A way of reasoning on paper
Three sections of the mural—Downtown—Big City, Main Street—Small Town, and Cocktail Party—that had been installed in the Delvaux showroom in March will go on view in a new permanent collection gallery in the museum, May 21 – October 19, 2025.
Three sections from Steinberg’s monumental 1958 mural, The Americans, and a fourth life-size reproduction were reassembled for an installation that commemorated the participation of the artist and the Delvaux leather goods company in the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The three sections are on view at their home in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, May 21 – October 19, 2025.
New Collections at Museo Bellas Artes de Bilbao
Artists’ archives and document collections are essential in understanding both their creative context and the interest and motivations of those who assembled them. Sketches, correspondence, photographs, written texts and other materials that belonged to the artists or the people near them help us to learn more about their lives and shed light on their most personal concerns.
The museum is now presenting six sets of documents, some of them associated with recent acquisitions, on the painter Eduardo Zamacois; the photographer Alphonse Guiard and his son, the painter Adolfo Guiard; the photographer Felipe Manterola; the photographic archive of the Patricio Echeverría S.A. factory; the illustrator Saul Steinberg; and the painter and engraver María Franciska Dapena.
Their recent addition is the outcome of donations made by their heirs and other private collections, the latest in the series of donations and bequests that have historically enriched the museum’s collections.
TOTAH presents Sunset Emergency, a two-person exhibition featuring selected works by Robert Feintuch and Saul Steinberg, opening on February 20th, 2025. This is Feintuch’s first appearance with the gallery, and Steinberg’s second large-scale presentation.
Steinberg and Feintuch are linked by literary contrivance. Steinberg, occasionally stamping his drawings in a legalistic way while leaving them far from officious, shows figures and signs become virtual, shading off into the brink of illegibility. Feintuch, for his part, creates larger than life scenarios on honeycomb panels-fleshing out improbable vistas which are no less complex and communicative for eschewing any pretense to literalness. Generationally located at modernity and post-modernity, respectively, a shared sensitivity to the nuances of verbal and visual ambiguity fosters a certain detachment. Their techniques and methods comment on the limits of knowledge and objectivity, giving form to dormant impulses and desires.
The world within a world quality of Steinberg’s artistry, archives of archives where the subject matter stands in for something two or three times removed from perceptual immediacy. In The Venice Table, 1979, the literal dovetails with the eerie and imponderable. The presence of bread and cucumber slices seem like keepsakes from a European travelogue. Meanwhile, the outlines of a dark seated woman, or a man gazing into an empty sky, suggests realms of the imagination which are far from interpersonal. This mock air of depersonalization is thickened by the crackling fog of Steinberg’s introspective personality – dramatized in the nervous rhythms of lines that recreate a ledger or speedometer.
This exhibition is a reduced version of the show at the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, highlighting the varied and complex Steinberg works in the Madrid collection.
Published by the University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, Virginia, and London, 2024. One-third of the book is devoted to Steinberg and his place in the 20th-century engagement with boredom as a creative spur.
This exhibition is the first complete retrospective dedicated to Saul Steinberg (Râmnicu Sărat, Romania, 1914 – New York, 1999) in Spain. Steinberg is considered one of the most outstanding post-war artists, and his work resists any simple classification. As he himself stated, “I don’t quite belong to the realm of art, of cartoons or drawings for magazines, and the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me.” The wandering between different artistic and literary genres is essential to his work, and also a mirror of his life, his times and his destiny in the turbulent 20th century.
Saul Steinberg is best known for his drawings published on the covers and inside pages of The New Yorker magazine , a close collaboration that lasted nearly six decades and meant that Steinberg entered North American homes and shook up the ways of thinking of American society. He defined himself as “a writer who draws”, but his artistic production goes much further: his ingenuity and virtuoso play of images are transferred to other less popular media, but key to his production, such as painting, graphics, collage , photomontage, and even “drawing” in three dimensions.
The exhibition presents all the facets of the artist and how they were interrelated throughout his life. It features nearly four hundred pieces from various private collections and European and American institutions. In addition, The Saul Steinberg Foundation of New York has donated part of its funds to the Juan March Foundation and they are part of this exhibition.
See below for more information, program, trailer, and catalog.
