What Is He?

By lending its premises to a full-scale retrospective of the drawings and assemblages of Saul Steinberg, the Whitney Museum is trying to settle once and for all a question that has bothered Steinberg’s army of fans for years: What is he? a humorist? a cartoonist? an illustrator? Even Steinberg himself admits his work is hard to define. “I don’t quite belong in the art, cartoon, or magazine world,” he said once, “so that the art world doesn’t know how to classify me.” The Whitney, however, has made up its mind: Steinberg is above all an artist, however he chooses to express himself and in whatever medium. At a time when the formerly rigid distinctions between drawing and painting, photography and painting, drawing and photography, documentary and fiction, have quite broken down, it doesn’t really matter how Steinberg is classified—and one comes away from this exhibition convinced that whatever the nature of his creation, it is a major one. He emerges as a loner who hides behind a mask and yet speaks to, and for, everybody; an alien and an outsider who sees things that are hidden from most of us.

His vocabulary is uniquely his own, and has become as instantly recognizable as Daumier’s lawyers or Grosz’s bloated capitalists, though it is far more varied: cats, crocodiles, high-heeled ladies with helmet-like coiffures; personified geometrical shapes, alphabets, numbers, each leading its own life; animated household equipment; officiallooking documents; faces made from cut-out brown paper bags. But while the meanings of Daumier and Grosz are clear, Steinberg’s are anything but. Before Dada and Surrealism, his art would have been unthinkable—but Steinberg is not out to thumb his nose at the bourgeoisie like Hulsenbeck or to sneer at democracy like John Heart- field, though he is aware of human frailty. His world is concrete yet irrational; though obviously a projection of his inner self, it is unsusceptible to Freudian analysis. It is anything but abstract and admits of no formal strictures, “To be involved in aesthetics only,” he says—“that, for me, is worthless. I want to say something.”

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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By lending its premises to a full-scale retrospective of the drawings and assemblages of Saul Steinberg, the Whitney Museum is trying to settle once and for all a question that has bothered Steinberg’s army of fans for years: What is he? a humorist? a cartoonist? an illustrator? Even Steinberg himself admits his work is hard to define. “I don’t quite belong in the art, cartoon, or magazine world,” he said once, “so that the art world doesn’t know how to classify me.” The Whitney, however, has made up its mind: Steinberg is above all an artist, however he chooses to express himself and in whatever medium. At a time when the formerly rigid distinctions between drawing and painting, photography and painting, drawing and photography, documentary and fiction, have quite broken down, it doesn’t really matter how Steinberg is classified—and one comes away from this exhibition convinced that whatever the nature of his creation, it is a major one. He emerges as a loner who hides behind a mask and yet speaks to, and for, everybody; an alien and an outsider who sees things that are hidden from most of us.

His vocabulary is uniquely his own, and has become as instantly recognizable as Daumier’s lawyers or Grosz’s bloated capitalists, though it is far more varied: cats, crocodiles, high-heeled ladies with helmet-like coiffures; personified geometrical shapes, alphabets, numbers, each leading its own life; animated household equipment; officiallooking documents; faces made from cut-out brown paper bags. But while the meanings of Daumier and Grosz are clear, Steinberg’s are anything but. Before Dada and Surrealism, his art would have been unthinkable—but Steinberg is not out to thumb his nose at the bourgeoisie like Hulsenbeck or to sneer at democracy like John Heart- field, though he is aware of human frailty. His world is concrete yet irrational; though obviously a projection of his inner self, it is unsusceptible to Freudian analysis. It is anything but abstract and admits of no formal strictures, “To be involved in aesthetics only,” he says—“that, for me, is worthless. I want to say something.”