The World of Steinberg

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His is one of the most remarkable oeuvres in applied art today: the product of an intelligence so finely drawn, insinuating and (at times) sadistic, so refracted in its maze of linguistic mirrors as to suggest no parallels. The best of Steinberg presents you with a master—but a master of what?

The short answer is: of writing.

Every artist finds his scale—the size of gesture proper to the image and medium he uses. "The scale of the drawing," Steinberg points out, "is given to you by the instrument you use," and pen drawings, being governed by the radius of the hand, cannot be very large. "The nib has an elasticity meant for writing, and that is why I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing. But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can't be reasoned in the mind. It can only be reasoned on paper." Steinberg's drawing, in all its varieties, is a form of thought.

Ogni dipintore dipinge se, a Renaissance maxim ran: every painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake.

Steinberg's work is always signaling that there are more interesting matters in art than "authenticity" in the expressionist sense. It looks beyond the man to the mask and finds there an extraordinary variety of personae, by turns bland, urbane, comic, ridiculous and distinctly threatening. The first mask of all is style itself. "I want the minimum of performance in my work," says Steinberg, a virtuoso if ever there was one. "Performance bores me. What interests me is the invention. I like to make a parody of bravura. You have to think of a lot of my work as some sort of parody of talent. Of course, parody is not an attack; you cannot parody anything you can't love. But I wish to create a fiction of skill."

Steinberg can fill a sheet with figures, each of them drawn in a different style—cubist, pointillist, child art, hatched shading, mock sculptural, hairy scribble, Leger boilerplate, art deco—and display a wide, ironic complicity with art history while making no final commitment to a "way" of drawing. The drawing works because he so obviously possesses each style. It is imitation without flattery. As a dandy, Steinberg owns all the hats in his wardrobe. A still life like Belgian Air Mail 1971, is not a "cubist-type" drawing, a thing done in homage to Braque and Picasso. It is rather a drawing about cubism, seen as one stylistic mannerism among others in the art-historical supermarket.

In short, it is an act of criticism. His "postcards"—melancholy vistas of flatland and horizon, with blotty little figures gazing at some manifestation of Nature or Culture, a pyramid or a rubber stamp masquerading as the moon—are philosophical landscapes. They are parodies of the picturesque.