Sections
1980
January, puts his beloved Chevrolet, purchased used as a country car in 1961, “out to pasture.” It has become too expensive to maintain, but he keeps it on the Amagansett property, rusting away.
February 17-25, trip to Guadeloupe with Sigrid; initially reluctant to visit a tourist site, but then finds it a “paradise.” They return in the winters of 1986 and 1989.
Stamp collecting becomes his “latest mania.” Collects only stamps to 1924, the year his childhood passion for stamps began; finds it “strange that all this was buried in me and now reawakens with alarming strength.”
October, “Saul Steinberg/Richard Lindner,” Galerie Maeght, Paris; catalogue introduction by Eugene Ionesco.
Around this time, meets New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, who becomes a close friend.
1981
Is again rereading James Joyce’s Ulysses.
February 1-25, in Los Angeles at the Gemini G.E.L. studio, where he learns to make an etching plate. Between 1981 and 1996, he will produce 12 etchings and a lithograph. The Gemini project represents the first time he works on printing plates rather than have his drawings photoengraved and issued as lithographs.
April, cancels a large exhibition, “Steinberg’s America,” being planned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. “Finally, after a year of doubts, I gave up on those gigantic museum retrospectives… and have returned to life as a free man, instead of being my own heir or even my own widow.”
July 1, death of Marcel Breuer, a friend since the 1940s.
July 23, death of his longtime dealer and friend, Betty Parsons.
September 29, tells Aldo Buzzi that he has “begun to speak German [which he had learned in high school], attempting to study it, dictionary, grammar…. But my real motive is the desire to speak Yiddish, which was the intimate language of my parents. Many words—but more than anything else, sounds, cries—come back to me with pleasure and surprise, like archaeological discoveries.”
October 26, ending thirty-year association with the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries, signs a contract with the Pace Gallery, headed by Arne Glimcher.
December, another trip to Israel. In Tel Aviv, visits Eugen Campus, an old friend from the Liceul Matei Basarab in Bucharest. (Campus stands to the right of ST in the 1932 graduation photo, above.) Campus, who has become a literary critic writing in French and Romanian, interviews ST on December 9 and 10; he publishes the transcripts in Romanian.
1982
April 3–May 1, first exhibition at the Pace Gallery, “Saul Steinberg: Still Life and Architecture.” Includes the new realistic watercolor still lifes, drawing table reliefs, drawings based on postcard images, and three-dimensional table sculptures. For the catalogue, Italo Calvino’s essay “The Pen in the First Person,” first published in French by the Galerie Maeght in 1977, is translated into English.
May, visits Jim Dine in Vermont. “We spoke with pleasure about professional matters, like schoolmates.”
November, “I’ve completely abandoned the violin, convinced that I have a tin ear. On the other hand I have an excellent nose, but no intelligent or systematic way to use it.”
November, “Steinberg: Mixed Media Works on Paper and Wood” opens at the Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago. Goes to Chicago for the opening. Then to Las Vegas to make drawings for an upcoming New Yorker feature on gambling—“three days of sheer hell.” Another interpretation of Las Vegas will appear on the September 7, 1992 New Yorker cover, based on 1980s drawings.
While in Chicago, has dinner with Saul Bellow, “a pleasure. He’s one of those rare people who thinks first before speaking and responds seriously. In other words, he takes his relationships with his friends seriously (even if his style is naturally witty and tongue-in-cheek).”
Meets novelist William Gaddis, partner of his friend and Long Island neighbor, Muriel Oxenberg Murphy. He admires Gaddis’s difficult writing: “he’s a realist who makes reality new, the very opposite of the usual realists.” Their friendship will deepen through the 1980s and 1990s.
Designs the label for Château Mouton Rothschild 1983. In a program going back to the 1940s, each year a famous artist is asked to design a label.
1983
May 3, New York City Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture.
July, spends three days at a Zen retreat in upstate New York. “Sat in the lotus position,” he tells Aldo Buzzi, “along with small group for 4-5 hours per day. 3 days of silence!—the best part.”
Around this time, begins to produce what he calls “ex-voto” drawings, with thoughts and memories from the past explained in handwritten captions.
Dal Vero, a limited edition book with text by John Hollander, published by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It contains drawings from life made in Amagansett, mostly of Sigrid, but some of his niece Daniela Roman, Aldo Buzzi, and other visitors.
1984
February 20, to Los Angeles to work on Gemini G.E.L. etchings project; February 25, to Chicago for a day, where he visits Saul Bellow; Bellow will visit him in New York in December.
March 10-17, in Martinique, Barbados, Miami, and Sanibel Island with Sigrid.
Late October-November 7, trip to Milan, Venice, Belgrade, Zurich, Paris.
Brings suit against Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement after the company appropriates View of the World from 9th Avenue in a promotional poster for the film Moscow on the Hudson.
1985
Mid-February, spends a week on Sanibel Island with Sigrid.
April 26, visits his friend Willem de Kooning in East Hampton. He sees the 81-year-old painter, in failing mental health, as “a sad one, because he no longer seems to be present (constant smile and whispery voice—he appears to be deaf, but he’s not). He was surrounded by 3-4 widows bickering about the future.”
