The first large-scale exhibition in Japan, with 280 works, including posters, prints, and reproductions of key drawings.
Photographs by Mitsumasa Fujitsuka
A selection of drawings from the 1950s to the 1980s.
More than a dozen selected works, drawn and sculpted, covering Steinberg’s imaginative treatment of the still-life theme.
A section of the gallery’s extensive holdings of the works of Steinberg, Maeght represented Steinberg in France from the early 1950s on.
The exhibition explores Steinberg’s roots in Milan, where he studied and worked from 1933 to 1941, and the resonance of his Italian experience in later works. Publication available.
The exhibition brings together more than eighty of Steinberg’s works, based on gifts from The Saul Steinberg Foundation and loans from elsewhere. Among the highlights is the reconstruction of Steinberg’s collage-mural, Art Viewers, never seen since its installation at the Galerie Maeght in 1966. Catalogue available.
A retrospective of 22 drawings, based on gifts to the museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
Published by the University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, Virginia and London, in 2021, Jessica R. Feldman’s Saul Steinberg’s Literary Journeys, the first book-length study of Steinberg’s art and its relation to literature, explores his complex literary roots, particularly his fondness for modernist aesthetics and iconography. The Steinberg who emerges is an artist of far greater depth than has been previously recognized.
Feldman begins with Steinberg as a reader and writer, including surveying his personal library. She considers the practice of modernist parody as the strongest affinity between Steinberg and the two authors he repeatedly claimed as his “teachers”—Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. Viewing Steinberg’s art in tandem with readings of selected works by Nabokov and Joyce, Feldman illuminates the fascinating bonds between Steinberg and these writers, from their tastes for popular culture to their status as mythmakers, émigrés, and perpetual wanderers. Feldman also relates Steinberg’s uniquely literary art to a host of other authors, including Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Defoe.
Generously illustrated with the artist’s work and drawing on invaluable archival material from The Saul Steinberg Foundation, this innovative fusion of literary history and art history allows us to see anew Steinberg’s iconic art.
Famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, Saul Steinberg (American, b. Romania, 1914–1999) was renowned for the covers, drawings, and cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades. He was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel careers, making no distinction between high and low art, which he freely mingled.
Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) redefined the possibilities of drawing, casting it as a philosophical investigation, “a way of reasoning on paper.” His ingenious experiments with drawing and other media, including photography, collage, and sculpture, earned him critical acclaim as a modernist artist in the post-war period, while his numerous drawings and covers for The New Yorker made him dear to a broad American public—the people whose daily lives and customs became the subject of his art.
Curated by Michaela Mohrmann
