Saul Steinberg, as a figure in American art, is poised to evaporate. The heat of a markedly debased graphic experience in our daily lives is ever rising, to such a degree that an often out of print New Yorker cartoonist, his past grandeur harder and harder to discern, cannot withstand it. I care for Steinberg a great deal, but have only a vague awareness of what his art means to other people, if, in fact, it can be said to mean anything at all today.
This is different from, say, Gluyas Williams, where a segment of our population still appreciates the skill involved in his cartooning (most are unfamiliar with Williams, but one glance will bring them up to speed, as Williams' drawing ability is more shrill in asserting itself than Steinberg's), or a Charles Addams, where the specific comedic tone continues to speak to a certain kind of reader. A specificity or worked out theory of admiration for Steinberg, from the rare few who even bother to profess admiration towards the work, is neglected, because not much is said beyond occasional measured and brief praise. Where is Steinberg in contemporary illustration, art or even culture itself? A stroll through visual America today shows little appetite for Steinberg's thought through line, and his status as a public, albeit graphic, intellectual seems deeply foreign to our times. The mere notion of him: a compressed entity of an idea, a thinking artist in the metropolis, whose mental expressions were tangled, dense and then excreted with a signature perfection. The Chicago Imagists touch on him around the edges, but there are far more eyes on their cleaned up (and pumped up) form of Steinbergism in our artistic life today than orthodox (or even progressive) Steinbergism enjoys. A Karl Wirsum exhibit lives on social media a bit, is collected to an extent, and enjoys a sort of "underdog made good" status. It is, to me, empty calories, easy enjoyment for just about anyone who encounters it (and easy enjoyment, these days, is what people want to fight for and what they want to reappraise the most, with an intensity more appropriate for an ascendant subversive religion than for easy on the eyes art). It fits our times. Steinberg doesn’t connect with people this way, of course, because his work does not comfortably translate to digital media, it cannot be consumed at a glance, and does not traffic in the fake density that Peter Saul or The Imagists (with the potential exceptions of Gladys Nilsson and Suellen Rocca) conjure up to surround their hit-maker Billboard singles. Steinberg’s atonal albums are not what people are listening to or asking for, and I sense that they are forgetting they ever did.
Even defining what discipline Steinberg belongs to betrays a basic inability to understand him. “He is not 'a cartoonist' in the sense that Daumier was a cartoonist” John Russel wrote in 1978 for The New York Times on the occasion of Steinberg’s Whitney retrospective (an achievement few cartoonists can claim, so perhaps best to snuff out the association altogether). “He does not wear out his eyes with work that others consider menial.” The massive level of craft, and yes, "work" involved in Steinberg’s project was, 50 years ago, indiscernible to our elite publication of record. Little changed over the years. Upon Steinberg's death in 1999, The Times headline read "Epic Doodler Dies at 84." Doodling implies a lack of focus, a lack of mind, a lack of thought. In his own words, if one bothered to listen, Steinberg would counter such a reduction, because it is antithetical to everything his work is “When I get up, I work," he stated in a 1967 interview:
It's a necessity to work for a few hours. And drawing is my way of explaining to myself what goes on in my mind. I start with the idea of a drawing. I have the appetite to make a drawing. I have everything looking at me. Paper, ink, pencils. I start sometimes drawing a hand holding a pen and making a drawing. This gives me some time to think of what this pen is going to do. I also want, in these moments, to lose the responsibility of the drawing. It's not 'I' who makes this drawing, it's that hand that I drew that makes it. I blame it on it. But this way I have a certain freedom, a certain lack of responsibility. I can always blame it on the hand that I drew. Of course it's mine, it's a game. But I want to make sure that what I am doing comes more spontaneously, more out of my own needs and not out of my own desire, volition, plan and plot.
