The World of Steinberg

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The artist who has had such a pervasive influence on the U.S. was born in Rumania, a fact he considers fortuitous. In 1914 it was "a corridor, a marginal place"—a palimpsest on which various neighbors and colonial powers (Russia, Hungary, Turkey) had left their traces. To this day, Steinberg confesses himself to be "culturally a born Levantine—my sort of country goes from the eastern outskirts of Milan all the way to Afghanistan."

He grew up in the Rumanian capital, Bucharest, then a city of about half a million people—the right size, neither cramped village nor crushing megalopolis. He spoke three tongues, Rumanian, French and "the secret language of my parents," Yiddish. "Childhood," he recalls, "was very strong. It stayed like a territory, like a nation. In my childhood the days were extremely long. I was high all the time without realizing it: extremely high on elementary things, like the luminosity of the day and the smell of everything — mud, earth, humidity; the delicious smells of cellars and mold; grocers' shops."

His father Moritz was a printer, bookbinder and boxmaker. The infant Saul had the run of his workshop, which was filled with embossed paper, stamps, colored cardboard, reproductions of "museum" madonnas (literally, chocolate-box art) and type blocks. These were his toys. "I had from the beginning the large wooden type used for posters; so if later I made, for instance, a drawing of a man holding up a question mark by the ball, it's not such a great invention—it was something known to me." And so letters presented themselves to Steinberg as things, and "I have always had a theory that things represent themselves. The nature of the question mark is questionable; you always wonder how come the upper part of the question mark is always passively following the ball, whereas the top half of an exclamation point is so rigid, so arrogant and egotistical."

In adolescence he felt rather a misfit, as gifted children do. He went to high school in Bucharest — a school photo shows him at twelve, the liquid gray eyes and budding prow of a nose beneath a military cap — but, as Stein berg remembers it, "my education, my reassurance, my comportment came out of reading literature. I found my real world, and my real friends, in books." At ten, "much too early," he read Maxim Gorky; by twelve, he was devouring Crime and Punishment; from France, there were heavy doses of Jules Verne, Emile Zola and Anatole France, "whose boulevardier quality was amazing to me."