Full exhibition details at Juan March Foundation website
Saul Steinberg, artista, program pdf
Saul Steinberg, artista, video trailer
Saul Steinberg, artista, exhibition catalog
Published by New York Review Books in 2024, Steinberg’s All in Line is now back in print for the first time in almost eighty years, with added texts and full captions. The book represents his first compilation of drawings, one that reveals his self-image as a refugee from fascist Italy finding his line and his way in America.
This new edition of All in Line includes an introduction by the cartoonist Liana Finck and an afterward by the writer Iain Topliss, and will resonate with both lifelong fans of Steinberg and artists just beginning to find their own way.
Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681378626
Pages: 160
Publication Date:
Purchase at:
Steinberg referred to himself as “a writer who draws”. With simple lines, he recorded his specific view of the world around him, seen through the eyes of a careful observer, noting the stereotypes and absurdities of human action. This view is apparent in the ten drawings from the National Gallery Prague’s Collection of Prints and Drawings, from a generous gift from The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York.
Producer: National Gallery Prague
Text: Adriana Šmejkalová Životopis umělce
Artist’s biography: Anna Strnadová Grafický kabinet, Veletržní palác
Graphic Arts kabinet, Trade Fair Palace Kurátorka
Curator: Adriana Šmejkalová. Pages: 23, Czech-English.
The exhibition presents Steinberg’s multidimensional exploration of still life in drawing, lithography and wood relief sculpture, dating from the time he built his East Hampton studio in 1970 until his death in 1999. His colored pencil drawings of tabletop arrangements depict casual setups of art supplies, apples, vases of flowers, postcards of Matisse and Braque paintings, and beloved tin toys, family photographs, and a miniature porcelain vase he drew and carved repeatedly. The charm and nostalgia in these drawings is palpable and enduring.
The six large lithographs of intricate still lifes from 1970 reveal Steinberg’s mastery of yet another medium. Actual postcards of a favorite Cubist Braque, a lush Matisse still life, and even an authentic Japanese wood cut are collaged onto the complex multi-plate lithographs compositions, a witty play on trompe l’oeil. During the process of building his studio, Steinberg found inspiration in the discarded scrap wood, shingles and lumber, asking his carpenters to cut various blocks and shapes for use in the Table Top Reliefs he explored for two decades. One of those on view, titled Cabinet, was featured in his one-person show at the Whitney Museum in 1978. Steinberg also began to carve and whittle faux wood objects often embellishing them with colored drawing. Included in the array on display are books, a pencil box, hinged secret boxes, and decorative forms he would sometimes glue to larger montages.
See below for more information, full press release and selected works.
The Drawing Room presents “Saul Steinberg: On the Table”
Download Press Release
Download Catalog
Saul Steinberg: Brilliant Witty Inventive Cerebral is drawn from the museum’s collection of the artist’s works, a gift of The Saul Steinberg Foundation. The ten prints, four drawings, and one watercolor, created between 1965 and 1984, represent many of the playful and intriguing juxtapositions of subjects, styles, and inventive graphic means Steinberg is recognized for.
He is known worldwide for his drawings reproduced in The New Yorker magazine. From the 1940s until the late 1990s, he created over 80 covers and 1200 internal drawings for the magazine, many of which have since been repeatedly reprinted.
During a career that spanned seven decades, Steinberg also created collages, public murals, theater sets, and paintings and sculptures for galleries and exhibitions. However, he always returned to works on paper, blurring the lines between high art and low, and enchanting viewers with his seemingly endless visual vocabulary. Defining drawing as “a way of reasoning on paper,” he created a graphic vocabulary that includes collage, the juxtaposition of styles, letters and words, the line, and stamps. His remarkable oeuvre is replete with works that could be described as absurd, cerebral, witty, childlike, hilarious, insightful, and a painful critique of contemporary life.
In 1961, Saul Steinberg created an extraordinary sgraffito decoration in the atrium of the Palazzina Mayer in Milan, commissioned by Studio BBPR, which was overseeing the renovation of the building. It was Steinberg’s last mural commission. Damaged by humidity, it was destroyed in 1997 during the renovation.
Learn more about Saul Steinberg murals.
Ugo Mulas / Saul Steinberg’s Graffiti in Milan
February 14-April 14, 2024
Saul Steinberg gained fame for his humorous drawings in The New Yorker. However, his early life was marked by adversity. Facing antisemitism in Romania, he moved to Milan to study architecture in 1933 and also worked as a cartoonist until Mussolini’s antisemitic racial laws forced him to leave. After completing his architectural degree, he sought refuge in the Dominican Republic and began sending drawings to US periodicals. By the time he arrived in New York City in 1942, several of his drawings had already been published in The New Yorker. Steinberg became a US citizen and continued collaborating with The New Yorker while exhibiting his art worldwide. In 2021, the OSU Museum of Art received a significant donation of Steinberg’s work, showcased in the Line of Thought exhibition. Line of Thought explores the contrasts between the adversity Steinberg faced and the witty, satirical art he produced.
