The World of Steinberg

"The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meager, in terms of self-entertainment. In the end, working is good because it is the last refuge of the man who wants to be amused. Not everything that amused me in the past amuses me so much any more. " —Saul Steinberg

The artist is 64 this year: a solid, wiry man, rabbinically delicate in gesture and as immobile in repose as a large tabby cat. For decades he has been regarded as the best cartoonist in America. Publishing mainly in The New Yorker—for which, to date, he has done 56 cover designs and innumerable drawings—Steinberg has erected standards of precision and graphic intelligence that had not existed in American illustration before him. "After nearly 40 years of looking at his work," remarks the magazine's editor, William Shawn, "I am still dazzled and astounded by it. His playfulness and elegance are of a sublime order."

If he is the doyen of cartoonists, Saul Steinberg is also to growing numbers of his colleagues a "serious" artist of the first rank. "In linking art to the modern consciousness," declares Art Critic Harold Rosenberg, "no artist is more relevant than Steinberg. That he remains an art-world outsider is a problem that critical thinking in art must compel itself to confront." That showdown is about to begin. This week an exhibition of 258 drawings, watercolors, paintings and assemblages by Steinberg opens at New York City's Whitney Museum, accompanied by a book (Saul Steinberg; Knopf; $10.95 softcover) with critical appraisal of the artist by Rosenberg.

Steinberg is a loner, a cosmopolitan Jewish exile, a refugee, a man of masks, languages and doctored identities, through whom the world's multiplicity is refracted as by a prism. In America, he is both outsider and insider: only he could have dreamed up the poster that summarizes the Manhattanite's provincial view of America: Ninth and Tenth avenues wide in the foreground, a strip of Hudson River, a smaller strip of New Jersey, and in the background a few scattered cities—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago—with Japan and China in the distance.

The focus does not quite work the other way. Most Americans may never have heard of Steinberg, but the influence of that clear, epigrammatic line and dry wit has been felt throughout American design and illustration for almost two generations. Moreover, his motifs are almost subliminally recognizable: the wry face whose nose turns into a detachable line, the worried cats, the Ruritanian flourishes and curlicues, the apocalyptic scenes of street riots and urban breakdown, the setting of the bizarre commonplaces of American life in a cosmopolitan matrix. Such details of Steinberg's work constitute a signature and have subtly altered America for everyone who has seen them.