Saul Steinberg: Up Close. The Steinberg Collection at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan, October 5-November 26, 2022

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The exhibition also makes use of mostly unpublished texts by Steinberg, suggesting possible keys to interpreting the works and revealing to us, alongside a better-known Steinberg as an artist, a writer of “great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..