This is not absent-minded doodling, this is an acknowledgement of organization and purpose, with a simultaneous desire for reform of both. Ultimately, though, Steinberg is unable to erase his directed thought. Mindless mark making, and mindlessness, is not the point. Instead, "the point" is an expression of "the art of living" (the title for Steinberg's 1949 album of drawings), which, for Steinberg, can never be without focus. His thinking is, in one arrangement of drawings, natural and spontaneous, while in another cluster of images, we find the smallest hint, a sensation (or maybe, at times, a pronounced articulation) of the effort it takes to think in this way. He draws the seesaw between one kind of thought (free, with qualifiers) and another (tending towards purposeful). Thought, "what goes on in my mind," is the key. "Doodles" or an absence of "work" misrepresent Steinbergism, as they portray Steinberg engaged in a narrow aesthetic project, one simply concerned with a perfect line. His line may be one of the most appealing to ever see print, but where Peter Arno ends, Steinberg begins, and walks on a considerable distance, more than most others managed or even attempted.
A recent reprint of his long out of print 1945 book All In Line, published in November by New York Review Books, will only exacerbate this confusion over what Steinberg represents. Here, we see Steinberg's in a phase where his thought through drawing has not reached full maturity. We encounter him in what the above cliches embrace him as: a master of line. It is, to be clear, a strong book and one whose availability we should applaud. However, if one is to do Steinberg justice, we must contrast All In Line with his later, more mature expression. A re-appraisal of Steinberg via All In Line alone would be a disservice: so little of Steinberg is available, any re-publication of his work will be many readers first encounter with his art, so a discussion of what this book lacks becomes pertinent.
I must first take issue with New York Review Book's description of the work, in press materials, as a "memoir-via-drawing of [Steinberg's] escape from fascist Europe and on his transition into life as an American." Further down in the copy, this is restated: 'This book, All In Line, is a memoir-via-drawing of this key time in Steinberg’s life, when he began to find his line and his way as an American." Even at this point in his career, where Steinberg had not yet achieved the intellectual depth that would find rich definition in works like The Labyrinth, The Inspector and The Passport, he was never this simplistic. It's a pity that this type of description appears at all. To say "he began to find his line and his way as an American" is almost shocking, as Steinberg's project would (correctly) deny any such tidiness. His thoughts were not contained to a solution about what "his way as an American" could be: they are instead the explosion of a mind unable to reconcile such a notion.
All In Line begins with a cartoon that explains what the book is about. A woman is turning coat hangers into wire sculptures of faces: what a line can do in the world and what that line can do on paper, and what sensations a modified line creates for a viewer. In 1945, Steinberg still makes this point with some allegiance to physical reality, to what is actually possible. Our statement of line has not taken off into thought that surpasses mere cleverness, and cleverness rooted in the possible, the actual.
However, most comics cannot even approach this kind of polite parlor trick. A cartoon where men turn their heads to read newspaper headlines (the newspapers themselves smartly abstract dots and lines) is an undeniably successful little drawing. It looks electric, you wouldn't change a thing, it all "functions" as it should. Beyond that, I can't say much about it, or think much more than "good work on that one, very good taste in your line weight, very sophisticated use of caricature. Good choices, light joke, nice cartoon." You can faintly praise most comics at the peak of our pantheon in the same way, nicely made and quietly pleasing.
There are drawings in this book where ones first thought is, "Here is an early indication of the real Steinberg that was to come." A second thought, however, reveals them less as harbingers of wildness than what they are really: lines designed to please, drained of obstruction, even the scent of it. We see assemblages of human forms drawing each other, or musicians united in performance. These are witty compositions, but saying anything more about them would be dishonest. To return to The Imagists: a fellow artist once defined why their work left him cold and Ray Johnson remained impactful: The Imagists and Johnson both understand seductive image making, but Johnson had an emotional project as the engine beneath his graphics. There was something he wanted to withhold and something he wanted to give, and the engine was manipulated according to these desires. These early compositions from Steinberg lack that engine, entirely. I can't do anything with them once I receive them.
It would be unfair to review All in Line without spending the appropriate amount of time focusing on the military themed cartoons, which are the books most noteworthy selections. Cartoonist Liana Finck, in her introduction to this new edition, writes that these cartoons show Steinberg drifting away from the superficial and into what might be called Steinbergism. "This metamorphosis is the secret drama of Steinberg’s first book, All in Line," says Finck. "Half visual wit and half observational drawings of military life in different US-occupied countries that he made while serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the collection also serves as a record of his transformation from gag cartoonist to, well, Saul Steinberg — the winking philosopher, the artist of the metaphysical."