Line of Thought: The Work of Saul Steinberg
July 25–September 30, 2023
The exhibition celebrates the major donation of a large number of the artist’s works by The Saul Steinberg Foundation to the Braidense National Library.
On display are drawings as well as works made with stamps, wooden objects, metal plates, paper masks and small oil paintings, documenting Steinberg’s tireless ability to use the most diverse techniques and styles in a continuous process of invention.
A collaboration with the New York Public Library enriches the exhibition with a loan of fifteen portraits of writers, artists, friends and celebrities: from Sartre to Bernard Berenson, from Constantine Nivola to the Queen of England.
The exhibition also makes use of mostly unpublished texts by Steinberg, suggesting possible keys to interpreting the works and revealing to us, alongside a better-known Steinberg as an artist, a writer of “great and special qualities,” as his friend Aldo Buzzi wrote in admiration..
Saul Steinberg (1914–1999), an American artist with Romanian roots, was a man with a broad cultural and political outlook that is also reflected in his work, which deals with everyday human life with all its paradoxes. Steinberg’s drawings, masks, collages, and assemblages are known for their penetrating analysis of modern society. A stay in Milan, where he studied architecture and made his cartoon debut in the humour newspaper Bertoldo, was a pivotal time for Steinberg. Even then, he impressed with his ability to express a complex idea with an original point through playful yet witty visual shortcuts. Steinberg was a true example of homo ludens in Schiller’s sense. Through play, he developed his thinking and explored different levels of meaning, which he then elaborated on in different contexts.
Collection of Prints and Drawings
Curator: Adriana Šmejkalová
Expert collaboration and coordination: Anna Strnadlová
Exhibition is based on gifts to the Museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
On view through May 21, 2023, The Drawing Room is pleased to present the gallery’s third Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) exhibition in East Hampton, where the artist lived and worked for nearly half a century. Important ink and watercolor drawings completed during his extraordinary career at The New Yorker are central to the installation, which also highlights oil paintings, watercolors, prints and objects used on his Drawing Table reliefs. The focus is on Steinberg’s original approaches to conventional art mediums and conceptual practices such as Trompe L‘Oeil, assemblage and “found” objects.
Passionate about drawing as a child in Romania, Steinberg went on to architecture school in Milan, where he honed his skills and became intrigued by representation and, in particular, perspective as a phenomenon to explore in drawing. Included in the show are the rare trapezoidal drawings, a form of Trompe L’Oeil, on panels of wood. Drawing a cityscape or landscape as one experiences it from an angle rather than straight on, Steinberg explores how we choose to see the world.
Material of Interest: Paintings Drawings Prints Objects
April 1 – May 21, 2023
Running from March 31 through April 29, the show brings together works on paper and wood sculptures conveying the defiant humor, curiosity, and modernist attitude of an artist trying to make sense of the chaotic postwar period. This exhibition, which marks the artist’s first presentation in Seoul, will focus on his unique, worldly perspective, which was shaped by his experiences as an immigrant in America, a New Yorker, and an observant traveler both within and outside of the US.
Mar 31 – Apr 29, 2023
Pace Gallery – Seoul
Based on gifts to the Museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
The exhibition is the first to showcase some of the original masks, gifted to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg by The Saul Steinberg Foundation, together with the photographs Morath took between 1959 and 1962, which included other masks of diverse characters that became famous thanks to Morath’s photographs.
Based on gifts to the Museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
To mark Inge Morath’s 100th birthday this year, a double volume of two rarely shown photo series is being published in the FOTOHOF>EDITION. Both books take on topics in Inge Morath’s work that are not part of the mainstream of her work, but which have a very special quality. The title “Where I see color” brings together a selection of color works that Inge Morath has photographed repeatedly throughout her career. Under the title “Mask and Face” Inge Morath’s collaboration with Saul Steinberg is examined. The volume contains her famous photos of models wearing Saul Steinberg’s masks and also images of the original masks donated by the Saul Steinberg Foundation. The illustrated books, each published by the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg and the FOTOHOF Salzburg, accompany corresponding exhibitions. They contain texts by the former director of the Inge Morath Foundation John P. Jacob and contributions from the curators as well as a text by Inge Morath.
