Sections
1970
February, trip to Italy, Israel, and Africa. In Kenya, runs into Saul Bellow in Nairobi and they travel together to Murchison Falls and later Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Visits Lalibela with architecture school friend Sandro Angelini. Also goes to Ghana and Dakar. From Kampala, Uganda, sends Aldo Buzzi a postcard of Kampala Road with the ironic message, “Behold Africa.”
Postcard sent to Aldo Buzzi, February 12, 1970, from Kampala, Uganda. The ironic message on the reverse reads: “Behold Africa.”May 15, writes to Buzzi, asking for a selection of European airmail envelopes with “the red and green borders.” These will be used in, or as models for, his growing series of airmail still lifes.
Contributes a rubber-stamp lithograph, The General, to the Peace Portfolio I, a portfolio of lithographs by 12 artists sold to raise money in support of peace candidates. Also designs poster for Referendum ’70, a national organization seeking to elect anti-war candidates.
Begins to paint large oils, including The Tree, one of the largest at 6 ½ feet long. Five of these paintings are exhibited at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, November-January 1971.
Six Drawing Tables, a portfolio of lithographs published by Abrams Original Editions, interprets his drawing table in 6 different guises, some of them including postcard reproductions of other artists’ works: Airmail Still Life, Music and China, Matisse Postcard, Braque Postcard, Millet, and Mixed Media.
1971
Mid-January, to Paris. Late in the month, books himself into the Bircher-Benner clinic in Zurich, where he undergoes a five-day fasting regimen. “A beautiful prison,” he calls it. Will periodically return to European clinics for multi-day fasts, exercise routines, and general physical recuperation.
Later in February, returns to New York and then, with Sigrid, travels to Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Caribbean island of St. Martin; also visits Arizona on this trip. Is increasingly annoyed at the way beautiful places have turned into tourist meccas, “already full of horrible people.”
June, to Paris for the opening of his solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght.
October, goes to the opening of the Maeght exhibition at the gallery’s Zurich branch; meets Nabokov there.
1972
January, visits the Buchinger clinic in Überlingen, on the German side of Lake Constance, where he quits smoking.
February to mid-March, in Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Returns to New York via Paris on March 14. Although he sees beautiful game reserves and the “real classical places,” he comes back “like Candide ready for the garden—enough of these absurd trips in a world ruined by the damned race of tourists.”
July, elected member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Munich.
Designs a tapestry for Modern Masters Tapestries, Inc., issued in an edition of 20.
1973
Beginning of his friendship with novelist Kurt Vonnegut. An interviewer later asks Vonnegut, “You ever meet anybody who was really smart?” Vonnegut answers: “Only one: Saul Steinberg…I could ask Saul anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer. He growled a perfect answer.”
Regrows his mustache.
February 7-March 3, “Steinberg: New Work,” at the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries, New York. The first exhibition of his Drawing Table Reliefs—carved and painted trompe-l’oeil wood objects mounted on panels, representing the implements of his trade, the things around his studio, the food on his plate, and even reiterations of his own work, past and present. He tells Aldo Buzzi: “…the new things—the tables—were well displayed and I’m still pleased with them. These are new things for me and bring me closer to the rather animal world of painters. In working on them there’s only pleasure, the mind is at rest, it’s the happiness of a horse…. This new passion for wood—what fragrance!—it makes me work and even dream that I’m working.”
May 31, purchases a duplex at 103 East 75th St., with room for a studio. Spends the summer arranging his move from Washington Square Village—“I feel it’s important to get out of the Village, more than anything else.” Retains his studio on Union Square until the lease expires in 1975, but gradually shifts New York operations to 75th St.
September, has plans drawn up for a studio addition to the Amagansett house. Construction continues into early 1974.
October, to Paris for the opening of his show at the Galerie Maeght. Like the Parsons-Janis show in February, the focus is on the new Drawing Table Reliefs.