The military themed work is the most inspired in these pages, but I find no promise of an implied future project in them. They are sensitive, to the extent that we can accept a cartoon to be sensitive, but not by the standard we judge sensitivity in other art, where one is typically more exacting. In one drawing, unlucky soldiers who did not receive a letter from loved ones back home stare at us blankly. In the next drawing, a soldier who did receive a letter wears a broad smile. Another cartoon shows men in a foreign land laying in bed awkwardly among both domestic and war making personal effects. Like his earlier cartoon of a woman changing a wire hanger into a face, Steinberg uses line to say something (almost) new in what line is capable of, but not something new in what thought is capable of. In his later work, Steinberg is unconcerned with clever reportage, which is all these early military cartoons are. They do clever reportage quite well, but at such a polite volume that it is hard to take them seriously as anything but genteel George Price fair, with a click more of social relevance (though just a click).
In a brief capsule biography, the publishers say that Steinberg "was, as the title of one of his books has it, the 'inspector,' seeing through every false front, every pretense. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, Saul Steinberg peeled back the carefully wrought masks of twentieth-century civilization." We are asked to see his military drawings in this way, as satire, a "peeling back of false fronts": a drawing of a heavily decorated fascist officer, the violence of his face in comedic contrast to his medals, which every smart reader knows he doesn't deserve. Genuinely original political thought in cartoon form is a mirage in a desert, though we talk as if it were an actual ocean. There are few stronger ways to defuse potent radical sentiment than to make art that is reductive and that is cliché (though critical response that over valorizes the cliché is often more destructive).
These kind of insights represent a glass ceiling of sorts, received notions from other media that cartooning all too often applauds itself for achieving (or, quite often, the applause is for an attempt at achievement). Steinberg's later art emerges as one of the most powerful bodies of work in the 20th century because it abandons a prosaic observation of the natural world and its norms. Instead, it explodes into something that cannot be accomplished in any other art form than the one Steinberg works in, and it is Steinberg himself who works to transform cartooning to these purposes. The falseness of war makers: I've heard that discussed before and discussed more forcefully than Steinberg cares to. What Steinberg says post-All In Line, I've never heard before or since. And none of us have, in part because we can barely even perceive it in Steinberg himself. We look to cartooning in a language that anticipates its utterances to be literary and satire based. Steinberg, later on, was engaged in something else entirely. All In Line offers no preview of this.
Drawing from All In Line
But what, exactly, was to come? Let's depart All In Line with the above drawing of a gag involving a cliff, and then consider the sequence of drawings that opens Steinberg's 1965 book The Inspector, which I regard as his best work. A cliff makes an appearance here as well. Scrolling through this sequence slowly will help us in facing Steinberg head on.
Is this sequence about the icons a culture uses to explain itself to itself? Is it about the power of symbols and language? Is it about the passage of time, one season to the next? These questions might work for All In Line, but are entirely inappropriate here. Finck notes that Steinberg referred to himself as "a writer who draws," but he is not a writer in the mold of one we have read before. He is a writer with a new voice that literature cannot recreate, and he draws his writing not as redundancy but as synthesis. We tend to approach Steinberg how we approach so much of "prestige" cartooning, as "attempts" at literature with competent drawing. We see a formation of a society in these early pages of The Inspector and we grasp at received ideas such as: this drawing represents Steinberg's "transition into life as an American." What a dead and useless way to think of Steinberg, all based in borrowed literary cliches. Let's look to the visual instead. Jasper Johns offers a far more precise lens to get at Steinberg. Johns takes iconic imagery and then "does something," less commentary than activity, moving around symbols with his own hands, not so much an exploration of context than a hyper reanimation. This, too, fails us with Steinberg but gets us closer. What a drawing of Cowboys, Indians and Business Men mean to Steinberg do not end in their political/historical context. They are visual and have a visual pleasure, and have an additional visual charge when multiplied, and placed next to another icon, and then further abstracted, and then morphed into simple letters, then into decorative letters, and on and on and on. All these things have their agreed upon meaning but they also possess a current that can be sparked and re-sparked and subverted and de-amplified and muted, and these effects can then be re-fed into their "cultural" meaning. Does Steinberg propose, in these pages, a system of thought? Or are the pages themselves the pulsating thoughts, alive and actual?
