Word: steinberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the war was over, Steinberg returned to his favorite occupations: drawing and traveling, the one nourishing the other. He did not work en route, which is one reason why Steinberg's drawings of places all look equally exotic: their abnormality is a refraction of memory, whether of Paris, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Tashkent, Palermo or Samarkand (whose telephone directory, stolen by him in 1956 and listing 100 subscribers, is one of Steinberg's more cherished souvenirs). Provoked by a "geographical snobbism," he and his wife, the artist Hedda Sterne?they were married in 1944 and fondly separated without divorcing...
...Things always happen to him," Sterne remembers. "At one point he was doing parades. We went to Europe and to Istanbul and there was a parade that had not taken place in 500 years, and it took place the day we arrived." Steinberg likes to look back on those journeys. "I loved to arrive in a new place and face the new situations, like one newly born who sees life for the first time, when it still has the air of fiction. It lasts one day." The late '40s and '50s were perhaps the last time in Europe when travel...
...That Steinberg made that passage, few of his colleagues doubt. But he is one of the very few American graphic artists to have done so; not even the big popular illustrators of earlier years, N.C. Wyeth or Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell or Charles Dana Gibson, can quite bear that claim. Esquire magazine's design director, Milton Glaser, sees Steinberg as a cartoonist who "by some extraordinary series of shifts became a major artist ... It is very hard to truthfully understand what happened to him on the way, not only in terms of self-transformation but in terms...
...Steinberg, on the other hand, dismisses (or refuses to pin down) the idea of such a transition. What marks the difference between his work and that of the easel painter, in his view, has always been more a question of medium than of aesthetic fullness. "I think of myself as being a professional. My strength comes out of doing work which is liked for itself, and is successful by itself, even though it is not always perfectly accessible. I have never depended on art historians or the benedictions of museums and critics. That came later. Besides, I like work...
That solitude is threatened by the Whitney exhibition, and Steinberg views the glare of attention with a carefully nurtured indifference. "I would like," he says opaquely, "to retrospect the retrospective." But the crowds that arrive to inspect the Inspector will, one may predict, come to laugh and stay to think; for this show sets before us one of the most intriguing and complex intellects in art today...