The World of Steinberg

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The next year. 1943, Steinberg enlisted in the Navy and became a U.S. citizen. He was at once assigned to Intelligence and posted successively to Ceylon, to Calcutta and then, masquerading as a weather observer with the 14th Air Force (his knowledge of meteorology being slight), to Kunming in China. His task was to act as a go-between with friendly Chinese guerrillas. Since he spoke little English and less Chinese, he drew pictures for them. It was a small but poignant metaphor of once r ...... and future Sino-American incomprehension.

When the war was over, Steinberg returned to his favorite occupations: drawing and traveling, the one nourishing the other. He did not work en route, which is one reason why Steinberg's drawings of places all look equally exotic: their abnormality is a refraction of memory, whether of Paris, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Tashkent, Palermo or Samarkand (whose telephone directory, stolen by him in 1956 and listing 100 subscribers, is one of Steinberg's more cherished souvenirs). Provoked by a "geographical snobbism," he and his wife, the artist Hedda Sterne—they were married in 1944 and fondly separated without divorcing 16 years later—became epicures of travel.

"Things always happen to him," Sterne remembers. "At one point he was doing parades. We went to Europe and to Istanbul and there was a parade that had not taken place in 500 years, and it took place the day we arrived." Steinberg likes to look back on those journeys. "I loved to arrive in a new place and face the new situations, like one newly born who sees life for the first time, when it still has the air of fiction. It lasts one day." The late '40s and '50s were perhaps the last time in Europe when travel was travel, unfiltered and not homogenized by mass tourism. It must have appealed to Steinberg as a form of controlled exile—the mask of expatriation.

In the meantime, his books and albums accumulated: All in Line, his wartime drawings, in 1945: The Passport in 1954; The Labyrinth in 1960. As they did so, his reputation steadily grew, and he began to enter that choppy strait, much roiled by the currents of American aesthetic puritanism, where the "illustrator" or "cartoonist" finds his reputation crossing to that of "artist."

That Steinberg made that passage, few of his colleagues doubt. But he is one of the very few American graphic artists to have done so; not even the big popular illustrators of earlier years, N.C. Wyeth or Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell or Charles Dana Gibson, can quite bear that claim. Esquire magazine's design director, Milton Glaser, sees Steinberg as a cartoonist who "by some extraordinary series of shifts became a major artist ... It is very hard to truthfully understand what happened to him on the way, not only in terms of self-transformation but in terms of how the audience saw that transformation — so that he could keep working as a literary and social critic through drawing, and still be a unique American painter. He is the only one that I know who has been able to achieve both at once."