Covering 14,000 Miles

Back from Alaska … Covered 14,000 miles like a good Babbit, saw the whole country including part of Mexico. The first order of business was to get his financial affairs in order so he could take the cross-country trip he had promised himself. While he was away, much had happened that required his attention, starting with his annual first-of-the-year assessment of finances (postponed because of the Russian trip), which he had to complete before he could decide how much time he could afford to devote to travel and his own work. A check had come in from the Swiss magazine Du for drawings it had used in its January edition, so that was a start. His annual $10,000 stipend from Hallmark Cards was safely deposited, as were several other routine payments and retainers. Added to all these, his lawyer, Alexander Lindey, had settled two infringement claims, against Time and the Grey Advertising Agency, which together brought close to $3,000.

Steinberg made it clear to anyone for whom he worked, whether advertising agency, business firm, or publication, that he would not sell the ownership, only the rights to use his drawings, and only in the manner Lindey specified in his meticulous contracts. With the exceptions of Hallmark and the various fabric companies, which insisted on holding the copyrights, everyone accepted this stipulation. Every year, for example, The New Yorker sent him a contract made “in consideration of the sum of one dollar,” in which the magazine agreed to receive credit as the original publisher of the drawings while Steinberg retained the rights to resell the work as he saw fit.

The two infringement cases Lindey settled were about contract violation. In the first, Time used several drawings originally commissioned to illustrate a single article for multiple and different uses besides the one originally contracted for; in the second, Grey did the same, but in a far more egregious manner.

Grey had commissioned Steinberg to make several drawings for its client, the television division of Emerson Electronics. The Grey campaign, unveiled under the general title of “Wherever you look … there’s Emerson,” was aimed at women who were housebound and therefore most likely to be watching television at any hour of the day. Steinberg’s first drawing was a striking departure from the realism of previous campaigns aimed at women, all of which routinely depicted a human model smilingly doing household chores while wearing a crisp dress, starched apron, and high heels. His drawing was of a deliberately noncontroversial caricature woman, middle-aged and sexless, having breakfast in bed while watching television. The set she watched was a popular Emerson model with a man’s face on the screen, rolling his eyes discreetly upward and not looking directly at her. It was completely without innuendo and eminently successful in every print medium, but it was Grey’s use of the second ad that inspired Steinberg’s lawsuit.

In that one, Steinberg drew a naked woman seated in a bathtub, similar to his drawing of the Paris bathtub. Instead of reclining in full frontal nudity, however, the cartoon woman is seen from behind, as she scrubs her back with a long-handled brush and watches a television set placed at the foot of her tub. On the set is a photograph of a real man with a monocle and a slightly lascivious expression on his face, holding up a book he does not read because he is too busy glancing sideways at the woman. Like the “Woman in Bed,” the “Lady in the Bathtub” was a huge success in whatever print medium Grey placed it, which Steinberg’s contract permitted. However, the contract did not permit the agency to place it, without his knowledge or permission, on forty-five billboards across the country, where it drew complaints of obscenity from various civil and religious groups. Lindey settled the case for $1,500 and Grey’s agreement not to use Steinberg’s future work in any way other than what was specified in his contracts.

Steinberg’s work for Grey was typical of the commercial work he did throughout the 1950s, particularly in the last half of the decade, when he was one of the artists at the forefront of the creative revolution in advertising that dominated the 1960s. His contribution to the genre’s evolution was with innovative drawings that departed from the expected and took the viewer into the realm of the surprising and unexpected. Although a Steinberg ad might have seemed at first glance to be a drawing chosen mainly for its shock value, in reality it was the lead-in for a carefully orchestrated plot to make the viewer read the copy that went along with it. “Operation Steinberg,” as the Swiss critic Manuel Gasser dubbed his commercial work, was replete with “advanced nonsense.” There was no smiling housewife pushing a vacuum cleaner or loading a washing machine; instead, his whimsical cartoon people stopped just short of being grotesque when he juxtaposed them with real objects (the lady scrubbing her back while watching an Emerson being just one example). Many of the ads Steinberg drew appeared in The New Yorker, and most of them for one time only, so that each week brought something new for viewers to chuckle over. When House and Garden advertised itself as a publication “for the House Proud,” one week’s ad showed a little man smelling a vase of flowers on a table and the next week’s featured a woman climbing a ladder propped against a tree to pick an olive for her martini.

