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.
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 he is recognized for.
Saul Steinberg (b. Romania 1914, d. New York 1999) 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.
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.
In 1961, Saul Steinberg created an extraordinary graffiti decoration of the atrium of the Palazzina Mayer in Milan, commissioned by Studio BBPR, which was overseeing the renovation of the building. It was an important work that followed other similar projects the great artist had undertaken in the United States and Europe over the previous fifteen years.
Magic Ledger: The Drawings of Saul Steinberg, at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, January 27-June 2, 2024
Based on gifts to the Museum from The Saul Steinberg Foundation, the exhibition presents drawings that combine Steinberg’s fantastic imagination and shrewd observation.
Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University Bloomington
Presented by Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Saul Steinberg, a Romanian American artist, gained fame for his humorous illustrations in The New Yorker. However, his life was marked by adversity. Facing antisemitism in Romania, his family moved to Milan in 1933 where he worked briefly as an illustrator until Mussolini’s antisemitic ideas forced him to leave. After completing his architectural degree, he sought refuge in the Dominican Republic and began sending illustrations to US periodicals. By the time he arrived in New York City in 1942, his drawings were already a regular feature 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.
Saul Steinberg: Lines That Transform the Real World, at the ddd gallery in Kyoto, Japan, August 9 – October 15, 2023.
Design by Kijuro Yahagi
We are pleased to announce that our first major solo exhibition in Japan, held at ginza graphic gallery (ggg) from December 10 to March 12, 2021, will travel to Kyoto ddd Gallery.
The exhibition will feature a total of approximately 170 works, including posters donated by The Saul Steinberg Foundation, lithographs, etchings, and other valuable works , as well as reproductions of representative works, mainly drawings.
The works of Steinberg displayed at kyoto ddd gallery are mapped in 3D Cube, according to each perspective. Please choose any category that interests you, and enjoy Steinberg’s unique approach to his drawings, which are organized by keywords.
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Saul Steinberg: Between Line and Text, at the National Gallery Prague, Czech Republic, May 24 – August 10, 2023.
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.
Saul Steinberg: Material of Interest– Drawings, Paintings, Objects, Prints and Plates, at The Drawing Room, East Hampton, New York, April 1- May 21, 2023
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.