I've heard a story told that when Steinberg had a studio near Union Square, he would walk through Greenwich Village and look at some of the underground comics for sale in the neighberhod. In the above sequence, one image is perhaps the icon of an "underground style," maybe spurred on by an encounter with a R. Crumb or Kim Deitch drawing, and it is incorporated into the larger flow of everything else Steinberg's eye, mind and heart encountered. There is affection for such a kind of drawing, a digestion of it, an amplification, an artistic lesson learned, and then a true emotion grafted onto the figure's face that comes from Steinberg's own unique self. To answer our previous paragraph's question, I see this image as a living breathing act of mind, which becomes even more alive as I (and anyone else who looks at it) receives it. Now I have a drawing I can do something with.
Above are some of my favorite drawings from Steinberg's most famous book, The Passport, from 1954. The last image, of two women walking, is quite powerful. Steinberg drew movement throughout his career, but here we have motion that rivals animation. Herriman, in the creative heights of Krazy Kat, would depict physical gestures with a patience that did not care to recreate a human tic or gesticulation, but instead worked to define an entirely new sensation, one that is not abstract, that communicates, but is entirely new (so new that the sensation would often become alien). Few other cartoonists could do this, as a confused notion of naturalism is a yoke that seemingly cannot be shed by many. Steinberg and Herriman stand apart, they could free themselves. I focus on the movement of these legs, at the suggestion of arms, and then I am confronted with those two faces. This drawing gives us a reality more resonant than our own, but without the whimsy and smoke and mirrors that dominate manneristic surrealism. Above that resonance, a gash of feeling from our pairs gaze towards us. The clever compositions of All In Line are now gone, and we are left with a congealed glyph of gesture and behavior and thought, phrased by Steinberg, alone.
In a drawing class I've taught at Parsons School of Design, I'll offer the following set of images, showing Milton Glaser's 1961 cover design for 1984 alongside Kaitlin Kall's 2020 version of the same book.
I'll then show the same books in thumbnail form, because it is through thumbnails for online marketplaces that most book sales are made these days.
The more prized image in today's visual culture is, of course, Kall's. As a thumbnail, we read it as "Orwell's 1984" in one second, instead of the three seconds we might spend on Glaser's, though Glaser's image is unique, rivaling the creativity of the work it covers. This new attitude towards graphics does not end in a virtual marketplace. Its influence extends to the visual life of our physical world, with graphic expression disciplined towards tighter and more cruel margins of clinical simplicity. Steinberg, in 2025, might be best suited to contend with these conditions on the ground via All In Line-era drawings than he might with an image like this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one
Comics has not built its highways on images such as these. Instead, comics has shown a preference towards circular and insular express lanes, of what can be reproduced and understood with as much ease as possible, anticipating our thumbnail heavy present day by many decades, perhaps even greasing the pathway towards it. Steinberg defies this as cartooning's destiny. He states a refutation of imposed restraint, declaring that comics, if they are to be anything that resembles a form unto itself, and a form that can move us in a meaningful way as human beings, must go another way. This other way is useful to us in our current degraded and compromised visual landscape, useful in countering how that landscape reduces us. This moment in time poses a denial to the right of thought and the right to reflection, a negation spread across our economic, personal, and cultural life. Steinberg emerges, if we look at him now, as a voice from the past, reclaiming that right with passion. We find a clear articulation of the actual nature of comics, a nature against this reduction and this denial rather than in league with it, when we look at the true Steinberg, the Steinberg beyond All In Line.
The post Saul Steinberg, yesterday and today appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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