A biting satire of American life

If my life, or yours or others were translated into architecture, who knows what incredible constructions, lack of logic, waste of materials, miraculous equilibrium, wrong locations. The official invitation to create a mural for the American Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair came from the State Department, but Steinberg’s good friend Bernard Rudofsky had a great deal to do with his selection. Rudofsky was the chief designer for all of the United States’ cultural exhibits, and his charge was to tell “the American Story” within the general framework of the fair’s theme, “A New Humanism.” Rudofsky was looking for “exhibition design with a sting,” one that “pricks our complacency…[and] puts doubts into our heads.” He wanted the exhibits to be controversial, and he was confident that Steinberg was just the man to help him fulfill his desire. Rudofsky got more than he bargained for when reactions to the exhibits ranged from bewilderment and confusion to anger and accusations of sabotage from American visitors who could not recognize themselves or their way of life. President Eisenhower was so disturbed by the controversy that he sent an envoy to investigate.

The American Pavilion was a domed building with an adjacent annex, both designed by Edward Durrell Stone. Leo Lionni, a friend of Rudofsky and Steinberg, had an exhibition in the annex entitled “America’s Unfinished Business” that featured the controversial desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was too controversial for the government and also for visitors and was shut down within days of the fair’s opening. Although Steinberg had intended to portray “blacks” in his mural and worried about how to do it, he ended up by not including any, thus avoiding being drawn into the political controversy. His charge was to cover five freestanding walls that contained eight panels of various widths but all a uniform ten feet high, with the entire length totaling about 260 feet. He undertook the commission with the highest seriousness and concentration, poring over the sketchbooks he had made on his numerous cross-country trips to find the eight to ten themes that he thought best represented America. Before he began to arrange old drawings or make new ones, he studied techniques to find which one would work best, and he made a series of notes about his overall intentions.

As he promised himself to do after the 1954 labirinto mural in Milan, he had worked on perfecting the technique of sgraffito in the 71st Street basement, and he felt confident about adding it to the other techniques he planned to use in Brussels. He finished fifteen pen-and-ink drawings, which were then photographed and enlarged to the sizes they would fill on the walls before brown-paper cutouts were made of most of them. His overall plan was to create composites that would show the vast variety of American life and landscape to curious Europeans. Some of the titles he settled on were “The Road,” “Main Street—Small Town,” “Downtown—Big City,” “Farmers,” “Drugstore,” “Cocktail Party, and the all-American pastime, “Baseball.” Because Europeans were fascinated by California and Texas, he included scenes from those two states and threw in Florida as well.

He did the initial drawings in New York and shipped them and some small brown-paper cutouts and boxes of other supplies to Brussels, where he arrived on a Sunday in mid-March to begin three weeks of work. He chose to stay in the Hotel Canterbury, unlike the Rudofskys, who had an apartment and insisted that he come to dinner on his first night. He would have preferred to go directly to bed but instead went to listen to “Bernard full of politics intrigues, etc.” He told Hedda, “The whole thing smells of nest of vipers, we’ll see.”

Everything started well on Monday morning. He liked the white photographic paper that had been chosen for the background cover of the walls because it was “beautiful, like enamel,” and when he pinned several of the brown-paper figures on it to get an idea of how it would look, he thought both scale and visibility might make it “quite a beauty.” The pavilion was open to the elements and there was noise, dust, and confusion throughout, but his section had been screened off so that he had a modicum of privacy in which to work. He blessed Hedda a million times a day for forcing him to take woolen underwear and socks and heavy work shoes, because the space was unheated and he was freezing. He used an office chair on wheels to scoot around from screen to screen, and as he did so, he saw that the size of the walls was “very misleading” and he would have to invent at least one hundred new figures to fill it up. When he began to glue the brown-paper figures onto the white background, he found that the glue did not hold, so he “lowered standards” and used staples until he found a fixative spray that he hoped would work. Unfortunately, “things already glued unglue. Fixative spray bungled. Great incompetence around. Lots of disasters.”

