Cover Story: Saul Steinberg’s Centenary

Saul Steinberg’s troupe of stylized American characters—Santa Claus, Witch, Abe Lincoln, Thanksgiving Turkey, Drum Majorette, Cowboy, Lady Liberty, Uncle Sam, and others—assumed various roles in his comical-philosophical tableaux. In the late nineteen-sixties, he added to the group a blank-eyed cartoon mouse who brought to mind Disney’s Mickey and, perhaps, Ignatz, the brick-tossing rat from the “Krazy Kat” comic strip. “Mickey Mouse is frightening and Donald Duck is cruel, but what can you do? They’re cute,” Steinberg told an interviewer, in 1972.

In the drawing on this week’s cover, the music-paper background suggests the medium that gave the cute and scary youth of the nineteen-sixties their spurious authority. Skeletal and clench-jawed, Steinberg’s mouse seems to enact, simultaneously, violence, terror, art, and cartoon slapstick. In the later years of his life, the terror-mouse became a more common feature of Steinberg’s work, as his initially optimistic vision of America changed.

2014 is Steinberg’s centenary year. He was born in Bucharest in 1914, just as history was beginning its twentieth-century plunge. He published his first drawing in The New Yorker in 1941, nine months before he arrived in America, and he continued to submit and publish his work here until 1999, the year he died.

This fall’s New Yorker Festival will offer a panel discussion and viewing of Steinberg’s works, on October 12th, at the Morgan Library. “Saul Steinberg: 100th Anniversary Exhibition,” a presentation of drawings, sculptures, and photographs, will be on view at the Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery from September 11th through October 18th. “Saul Steinberg: Drawings of Architecture and Public Space” will appear at the Center for Architecture, A.I.A., November 10th through December 6th. The Sculpture Center, in Long Island City, will hold a group exhibition that includes five Steinberg drawings examining real and illusory space. Selected works donated to the Art Institute of Chicago will be on display there through October 12th. Additional shows will happen in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Barcelona; full details are available at The Saul Steinberg Foundation’s Web site.