1966

February 16, flies to Paris to prepare for his show at the Galerie Maeght. Stays first in a hotel, then in the vacant apartment of Inge Morath and Arthur Miller. A month later, Sigrid joins him for part of his stay.

March 25, opening of “Saul Steinberg” at the Galerie Maeght. In addition to hanging drawings, ST makes a wall-size installation of cut-out figures—brown paper, linen, canvas—representing art world viewers. The book Le Masque is published, with color reproductions of drawings, most from 1964-65, paper-bag masks, and some of Morath’s photos.

Installation shot of Steinberg’s 1966 exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Paris.

The Galerie Maeght exhibition is his first major show in Europe in a dozen years. He writes to Aimé Maeght: “As you know I avoided exhibitions for many years and I worked in a way that gave me privacy and I forgot the nuisance of daily art historians.”

March 28, goes through the Louvre with French art historian Pierre Schneider. His comments on works of art are published by Schneider as “Steinberg at the Louvre,” Art in America, July 1967. “Art is a sphinx,” ST says. “The beauty of the sphinx is that you yourself must do the interpreting….The mistake people make is to believe that the sphinx can give only one answer. Actually, it gives hundreds of answers, or maybe none at all. Interpretation probably does not give us the truth, but the act of interpretation saves us.”

Begins having rubber stamps made after his own designs instead of using store-bought stamps.

Two pages from Steinberg’s inventory of custom-made rubber stamps. 14 ½ x 23 each. The Morgan Library & Museum; Gift of The Saul Steinberg Foundation.

Now starts to spend more time in Amagansett. Develops a coterie of friends there, including Willem de Kooning.

Steinberg and Willem de Kooning at the home of Tino and Ruth Nivola, Amagansett, 1969.

Tino Nivola, Willem de Kooning, and Steinberg in front of a cast of Rodin’s Burgers of Calais on the grounds of the estate of art collector Joseph Hirshhorn, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1968. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. — Tino Nivola, Willem de Kooning, and Steinberg in front of a cast of Rodin’s *Burgers of Calais* on the grounds of the estate of art collector Joseph Hirshhorn, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1968. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

September, awarded medal, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, by the French government.

November, spends the day at the home of Inge Morath and Arthur Miller in Roxbury, Connecticut, along with John Updike and visiting Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Arthur Miller, Steinberg, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Photograph by Inge Morath © The Inge Morath Foundation.

Steinberg with Arthur Miller and John Updike. Photograph by Inge Morath © The Inge Morath Foundation.

November 29-December 24, “Saul Steinberg: Recent Work,” exhibition at the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries, New York; his aversion to exhibitions makes this the first New York show since 1952.