I Do, I Have, I Am, 1971. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society
Exhibition Preview: Saul Steinberg: Illuminations is running at Dulwich Picture Gallery until February 15 2009.
Saul Steinberg originally studied as an architect in Milan, before turning to cartoons and illustration and making his name as a contributor to The New Yorker magazine.
The exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery covers the whole range of his work, from high art to low, from murals to magazines, from caricature to cartography.
The retrospective features more than a hundred drawings, collages and sculptural assemblages by the artist and the exhibition is the first full-scale review of his career, which ventured well beyond magazines into art galleries and museums.
Over the course of six decades he created more than 1,200 covers and editorial illustrations for The New Yorker magazine. He also employed his talents as a propagandist, a fabric and card designer, a muralist, a fashion and advertising artist, a stage designer and was the tireless creator of image-jammed books.
Words can quite often be as important as the images. Steinberg liked words; the look and feel of them, as well as their meaning. His ‘I Do, I Have, I Am’ (1971) a New Yorker cover, has comic and aesthetic appeal but touches on a very serious moral issue of the worthlessness of material possessions.
Woman in Tub, 1949. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society
‘I Do’ is a firework display of dazzling light; ‘I Am’ has the solidity of earth and roots; on the other hand ‘I Have’ is a greying tumbledown washing-line of rags and broken woodwork.
He often seems to have started off with a comic doodle that takes on a life of its own and develops into something which has considerable depth and relevance as social commentary of the 20th century.
Caricatures, as well as symbols and satire, are a regular occurrence in his work. Steinberg once said, “I deal with mediocrity and clichés; I am not only involved with the sublime.”
As a result of his perspective as an immigrant, his portrayal of America was both affectionate and sardonic. This vantage point can be seen in Twenty Americans (1975), another New Yorker cover image, where Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty are joined in a line-up with a gangster, a riot cop and a lost astronaut.
Another picture of a Lexington and Wiltshire Avenue junction is presented as a colourful and tropical but bizarre circus where people seem like ants in a strange fantasy world, presumably New York as viewed by an outsider.
Twenty Americans 1975. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society
In the past, Dulwich Picture Gallery has focused on British artists and illustrators between Beardsley and Heath Robinson, by way of Rackham, Beatrix Potter and EH Shepard.
Saul Steinberg: Illuminations marks a significant change in direction, linking that series to the series of American shows that the gallery has lined up over the next few years.
Sadly, Steinberg’s name is now little known in Britain, except to established readers of The New Yorker, by whom he is still revered. This exhibition should help change that.
Admission is £9 for adults, £8 for seniors and £4 for concessions. Free entry is given to children and Friends.