Steinberg’s ads for Simplicity, the largest manufacturer of home sewing patterns, illustrate just how integral his nonsense drawings were to the sensible copy that came below them. A headline beneath his elaborately curlicued and swirled caricatures of women proclaimed “And she did it all by herself.” The copy that followed explained what the product could do, but the product was not pictorially represented. In the ads he designed for Comptometer, the largest manufacturer of adding machines, he showed a man lying on a chaise longue in a garden, fanning himself on a hot summer day while an umbrella shades him and a pitcher of cold drinks rests on the table beside him. “It isn’t the heat,” the caption reads, as the copy explains how the man can afford to relax because his Comptometer is doing the work for him. If the picture is puzzling, the text explains it, so that, as Manuel Gasser noted, “in the final analysis, the picture is the riddle and the copy is the answer.”

In one ad for Noilly Prat vermouth’s highly successful “Don’t Stir Without Noilly Prat,” Steinberg has an elegant thin hand stirring circles and squiggles that rise above a photo of the bottle in a crescendo of imaginary writing. Only the vermouth bottle beneath the slogan is literal; everything else is conceptual. For Schweppes, he created a comedic double take when he drew a man and a woman in a living room whose furnishings resemble one of his interiors in The New World. They hold glasses as they stand, each with one leg hitched onto a low bar rail—but there is no bar between them, just the rail.

Perhaps the most wildly imaginative print ads were those Steinberg created for Lewin-Mathes, the St. Louis firm that manufactured copper pipes and tubing under the general heading “We Teach Copper New Skills.” In one, a man’s head very much like Steinberg’s is turned into an angel who sports a halo made of copper tubing; in another, circular rows of copper pipe look like the repetitive writing exercises grade school children were taught when they learned the Palmer Penmanship method.

The agencies that commissioned Steinberg’s ads generally sold them first to The New Yorker, where sophisticated readers lapped them up as if they were part of the magazine’s visual content rather than a commercial adjunct. The art editors were well aware of the enthusiastic response to Steinberg’s commercial work, and Jim Geraghty’s impassioned letter of several years earlier in which he had expressed frustration that the magazine and Steinberg could not reach an agreement where the magazine’s “demands coincide with your aspirations” still rang true. With the exception of the two Russian spreads, most of Steinberg’s artistic contributions to the magazine were still “spots” or “spot-pluses,” the filler drawings editors pulled from the files to round off a page or fill a column. Ever since Steinberg had completed a last-minute assignment to make the portrait drawing that accompanied a profile of Le Corbusier, William Shawn and the art editors had fallen into the habit of sending assignments that had strict deadlines, because they knew they could count on him to meet them; but when it came to printing the kind of work he wanted to do, such as his spreads of daily life in the segregated South, it seemed as if he and his patria had not yet found the common pathway that would allow his aspirations and their demands to go forward in harmony.

All Steinberg’s ads were print, with only one exception, a television commercial for Jell-O. In the days of black-and-white transmission, his line drawing of a woman has her shuffling along on a treadmill while a frazzled female voice-over intones, “Busy, busy, busy.” The woman runs faster and faster as images bombard her: of a demanding child, a ticking clock, a man whose needs she is obviously not meeting. A black scrawl swirls across her and becomes deeper and darker until the screen fades to black while a sonorous male voice tells the viewer that there’s no need to be embarrassed or ashamed about not making dessert on a busy day now that Jell-O has a new line of instant puddings. The scene cuts from Steinberg’s obliterated cartoon woman to the midsection of a real woman, who pours milk into a bowl of powdered pudding and whips it with an egg beater so easily that even “the children can make it themselves.”