The exhibition was to open on April 17, and to be ready for it, he worked for ten or more hours every day, seven days a week. He made it a point to return to the hotel at 6 p.m. for a two-hour nap; then he went to a solitary dinner and directly back to bed, managing to sleep through the night with the help of sleeping pills. Brussels was as cold and dark as Moscow, and he was so tired that his entire social life for three weeks consisted of two dinners at the Rudofsky apartment. When panic over the isolation and the unfinished project was setting in, he broke down and hired a German art student to help him during the “slaving 12 hrs day pasting and fixing.” He credited her for saving the work “from worst disaster” and told Hedda not to worry because he found her very unattractive. However, neither his helper nor anyone else could do anything about the only fixative they could find to hold the collage together, which turned everything yellow. “A pity, but all in all it may look good,” Steinberg concluded. The next day brought more “miseries and disasters,” when someone attached a vibrating motor for another exhibition to the rear of one of his panels: “Things are peeling off, mural hardly finished. It’s so huge I could work for two more years.” At this point he didn’t care and was determined to finish it as best he could and leave for Paris the day before the fair officially opened. Between the problems with the mural and Rudofsky’s ongoing political contretemps, he felt like someone who was being slowly poisoned, and he just wanted to get out of there.

In fact, his mural was the greatest success of the entire pavilion. When an American journalist commented that Steinberg showed everything about America but people at work, he replied that it was a deliberate choice not to, because tasks of work were “the same everywhere.” As an American, he wanted “to show how we really are. There are few people who can afford to grin a little bit at themselves. We can.” It was the age of Sputnik, and neither Steinberg nor the critics and journalists could resist comparisons between the Soviet Union and the United States. The French journalist Pierre Schneider called the mural “a biting satire of American life” and found “no such good humored relaxed self-irony at the Russian Pavilion. The atmosphere there is of relentless propaganda and self-glorification.”

THERE WAS ONE BRIGHT SPOT DURING Steinberg’s stay in Brussels. He arranged to buy a Jaguar, and it was ready in time for him to drive it to Paris and then on to Nice. He was thrilled with the car but not with the color, which he called “ugly dark blue.” Still, he had always wanted a Jaguar, so he accepted what he could get. He drove slowly to Paris because the car was new and had to be broken in; by the time he arrived at the Hotel Pont Royal, he had had a long and tiring day and was happy to sleep the better part of his first twenty-four hours in Paris. He was depressed when he woke up but blamed it on “a hangover of the three weeks excitement in Brussels,” conveniently ignoring the unsettled triangular situation he had left at home with Hedda and Elizabeth Stille. He invited Hedda to come to Paris and travel with him, first to Nice, then to Spoleto, where “they are frantic about the [Robbins] ballet” and wanted him to redesign parts of the backdrop and create a new front curtain. He wanted her along because he planned to look again for a house to buy in Italy, and if he found one, he intended to stay there for several months. He urged Hedda not to doubt either his love or his need for her, both of which were true, but the problem was, as she knew, that he felt the same emotions for Elizabeth Stille.

Hedda replied with an uncharacteristically frank letter. “Decisions, decisions,” she began, as she addressed his instruction that she should not make hers on the basis of his “desire or need.” She asked if he would allow her to make the definitive decision about him and Elizabeth if he were not so riddled with doubt. For the first time, she told him how she thought he treated her as “an object of dislike and irritation in New York,” where she had her “functions” and served his needs because he was away from home so much that he seldom saw her. To enforce her point, she told him how she was acting as his secretary, busily responding to the many social invitations that were pouring in from various European nobles and international art dealers, all for him alone and not for them as a married couple, and how difficult he had made the task because he had not left her the address of his Brussels hotel, only its name, and she could not consult him in a timely fashion. In conclusion, she told him that he had to decide what he wanted and needed, and whatever it was, he would have her blessing.

