Human Flower Project

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Steinberg: Flowering Question Mark

Saul Steinberg was born June 15, 1914 in Bucharest, Romania.

Double Still Life, 1979

Saul Steinberg

Photo: Adam Baumgold Gallery

Some lines stay with you. Hollyhock towers by the stucco house where we lived in Smithville, Texas. The slope—fine for sledding—of Perry’s Hill.  A newspaper obituary from 1999.

How grateful we are to find in full Sarah Boxer’s remembrance of the artist Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1915—May 12, 1999). Boxer’s article appeared in the New York Times May 13, eight years ago.

Crisp and amusing, the article does her subject justice. Boxer supplies the oddly zig-zag story of Steinberg’s life, coiling back throughout her article to the unmistakable drawings. “His visual language was a thin, sharp line that was always remarking on its own existence. ‘My line wants to remind constantly that it’s made of ink,’ Steinberg said. ‘I appeal to the complicity of my reader who will transform this line into meaning by using our common background of culture, history, poetry.’”

Complicity is all! “‘The doodle is the brooding of the hand.’”

Natural History, 1961

Saul Steinberg

Alice Lacht Zich Een Weblog

Too cerebral and “haughty” for the cartoonists,  too humorous and trenchant for the art world, he could never be folded over and stuffed in any envelope. Boxer observed that Steinberg “was particularly attached to the question mark, which he drew hovering overhead, embraced in bunches or carried like a briefcase. He traced his obsession with punctuation and letters to his father’s printing business in Romania, in which condolences like ‘Crushed by Sorrow’ were printed in big wooden type.”

Drawing by Saul Steinberg

Image: Digestivo Cultural

Speaking of punctuation, her obituary quotes generously from the artist himself and a number of admirers. Art critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Steinberg,  “His drawings are, in a sense, anthologies of art history. There are Cubist and rococo characters. Expressionist conversations, Renaissance objects. Gothic words and Pointillist emotions.” Still life, too. “There is a kind of primitivism in all this, an animism, for everything in Steinberg—even the most inanimate object or abstract thought—is teeming with feeling, aspiration, ambition and portents. Numbers are erotic, words are predatory or faltering, a coiffure may be cerebral, or a boot didactic. Steinberg sees experience itself as a parody of experience, with ‘style’ the only reliable clue to its mysterious gyrations.”