Steinberg’s contributions to advertising were not only easily recognizable but also ubiquitous. His work was so well known that Hallmark featured him as one of its famous artists in ads touting contributors to their “Hall of Fame” collection, a campaign that featured photographs of artists such as Norman Rockwell and Winston Churchill. Described as a “comic draughtsman of outstanding genius,” Steinberg stands out in a sea of dark suits, looking stiff and uncomfortable in a beige deerstalker hat and matching tweed jacket, in a pose reminiscent of something between an English country gentleman and Sherlock Holmes.

Unquestionably he had arrived commercially, and the boxes and boxes of business correspondence he saved throughout his life attest to his commercial popularity. Requests literally poured in daily, with offers of complete freedom for him to create whatever he wanted, if only he would agree to create it. Clearly he ignored Marcel Duchamps’s advice either to answer or to burn letters as soon as he received them, for often the initial requests led to a series of increasingly impassioned others in which the writers begged Steinberg please to respond, if not by mail, then by telephone or telegram. In most instances he was given the option of naming his fee, choosing his delivery date, and setting any other condition he wished to impose. His talents and abilities placed him in a fortunate situation: because he could deliver the goods, so to speak, he had the luxury of being selective, taking only those commissions that were intellectually appealing or so financially rewarding that he could not afford to refuse them.

At the same time as the demand for his commercial work rose, so too did the demand for his creative drawings. Only The New Yorker remained picky and selective, while galleries throughout the United States were eager to exhibit his work. He planned to visit several of them on his upcoming auto trip. International collectors were lining up to buy, and European offers for exhibitions and projects were also coming in a steady stream. All in all, much of the financial pressure that had contributed to his flight from New York the year before was fast becoming a thing of his past. He was on the verge of becoming a very wealthy man who had the luxury of doing exactly what he wanted to do.

MOST OF STEINBERG’S FRIENDS DID NOT understand his desire to leave New York so soon again, especially for a rambling drive across the United States, which, as far as they were concerned, had no real purpose. He and Hedda were ready to go by the end of May but hung around until June because they wanted to see Aldo Buzzi as he passed through New York on his way to Mexico to work on a film with Alberto Lattuada. Steinberg promised Buzzi to try to time his driving for a visit to the Mexican location before the film wrapped. By the nineteenth, he and Hedda were finally ready to go, and he made the last entry in his datebook until their return on August 16: “Left by car.”

For Hedda, driving across the country made real most of the dream she had envisioned of what their marriage should be; although they were not working together in a room, they were at least alone together in a car. For her, the trip was “the beauty of an eventless life…quiet working and real understanding.” At the time of her marriage, Hedda had believed that happiness came from being with Saul in “some room, any room…forgetting about the other for half an hour and then coming back and seeing you and remembering reality: that you are right there and are going to be there and were there before—and it’s just too wonderful.” She thought they were like-minded, that Saul hated “lies and over-statements and sentimentality (not sentiment)” as much as she did. Hedda was sure that an “understanding between [two] people is possible, and real friendship and complete relationship and mutual confidence.” Now, a decade later, she wanted to persuade Saul that such a relationship could exist between a man and a woman, even if they happened to be married, and even if the man held what she gently accused him of having: “a rather bad attitude about women.”

In the car, with just the two of them driving for long days, it was much the same as being alone in a room together. They talked constantly, each saying whatever came to mind without fear of offending the other. They had no set itinerary, and everything about the trip was spontaneous and subject to change at a moment’s notice. As they drove along one of the main highways, a mere twist of the steering wheel might take them onto a dirt road just because it looked interesting. A sign pointing to a place with an unusual name they never heard before was one that simply had to be investigated.

