man who did that poster.” Nobody knows whether the genesis of the “View of the World from 9th Avenue” came from one of the free-wheeling, far-ranging dialogues of free association that happened every time Saul Steinberg and Harold Rosenberg got together, but it is a possibility, because one of Steinberg’s favorite anecdotes was about how a real-life incident had led him to create the pineapple as one of his most iconic symbols.

  A decade before he made the “9th Avenue” drawing, Steinberg told Claire Nivola that “one of the very rare times when a real incident gave [him] the idea” of the symbolic meaning he wanted to convey came whenever he drew a pineapple. It happened in the mid-1950s, during the years of his closest intellectual friendship with Dorothy Norman. Steinberg was visiting her in East Hampton, where, as in her New York town house, she presided over an informal salon of some of the most interesting people in the creative professions. Norman was writing a book titled The Heroic Encounter to accompany a collection of objects and photographs she planned to exhibit at the Willard Gallery in New York. As she described her intentions to Steinberg, he thought the project seemed “hopeless” because the material was so vast, disparate, and personal. The only point on which they agreed was that the history of art was the story of humanity’s ongoing struggle in one “heroic encounter” after another, all of which were portrayed through myth and symbol.

  Some months later, on a hot summer afternoon when Steinberg dropped in at the Rosenberg house in Springs, he found Harold sitting at the kitchen table wielding a large kitchen knife and “bothering” a pineapple. “Voila! The Heroic Encounter,” Steinberg said theatrically, as Dorothy Norman’s title popped into his mind. Harold hacked away at a pineapple that stubbornly refused to be cut, and his expression seemed to Steinberg “crocodilian … a sinister smile.” Steinberg didn’t remember who won, but the memory of Rosenberg’s battle always made him think that the top or “feathered” half of the pineapple was “the hero,” whereas the prickly bulb below it was “the dragon” that the hero was compelled to slay.

  Steinberg had been playing with representations of the North American continent for well over a decade before the “9th Avenue” poster took its final form. In 1966 he did a series of drawings for a three-part profile of Los Angeles in The New Yorker, some of which featured the West Coast as if the artist were poised high above the Pacific Ocean looking down on the city. In 1973 he switched coasts for “The West Side,” a drawing that placed Manhattan Island at the center of a universe that included a collection of amorphous lumps denoting the five boroughs (Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island), with a vague sixth lump known as Upstate. Beyond the city, a sun peeked over the Atlantic Ocean at the top of the drawing, while the largest lump of all, an upside-down bean-shaped “USA,” filled the bottom. After he made this one, Steinberg started to draw visions of a city that might have been New York and might have had a river beyond it, but without any of his iconic images: no Chrysler or Empire State Building, no Statue of Liberty, and no other recognizable landmarks. There was only a power station, which may or may not have been the one on East 14th Street, but the buildings along the horizon looked as if they would be more at home on Red Square in Moscow than along the Hudson River.

  There were other versions of cityscapes, and in one of them Steinberg added words, marking off 9th and 10th Avenues, the Hudson River, and a vague “America,” but it was still very much like his earliest drawings, with nothing except the street names to make the viewer aware of a specific place. In another version, “Jersey” showed up beyond the Hudson River, and the landscape included Texas, Nevada, and Canada. All these were drawn on 8½-by-11-inch paper, but he expanded the next version to 20 by 15 inches, then to 26 by 19½ inches, and finally to the largest, 28 by 19 inches. The streetscape eventually included the ordinary squat redbrick apartment buildings and warehouses that dot the midtown West Side of New York, to which he added some generic-shaped cars and many scritch-scratches of rubber-stamp people who scurry along the sidewalks.

