The World of Steinberg

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The elusive self keeps peeping through, like the rabbit he once drew peering out of a man's eyes. Even Steinberg's cats have large meditative noses and Austro-Hungarian whiskers. The tone of his work is comic, but one's guffaw, once provoked, is checked by Steinberg's precision about how the self may be allowed to materialize. The artist seeks complicity with the audience, but he does it (so to speak) from the driver's seat.

There are simple drawings in Steinberg's oeuvre, but very few simple situations. He delights in apparently simple ones: the conflict between a hero and a dragon, for instance. But then we find the fight is rigged. The hero and the monster are actually partners; they have a deal; without a dragon, what can a hero do? One drawing makes this point with particular elegance: a new kind of adversary, a man with a cannon, is drawing a bead on the dragon. The hero is about to save his enemy by attacking the gunman from the rear. In another drawing, the monster has become an enormous furry rabbit. "The rabbit is as armored as the dragon," Steinberg points out. "It has the impenetrable armor of fat fluff. It is invincibly sweet. There are, you see, two sorts of danger. One is being hit by a giant boulder: the direct assault of the world. The other is being overcome by a mountain of fluff, or molasses. The softness is as dreadful as the hardness."

One does not expect social optimism from a man of Steinberg's background, and one does not get it. The U.S. that rises from some of his drawings in the 1970s is an edgy, nasty place, a theater of disaster populated by grotesques. The white paper takes on the look of Manhattan's 42nd Street in summer, bombed out by midday glare. Whores, bums, flint-faced Irish cops, frazzled black pimps, rats, crocodiles up from some imagined sewer, sirens emitting Technicolor laser blasts of sound, bulbous cars belching their exhaust smoke, an S and M homunculus encased in glittering leather with the motto VIVAN LAS CADENAS (long live chains) worked in studs on its back—this, in Steinberg's ironic eye, is the American dream street (our equivalent of the Di Chirico piazza, repository of all unspoken fantasy) brought up to date from its origin in the Wild West movie.

One of his most cutting inventions—or adaptations—is the urban guerrilla seen as Mickey Mouse. In Six Terrorists, 1971, a file of them strut across the page, in aviator jackets and miniskirts, equipped with flick knife and carbine: young bourgeois clones of affectless violence, Black Shirt, S.L.A. or Brigata Rossa. It is an uncannily predictive drawing. "The Mickey Mouse face," Steinberg remarks, "is sexless, neither black nor white, without character or age: for me it represents the junk-food people, the spoilt young ones who have all their experiences, inferior as they are, handed to them on a plate." An encyclopedic disgust pervades these drawings. But it is not a common emotion in Steinberg's work. In general, he is a paragon of detachment: he is, as the title of one of his books announces, the Inspector, imperturbable, restless and nosy.