On their way through the northern mountain states en route to the West Coast, they saw a sign for a Native American reservation, so they made an impromptu detour and went to see it. The tribe was not one that catered to the tourist trade but consisted of poor people who were not used to seeing other Americans, let alone those with foreign accents whose big car had a backseat filled with enough equipment for two artists to set up easels whenever the urge struck. To get there, they had driven down a rutted, rock-strewn road that was little more than a path, so far out in the middle of nowhere that the tribal elders insisted they had to spend the night for their own safety. When they left the next morning, it was with the certainty that they had experienced something profoundly spiritual and moving. As they drove on, Hedda tried to put the experience into philosophical perspective by entertaining Saul with tales from the writings of Lin Yutang, Confucius, and several New Age lecturers whose talks she had heard and books she had read. They both vowed to investigate Native American myths as soon as they returned to New York

They had the same sort of reaction when they drove through British Columbia to reach the boat that would take them to Alaska. Ever since they left New York, Saul had been filling the car with the “junque” that always caught his fancy. In the Pacific Northwest, masks and totems joined the other purchases, with everything from the cheapest roadside souvenirs to examples of arts and crafts from galleries and museum shops. In Alaska he photographed all the local objects he saw, from kitsch to high culture, and much of what he saw later found its way into his drawings, the ones in which seemingly random objects—a blue-and-white Chinese vase, a can of pistachio nuts, a paper bag mask, a tin of tea, or a telephone—originated in a personal biographical moment that resonated in a multiplicity of meanings for those who saw it.

Driving down the California coast led to inevitable conversations about the place of pure art in a philistine culture. There were long conversations wherein Saul and Hedda swapped stories about their relationships with their artist friends. Saul spoke of Joseph Cornell, who preferred to talk about esoteric eighteenth-century French writers rather than make observations about daily life on the magically named Utopia Parkway, the street where he lived in the borough of Queens. Saul said that like Cornell, he relished conversations about literature, but he was more interested in “direct experience, and spontaneous inventions of the moment.” Hedda was closer to Mark Rothko than Saul was, and they had had many intense conversations when Saul was away and Rothko dropped in unannounced to stay for casual suppers in her kitchen. Rothko’s insistence that he painted himself with blanked-out eyes because he was not “visual” puzzled her as she filtered his perceptions into her own thoughts about portraiture, particularly when she painted Annalee and Barnett Newman. Hedda made Annalee larger than life to fill a long narrow canvas that showed a strong, beautiful woman in command of the world before her; she painted Barney (whom Annalee supported until his work began to sell) smaller and seemingly crouched at the bottom of the canvas, the space above him largely white and open. Hedda had enjoyed the challenge of conveying the individual personalities and circumstances in each portrait, and the mutuality of the relationship when they were viewed together.

When Hedda painted the Newmans in 1952, she was torn between wanting to do more portraits and doing none at all. This conflict led to discussions in 1956 as she and Saul talked at length about what they wanted to achieve in their art, and if they were at cross-purposes on any subject at all, it was what they expected from their work: she insisted that she had no ego and no ambition for public recognition, while these things governed everything he did. Her recent painting had evolved to the point where she believed there was no “vanity” to be seen in it, no personal, social, or political agenda, and nothing that could call attention to the glamorous woman and brilliant artist who created it. With her large-scale machines and spray-painted cityscapes, she had removed everything pertaining to her biography from the viewer’s consideration. Her semi-abstractions were raw and brutal, far different from, say, the color fields of Helen Frankenthaler or the big blowsy blobs that Joan Mitchell slapped onto huge canvases in thick layers and wedges. Hedda Sterne believed that something “interesting” had happened to her personally that was responsible for the departure of vanity from her paintings; “very little ambition” remained in her, and she was no longer interested in scrambling for success. Saul could not understand her indifference to showing or selling her work, but as no agreement seemed possible they did not dwell on the subject.

