1981

Is again rereading James Joyce’s Ulysses.

February 1-25, in Los Angeles at the Gemini G.E.L. studio, where he learns to make an etching plate. Between 1981 and 1996, he will produce 12 etchings and a lithograph. The Gemini project represents the first time he works on printing plates rather than have his drawings photoengraved and issued as lithographs.

April, cancels a large exhibition, “Steinberg’s America,” being planned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. “Finally, after a year of doubts, I gave up on those gigantic museum retrospectives… and have returned to life as a free man, instead of being my own heir or even my own widow.”

July 1, death of Marcel Breuer, a friend since the 1940s.

July 23, death of his longtime dealer and friend, Betty Parsons.

September 29, tells Aldo Buzzi that he has “begun to speak German [which he had learned in high school], attempting to study it, dictionary, grammar…. But my real motive is the desire to speak Yiddish, which was the intimate language of my parents. Many words—but more than anything else, sounds, cries—come back to me with pleasure and surprise, like archaeological discoveries.”

October 26, ending thirty-year association with the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries, signs a contract with the Pace Gallery, headed by Arne Glimcher.

December, another trip to Israel. In Tel Aviv, visits Eugen Campus, an old friend from the Liceul Matei Basarab in Bucharest. (Campus stands to the right of ST in the 1932 graduation photo, above.) Campus, who has become a literary critic writing in French and Romanian, interviews ST on December 9 and 10; he publishes the transcripts in Romanian.