Exhibition: Mask and Face. Inge Morath and Saul Steinberg
Publication: Inge Morath & Saul Steinberg – Maske und Gesicht
Exhibition catalogue by Kerstin Stremmel, Andrea Lehner-Hagwood, and John P. Jacob. Salzburg: Museum der Moderne, 2023.
When he was almost twenty years old, Saul Steinberg moved to Milan to study architecture at the Politecnico: his Italian years (1933-1941) laid the foundations of his future vision, acting as the starting point, albeit an early one, of his unique ability to chart unexplored territories and to rely on humor to “conceal” the seriousness of certain topics, which he combined with an extraordinary graphic talent.
The Steinberg collection at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan, recently gifted by The Saul Steinberg Foundation, pays homage to Steinberg’s eight Milanese years and casts new light on an artist whose many-leveled output (from magazines to murals to stage sets) makes it difficult to situate him within the established canons of art history. Starting from the works now in the Brera collection, this books develops a narrative journey where the artist speaks for himself, through the texts of the conversations with his friend Aldo Buzzi—some of them published here for the first time. Steinberg’s life and work are seen up close, showing how his own history traversed his work to create a great autobiography.
Texts by James M. Bradburne, Francesca Pellicciari, Ilaria Bollati, Roberto Dulio.
Exhibition catalogue, edited by Francesca Pellicciari. Milan: Corraini Edizioni, 2022
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.
An exhibition of sculptures and works on paper from the 1950s through the 1980s.
The first large-scale exhibition in Japan, with 280 works, including posters, prints, and reproductions of key drawings.
Photographs by Mitsumasa Fujitsuka
A retrospective of 22 drawings, based on gifts to the museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
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 section of the gallery’s extensive holdings of the works of Steinberg, Maeght represented Steinberg in France from the early 1950s on.
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.
Read A Philosophical Game: an interview with Saul Steinberg interview on The Paris Review website.
The artist Saul Steinberg, who immigrated to the United States in 1942, was deeply preoccupied with identifying the essential threads of American life. For him, baseball was rich material. In 1954, he traveled with the Milwaukee Braves, taking them as subjects for his deft, sharp linework. The sketches from that trip are some of Steinberg’s most recognizable work, and were published in LIFE magazine in 1955.
In 1972, The Paris Review began an interview with Steinberg that was never published. The manuscript of some thirty-odd transcribed pages was catalogued by the Morgan Library archive staff and then left alone, until the Review recently rummaged through some folders and pulled it out.
Like Steinberg, this magazine has always had a soft spot for baseball. In 1958, our founding editor George Plimpton took to the pitcher’s mound to try out his fastball on the MLB’s All Stars, the first of his “participatory journalism” forays for Sports Illustrated. That experience would eventually become the book Out of My League. Though this transcript does not name an interviewer, we can guess with confidence that it’s Plimpton.
In his account of entering the field, Plimpton observed that it is “unbelievably vast, startlingly green after the dark of the tunnel. In the looming stands the stark symmetry of empty seats … after the reverberating confines of the corridors, the great arena seemed quiet and hollow, and you felt you’d have to talk very distinctly to be heard.” I can’t be certain that Saul Steinberg ever set foot on the field at Yankee Stadium from the players’ tunnel, but his drawings of stadia evoke the same effect: bright oases situated in the muted hodge-podge and discord of the city.
Here Steinberg lays out for Plimpton (or whomever) what he has gleaned about nationhood through watching sports. Their conversation makes its way from whether American baseball is doomed to whether the eye grows weary of symmetry.
Some notes on the text presented here: At one point, the tape cut out, and that spot has been indicated in brackets. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, but has otherwise been kept true to the original transcript.
Exhibition catalogue, edited by Anne Montfort-Tanguy and Valérie Loth. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2021. English edition, Saul Steinberg: Between the Lines. Munich: Prestel, 2022.
Edited by Marco Belpoliti. Publication accompanying the exhibition “Saul Steinberg: Milano New York,” 2021.
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.
The exhibition focuses on gifts to the Parrish Art Museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation, which reveal the rich idiom that the artist crafted in a twofold career, publishing art in The New Yorker and exhibiting works of all media internationally in galleries and museums, freely mingling high and low art.
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