The World of Steinberg

(5 of 8)

The biggest impression was made by an autobiographical sketch of Gorky's. It "was an excellent metaphor for how I felt. One must consider the idea of the artist as orphan, an orphaned prodigy, whose parents find him some where—the bulrushes, perhaps. To pretend to be an orphan, alone, is a form of narcissism. I suppose all children have this disgusting form of self-pity; but more so the artist, who is Robinson Crusoe. He must invent his stories, his pleasures; he succeeds in reconstructing a parody of civilization from scratch. He makes himself by education, by survival, by constantly paying attention to himself, but also by creating a world around himself that hadn't existed before. The corollary of this is the desire not to end childhood. Which in turn makes for a desire not to stop growing."

He graduated from high school and enrolled as a philosophy student at the University of Bucharest. The following year, 1933, Steinberg embarked on the first of his many expatriations—to Italy, where he settled in Milan to study architecture at the Polytechnic. "It was clear to me that I could never become an architect, because of the horror of dealing with people that architecture involves. I knew it from the beginning, but I went on with it. One learned elementary things. How to sharpen a pencil. The fact was that most of my colleagues went to architecture the way I went, as a decoy or an alibi."

In fact, the influence went a good deal deeper than that, for Steinberg's later drawings would display an exceedingly refined sense of architectural convention, of the parodies of style learned by precision rendering: the sharp, etched shadows and intricately reasoned-out facades of his dream skyscrapers on the American horizon could only have been drawn by an architectural dropout gazing with irony on his past. "You learn all the cliches of your time. My time was late cubism, via Bauhaus; our clouds came straight out of Arp, complete with a hole in the middle; even our trees were influenced by the mania for the kidney shape."

In Milan, his career as a cartoonist got under way. "I succeeded right away; I published my first drawing, and the magazine paid me for it." Living off his cartoons for Bertoldo, a satirical fortnightly, Steinberg in his early 20s could afford a reasonable facsimile of the boulevardier life he had read about as a child in Anatole France: buying new neckties in the Galleria, lounging in the Ristorante Biffi. "I had the rare, beautiful pleasure of making money out of something I enjoyed doing and then spending as soon as I made it. As I lunched, I knew that this was my cat—I mean my drawing of a cat—that I was consuming; followed by a tree, the moon and so forth."