On the other hand, Hedda spoke often about Saul’s work, usually claiming that she could write the definitive book on it. She thought his type of humor, which she called “mostly comic,” was different from others because of how he “deflavourized” emotions, ideas, and situations. She equated his “humour” (she always used British spellings) to “poetry” because of his ability to bring “a tender smile upon things one never looks twice at.” Steinberg brought “magic” instead of taking it away by making viewers see the world as he did. “The humour is in the line [her emphasis], and most of all, the love that transfixes your affirmative attitude, accepting good and bad of life never as one assuming the right to judge.” Hedda found “one and the same attitude toward life” in all his drawings, what she called the “deeply intelligent and understanding” ability to make his point “in the simplest and best way and impose [his] point of view without violence but with force and grace.” For lack of a better phrase, she called it his “sense of humour,” which she insisted was evident in his drawings but “not in what I know of you as a person.” This too was a subject they did not dwell upon.

They did not stay long in Southern California and made no attempt to see the many friends who lived there. It was as if they did not want outside influences to spoil the purity of their intensely personal experiences. They dashed across the southwestern desert states into northern Mexico but were too late to connect with Aldo and the film crew, so they meandered back through the southern states and eventually headed for the mid-Atlantic coastline, New Jersey, and New York.

BACK ON 71ST STREET, THERE WAS an inevitable feeling of letdown after two months of getting up every morning with a sense of urgency to get started on whatever the adventures of the day would bring. They were tired from the constant movement and New York was still hot, so they decided to spend the next few weeks in Wellfleet. Hedda liked Cape Cod well enough for vacations but was not enthusiastic about buying property there. Neither was Saul, but somehow he managed to persuade himself that it was the thing to do. He found a house on the outskirts of Wellfleet and impulsively decided to buy it, making a significant nonrefundable deposit and then hiring a team of house inspectors from Hyannis to make a report. Because he had locked himself into an iron-bound contract to buy the property, it was a shock when the report came back showing that the property was “a disaster—everything was in poor shape, no direct access to the house except through someone else’s property, termites, etc. etc.” Lindey engaged a local law firm to handle the matter, even though Steinberg claimed he didn’t want to know anything about the deal except that Lindey had gotten him out of it. The Massachusetts lawyer told Lindey that they were “charming clients really in need of the protection you requested we give them,” and “it was a relief to know that they had decided after all not to buy trouble and expense.” However, it still took both lawyers to get Steinberg out of the mess.

Meanwhile, Louisa and Sandy Calder invited them again for Christmas, and they went, sending a huge ham before them as their gift. Steinberg, who had never really liked Connecticut, now decided that Roxbury would be a fine place to buy a house and asked Calder to help him find one. Calder said they never knew of houses until they were already sold and told him to engage a realtor and take several days to look at properties. Steinberg declined, and the idea of living in Roxbury fell by the wayside.

Tino Nivola heard of Steinberg’s quest for a country home and told him of a house in Springs, near his, that was for rent. Again acting impulsively, Steinberg rented it. It turned out to be a good decision, and everything about the place made him happy. He liked the two-hour drive across Long Island to get there, which was then mostly along an easy highway bordered by potato fields and the occasional farmhouse. He liked the physical activity of country living: “I enjoy chopping wood for the fireplace, and once I’ve made this effort and the wood has been burned I go back to New York.” There was a whole colony of artists and writers in what was loosely called “the Hamptons,” among them Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, and May and Harold Rosenberg. The Nivola house was the gathering place for every visiting or transplanted European, and the warmth and vitality of the Nivolas’ hospitality was always available to Saul and Hedda. Even though Saul had told Hedda the last time they had been weekend guests of the Nivolas that he could never live in the Hamptons because there were too many artists there, he changed his mind and was relieved to think that he had finally found the perfect location for a second home. He planned to look seriously for one to buy, but this happy prospect was still not enough to keep his galloping insecurities at bay, and he did nothing about it just then.

By the end of the year he was in a “bad mood because I’m dissatisfied with my work and also my behavior or whatever it is. During the night I think of what I’ve said or done during the day and it doesn’t seem true to me.” Shortly after the 1957 New Year, everything he did was “a great waste of time, with people who are indifferent or worse, but they’re around.”

It was time to go traveling again, and this time he planned a complete vacation, no work at all, and he asked Hedda to choose where they should go. She suggested Spain because neither of them had been there, and by April they were on their way.

CHAPTER 21

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30