  When viewers first saw the magazine cover, the usual response was almost always a smile of recognition swiftly followed with a nod of superiority over the parochialism of supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers, who allegedly believe the world ends once they cross the Hudson River. Nobody, it seemed, stopped to consider that Steinberg was showing how the New Yorkers’ parochialism was no different from every other American’s, the only difference being that New Yorkers seldom ventured outside the small neighborhood villages into which the great city is divided. Steinberg’s ordinary “crummy” New Yorkers are rendered as impersonal rubber stamps who live in the “crummy” parts of town seldom seen by tourists, and who are too busy just making it through another day to have time to think about the larger world beyond the appointed rounds of where they live and work.

  After the magazine’s legendary reader, “the little old lady in Dubuque,” enjoyed her moment of condescension with the cover, she and the rest of Steinberg’s viewers wanted to know why none of his typical landmarks were included to identify the grandeur for which the city is famous. He had a ready answer: this was a drawing of how “the crummy people”—that is, the working classes—see the world that lies beyond their immediate neighborhood. He never intended to make people feel superior or even comfortable when they looked at this drawing, for his thoughts about America, particularly New York and its environs, had darkened considerably during the past decade. Like most of the rest of the country, he had been “glued to the television” and was in “paralysis” over the Watergate affair. During the worst of the Vietnam War, he thought it was probably for the best that the average American was confronted by its brutality in every newspaper headline or television broadcast. In a paraphrase of Gertrude Stein’s famous remark about Oakland, California, “There’s no there there,” Steinberg enlarged the phrase to include the entire continent: “Today you get from here, where you board the plane, to there, where you get off. There’s nothing in between, not like it used to be.”

  And just as the country was facing one crisis after another, so too was he. There were too many “boring parties and primitive conversations, nagging, bragging, the usual kindergarten.” He fled from the city at every opportunity because he thought it had been ruined by an influx of poor people, while paradoxically, East Hampton, where he went for solace and tranquillity, was “ruined by invasion of the rich.” The country was roiled by gasoline shortages, falling house prices, and rising unemployment, and he could see all this clearly in eastern Long Island, where there were no cars in the supermarket parking lot, many stores had to close, and “everyone has left, due to poverty.”

  By the time the “View of the World from 9th Avenue” appeared, it was not meant to be the cheerful, optimistic poster people took it for, and the public misreading of Steinberg’s intention only deepened his chronically gloomy outlook. When the demand for copies of the cover became more than the magazine could handle, a contract to reproduce a poster was quickly drawn up, and by 1980 25,000 copies had already been sold. As years passed, it became a kind of public shorthand for New York in the American imagination: in 1992, at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, the president of the New York State Bar Association used Steinberg’s iconic pos
ter as an example of how Justice Ginsburg’s vision would be far vaster than “how the world revolved around 7th [sic] Avenue.” Chambers of commerce all over the world literally stole the idea as they adapted the poster to promote their cities and organizations, while individuals as well as publications created other kinds of rip-offs.

  Steinberg amassed a file of imitations a good five or six inches thick, as people from all over the world sent him various versions, and it made him fume repeatedly about everything from plagiarism to copyright infringement. Time and again Alexander Lindey had to restrain him from suing over everything from T‑shirts to coffee mugs that bore an adaptation of the poster. Steinberg complained that he hated to walk down Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets, for the windows of every souvenir shop he passed had some rip-off relating to the cover that made him wince. There were heated exchanges between the angry and outraged Steinberg and the obviously irritated Alexander Lindey, whose patience wore exceedingly thin as he told his client repeatedly that he had no grounds to sue. Steinberg insisted that he did, and just when the situation threatened to explode, he usually backed off and sent Lindey another of his many euphemistic apologies for his “Mittel Europa attitudes.”

  The fuss over the cover showed no sign of abating, and Steinberg festered for the next seven years, until 1984, when he finally had legitimate grounds to sue for copyright infringement. He sprang to the ready when Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., appropriated specific images of some of the buildings from his poster for one they created to promote the movie Moscow on the Hudson. It took four years for Steinberg to win his case, and by that time Alexander Lindey had retired. After Steinberg paid his new lawyers at Rembar & Curtis, his share of the settlement was an impressive $225,859.49.