Publication of The Inspector, his sixth compilation of drawings.
December 21-February 10, 1974, “Steinberg at the Smithsonian: The Metamorphoses of an Emblem,” exhibition at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC. Exhibited are the drawings on Smithsonian letterhead produced during his tenure as artist-in-residence in 1967.
1974
May, awarded gold medal for Eminence in Graphic Art by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Philip Johnson, making the presentation, says: “Our 20th-century insistence on careful categories, our academic enthusiasm for dichotomy and definitions, betrays us. We cannot pigeon-hole Saul Steinberg. Let us call him ‘artist’—a visual artist who cannot fit definitions because he himself does not depend on words or definitions.”
August, Aldo Buzzi visits him in Amagansett. They have the first series of “conversations” which, transcribed and edited by Buzzi, will be published posthumously as Reflections and Shadows. ST talks about his early years in Bucharest and Milan, his impressions of America, and his art.
November, spends ten days in the Überlingen clinic, where he loses more than ten pounds. Visits his ailing sister Lica in Paris.
November 14-December 31, “Saul Steinberg: Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Collagen, Gemälde, Reliefs,” at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. From Cologne, the show travels to Württemberg, Hannover, Graz, and Vienna (through August 1975). The organizers had wanted a full retrospective, but ST is adamant that the show focus on works of the last ten years.
1975
May, his sister Lica spends the month with him in Amagansett, where they talk like old friends and he remembers things he thought he had forgotten.
July 14, Lica dies in Paris from complications of a lung operation. After the funeral, he writes to Buzzi that he cried real tears for the first time since he was fourteen.
1976
March 29, his most famous New Yorker cover, View of the World from 9th Avenue, hits the newsstands. He gives the magazine permission to issue it as a poster; 25,000 are printed over the next two years. Imitations are produced worldwide, as are copies. “The most notorious picture I have done, the most famous, the one that has been plagiarized and abused so often.” Henceforth, his art will often be exclusively (mis)identified with View of the World.
May, awarded AIA Medal by the American Institute of Architects for his “meticulous draftsmanship, inspired imagination, and satirical gifts [which] have shown us our buildings and ourselves from a new perspective.”
June, receives an honorary doctorate from Harvard University, inscribed to “reverendis Inspectoribus Saul Steinberg.”
June 27, departs for Paris; also visits Milan and Bergamo, returning to New York on July 10.
November 11, his close friend Alexander Calder dies. At the memorial service held in December at the Whitney Museum, he fondly recalls: “One evening…Sandy said something I couldn’t hear. He was seated and I was standing. I bent nearer and then…sat on his knee to hear him better. I thought afterwards that I hadn’t sat on a man’s knee in sixty years, and that this was the only man so happy and so innocent as to give me and everybody this simple and loving familiarity.”
Calder is the first of several friends who will die over the next years, adding to ST’s increasing tendency to depression.
November 17, opening of his solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries, New York.
1977
February, spends two weeks in Paris.
April 28, leaves for Paris en route to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where he and his niece, Daniela Roman, will visit a cousin who emigrated to Israel.
May 4, returns to Paris to prepare his exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, which opens on May 16. The show travels through December to the Galerie Maeght, Zurich, and the Galería Trece, Barcelona. Unlike previous Maeght exhibitions, which focused on recent work, this show is retrospective, with works dating as early as 1943. Italo Calvino writes the catalogue introduction, which ST likes “because largely made up of quotations: Galileo, Michelangelo etc….The main thing is that I’m not praised directly.”
Retrospectives, however, continue to make him anxious. The Maeght show “has upset me and made me conscious—self conscious—as though I were not working for myself anymore but for a government, a ministry.”
The Whitney Museum has approached him about a retrospective. “The thought disturbs me. I’m afraid that these damned flatterers and confounded old men will win. But they’re all younger than I—more and more I find myself to be the most venerable.”
June, receives honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art.
