Saul Steinberg

Famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades, he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.

 

Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel yet integrated careers. Such many-leveled art, however, resists conventional critical categories. “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me,” he said. 1 He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination. 

Source: Sheila Schwartz / The Saul Steinberg Foundation.

 

Selected works from the 1970s period (like Three Landscapes, Album, or Airmail shown here) present Saul Steinberg’s wonderfully unique, worldly perspective, shaped by his experiences as an immigrant, New Yorker, and discerning traveler both within and outside of the US.

 


 

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS WITH STEINBERG WORKS (SELECTED)

Akron Art Museum, Ohio
Albright-Knox Art Museum, Buffalo, New York

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York  

The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York

Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, France

Fondation Folon, La Hulpe, Belgium
Fondation Alberto Giacometti, Paris, France
Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, France

Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de Vence, France

Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC 
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

The Jewish Museum, New York

Library of Congress, Washington, DC
The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
Morgan Library & Museum, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
Portland Art Museum, Maine
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

 


 

BOOKS ABOUT STEINBERG  (Selected)

2021   Jessica R. Feldman, Saul Steinberg’s Literary Journeys: Nabokov, Joyce, and Others. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 

2016   Will Norman. Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 

2014   Joel Smith, introduction. Saul Steinberg: 100th Anniversary Exhibition. The Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill

2013   Melissa Renn, Andreas Prinzing, Iain Topliss, et al. Saul Steinberg: The Americans. Cologne: Museum Ludwig 

2012   Bair, Deidre. Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday  

2009   Saul Steinberg. L'Écriture visuelle. Strasbourg: Musée Tomi Ungerer 

2006   Joel Smith, with an introduction by Charles Simic. Saul Steinberg: Illuminations. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 

2005   Iain Topliss, The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 

2005   Joel Smith, with an introduction by Ian Frazier. Steinberg at The New Yorker. New York: Harry N. Abrams