August, begins correspondence and telephone conversations with Primo Levi. They exchange copies of their wartime Italian university diplomas, both of which are inscribed “di razza ebraica”—“of the Hebrew race.”
September 19, Italo Calvino dies.
October, his maternal Aunt Sali, the last relative of his parents’ generation, dies in Israel at ninety-one.
1986
Writing to Aldo Buzzi in January, he confesses that “For the last few years, the New Yorker has already been less important to me as a presence—although still a touching one, like tante Sali, the last aunt in my life until a few months ago. I’m exaggerating, perhaps to avoid frightening myself.”
February, begins a series of interviews with Adam Gopnik, intended for publication in The New York Review of Books. The interviews continue into 1991, but no publication materializes; excerpts are published in French in the magazine L’Egoïste, December 1992.
March, spends a week in Guadeloupe with Sigrid.
September, opening of solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght Lelong, Paris, and another at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.
September 25, he tells Buzzi: “I’m creating a library of books I’ve read. Books made out of wood, Russian books in Romanian, French books in Italian etc., a kind of autobiography….I should end up making at least fifty or so books.” These carved and painted books become the three-dimensional sculpture titled Library.
1987
January, S.I. Newhouse, new owner of The New Yorker, dismisses longtime editor William Shawn. In protest, ST withholds new work from the magazine.
January 31–February 7, spends a week on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.
February, Prudence Crowther contacts ST while compiling a volume of S.J. Perelman’s letters; she will become an important friend to both ST and Hedda Sterne.
April 24–May 6, brief trip to Paris, Brussels, and Bruges, with Sigrid. Such trips to Europe are becoming infrequent; most of his traveling is now to beach resorts in Florida and the Caribbean. “The winter has become my real enemy,” he tells Buzzi.
June, Judge Louis L. Stanton hands down a decision in favor of ST’s 1984 suit against Columbia Pictures for the illegal use of View of the World from 9th Avenue. ST savors the decision as “a true, primitive pleasure, the glorious dream of every humble individual persecuted by invincible forces.”
October 13–November 28, “Steinberg: Recent Work,” at the Pace Gallery, New York.
October 27, death of French artist Jean Hélion, a longtime friend, for whom he had made a record-label portrait as the frontispiece to a 1966 exhibition catalogue of Hélion’s work.
1988
A year of more deaths: Bernard Rudofsky (March 11) and Tino Nivola (May 3), two of his oldest friends in the US; his New Yorker friend and colleague Charles Addams (September 29). He delivers a eulogy at the Addams memorial in November. “His work was made of intelligent drawing, simple and clear, well-organized to convey the main idea. But I was more interested on reading the secondary ideas that were creeping always in Charlie’s drawings, [where] even the most familiar things became alarming.”
Also in the fall, death of Gertrude Einstein, who had handled the US business of his agent, Cesar Civita, in the 1940s and with whom he had remained in touch.
In April, he writes to Aldo Buzzi that he has begun making photocopied enlargements, up to a meter wide, from his collection of old gravure postcards of Russia and Europe. He studies the small, little-seen details and later reports: “Best are the pedestrian dogs, those left to their own devices, without masters, dogs heading who knows where with energy and precision, on business of their own.” He starts making drawings of dogs and considers turning them into a book. Some of the drawings are later published in the literary journal Grand Street, accompanied by the postcard blowups on which they were modeled.
From this point on, as he works and travels less, his letters to Buzzi grow in frequency. As many are written over the next eleven years as were written in the previous forty. “Italian has become my literary style, that is, my method for thinking in words, to be used in the letters I send you frequently and regularly. Sometimes the very paucity of my vocabulary forces a certain ingenuity on me.”
June 16–October 2, “Steinberg: 4. Internationale Triennale der Zeichnung,” Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg—a retrospective exhibition of nearly 90 drawings and reliefs, which he privately described as “a kind of personal payback for 1939.”
Summer, solo exhibition, Galerie Adrien Maeght, Paris; travels the following February–March to the Galerie Maeght, Barcelona.
July 1, receives honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London.
1989
January, spends ten days in Guadeloupe with Sigrid.
February, buys a video camcorder. Records domestic activities in Amagansett, meals with friends; also experiments with extreme close-up self-portraiture.
March, spends a week at the clinic in Überlingen for his regular weight-loss and exercise regimen.
April 15, writes to Buzzi that his childhood neighborhood in Bucharest was razed by Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, ending his plans for a visit. “So my plan to unburden myself of the past has already been resolved, in a drastic manner, and I have no desire to visit the imbecilic future.”
June 4, receives honorary doctorate from Yale University, along with Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Hawking, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Late June, the cat Papoose, for 15 years a beloved companion of ST and Sigrid, disappears and presumably dies. Later tells Sterne that of all the friends he has outlived, he misses his sister and Papoose most.
December 10-13, in Sarasota, Florida, to consider purchase of a house or apartment.
December, obsessively watches TV news as the regime of Ceausescu is violently overthrown. “I have what they call phantom pain, that is, strong and specific pain in the big toe of a leg amputated years before. It’s the pain of the Romanian patriot I was until the age of 8 or 10, when the anti-Semitism of the place made me renounce that fucking nation forever, remaining faithful only to the landscape, the smell, the house on Strada Palas.”
Now spends more and more time at his country house in Amagansett.