July 2, death of Vladimir Nabokov, whom ST had known since the early 1960s.
By July, despite his anxieties, he has agreed to a Whitney Museum retrospective and spends the next few months preparing art and catalogue material. He is distressed about the catalogue, which is becoming “an Art Book, which I’ve been trying to avoid for many years, a heavy, expensive, vulgar book, which is the stuff on which museums feed.” But “I’m resigned to the worst (because the clandestine nature of my work is the opposite of this big public affair).”
Autumn, second series of “conversations” with Aldo Buzzi in Amagansett that will eventually be published as Reflections and Shadows.
1978
April 14-July 9, retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art; travels to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de Vence. Harold Rosenberg writes the introduction to the catalogue.
At the time of the retrospective, ST conceives a photomontage of his adult and child selves. Evelyn Hofer photographs him in the Amagansett house, holding the hand of a blown-up photo of six-year-old Saul.
April 16, his old friend, artist Richard Lindner dies. Writes a tribute that is read at the January 1979 meeting of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Lindner’s death dampens his pleasure at the success of the Whitney exhibition.
May 3, elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
June 1, receives honorary doctorate from New York University.
July 11, Harold Rosenberg, one of his closest friends, dies.
August, automobile trip with Sigrid to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming; is increasingly disturbed by the crowds visiting natural wonders and by changes in small-town America. “Monument Valley, a formerly marvelous place worth seeing twice, but this was my third time, and it was too much…. In general things have deteriorated out there [in the West], with crowding and a decadence of restaurants and motels…. Cheyenne looks like Times Square.”
August 21, furniture designer Charles Eames dies. ST had been friends with Charles and his wife-design partner Ray since the 1940s.
December 25, “Uncles,” the first of his autobiographical portfolios, is published in The New Yorker. “Cousins” appears on May 28, 1979. They may have been inspired by reading the transcripts of his 1974 and 1977 conversations with Aldo Buzzi. Describing such drawings to Buzzi, he says: “I recognize…parts of myself: an ear, an eye. Archaeology!” The drawings of family members are “variants and parodies of myself, as relatives usually are.”
1979
March 2, leaves for Paris, then Barcelona and Nice. Attends opening of the Whitney retrospective at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence; two days later, goes to Madrid with his niece, Daniela. Returns to New York, March 14.
April 25, speaks at the memorial for Harold Rosenberg at the New York Public Library.
August, writes to Aldo Buzzi about the drawings he is doing based on chamber of commerce postcards and his own travels: “I’m completely finished with my view of Milan…and other so-called views of Athens, Papantla, etc., which strike me as the equivalent of short stories.”
October 10, in Chicago to speak at Harold Rosenberg’s memorial, University of Chicago. Then goes on to Tucson to visit a cousin, Phil Steinberg, an electronics repairman, whom he has never met. The visit gave him “an idea of what I’d be like without education, without success…[it] left me with an exquisite taste of an authentic person.”
October 17, death of New Yorker humorist S.J. Perelman, a friend since the 1940s. ST later said that when he arrived in America in 1942, Perelman’s comic writing gave him an invaluable shortcut to the clichés of American culture.
Also in October, his New York City apartment is robbed. The thief “made off with all my gold cufflinks and the [gold] medallions from various Academies….I’m sorry about some of the cufflinks….”
2nd edition of The Passport is published, with some drawings substituted.
November, writes to Aldo Buzzi: “These days my drawings are being bought by rich people—as investments. What a responsibility! Good fortune or bad luck for widows and orphans.”
December, resumes playing the violin, which he had played as a child. His violin is a gift from Alexander Schneider. “Playing it loudly, out in the country, with no neighbors nearby, is a pleasure.” Over the next two years, takes lessons, plays with a trio and, informally, with Schneider.
Around this time, begins drawing portraits from life of Sigrid and visitors to Amagansett as well as realistic watercolor still lifes. Some are included in the 1983 publication Dal Vero.