HE WAS IN PARIS LONG ENOUGH to see the three good friends with whom he could talk about his work and theirs, the painters Hélion, Matta, and the aged Victor Brauner. He refused an invitation to dinner from Darius Milhaud and avoided returning Oriana Fallaci’s telephone calls because he did not want to be interviewed again after having sat through so many interviews in Brussels. Most of his time was taken by negotiations with Robert Delpire, who was more or less in charge of a book of the Brussels murals that would also be published by Hamish Hamilton in England, Rohwolt in Germany, and Mike Bessie at Harper. Delpire had various mockups and proofs ready to show Steinberg, but, ominously, he also had “suggestions to reconsider certain aspects.” Delpire particularly wanted Steinberg to “describe the contents” or at least “to give a written hint as to what they represent.” Steinberg was furious and demanded to see the French translation of the few remarks he had already provided: “It seems to me they are obvious. The sort of people who need explanation deserve a mystery.” He did not approve of Delpire’s suggested changes, nor did he approve of the color plates of the first four panels. He pronounced them “terrible” and brooded about it until he reached Nice, where he sent a telegram telling Delpire to “interrupt production book.”

The project dragged on for one full year before Steinberg decided that he did not want the book to be published “anywhere, in any form” because it did not meet his meticulous standards for any reproduction of his work, and it seemed unlikely that publication would ever happen. Delpire had already spent more than $8,000 on it, so Steinberg proposed that all four publishers split that cost and he would agree to let them all publish his next book, to which he had already given a working title, “Steinberg’s America.” Alexander Lindey thought that this would be “a happy solution to an unpleasant situation.”

An unhappy resolution occurred while Steinberg was in Paris, though, when William Shawn declined to feature portions of the murals in The New Yorker, saying that he could not see how to make them suitable for the magazine. Shawn tried to soften the blow by inviting Steinberg to call him as soon as he returned from Brussels to discuss future possibilities, but it was still a disappointment on two levels: financially, because Steinberg needed the money, and professionally, because it had been a long time since his last spread in the magazine.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS IN NICE, he was glad that Hedda had decided not to meet him. “I’d be horrible to you if you were here now,” he wrote from Genoa, to which he had driven all night long to escape from his family, especially from Rosa’s “distinguished conversation and other horrors.” He was dismayed by Lica, who had had “some sort of breakdown: poor sister, a tragedy. Sensitive, simple, ignorant, terrorized by mother, affected by pity, staying with the stupid husband, living still in Rumania [sic] (or in Nice, which is worse). She stays indoors for weeks, paints in confusion (trying to discover Cubism). It breaks my heart. She really needs help. I behaved like the usual grandfather, brought gifts to the children.”

To clear his head, he spent the day in Genoa making advertising drawings for a New York bank. Then he drove on to Rome, thinking that if he stayed long enough he could avoid having to go to Spoleto, because the Robbins ballet would have opened without his redoing the rear curtain and designing the new one for the front of the stage. However, he was almost irrationally worried about money, despite the fact that lucrative requests were coming to him on almost a daily basis. A huge shipping company in Genoa, thinking that he was in New York, offered to pay for a flight to Genoa just to see if he wanted to accept a commission to make a drawing approximately fourteen feet long and four feet high for a new building; They invited him to name any price he wanted, which they would gladly pay. Stanley Marcus, of Neiman-Marcus, wanted to see him as soon as he returned to New York to discuss further projects for the store, and the newly reissued Horizon magazine was willing to pay him top dollar for whatever he wanted to contribute. Nevertheless, he still drove north to Spoleto to collect his $500.

He started driving in late afternoon, and by the time he arrived, it was late and he was tired, so he parked the Jaguar on the street and checked into a hotel without unpacking it. The next morning he discovered that thieves had broken in and taken everything inside, including a green hat that he was fond of, a sweater, and a small drawing portfolio, which fortunately contained nothing he cared about. On top of everything else he had to do for the festival, he had to negotiate with the Paris agency that had insured the car. He chose not to report the theft to the Spoleto police, fearing headlines about the “affamato artista e la sua pottente giaguar.”

Despite the “horror of the brutality of the robbery,” he enjoyed Spoleto, a “splendid town ruined by snobs. He liked it, but the robbery and all his aimless driving through Italy convinced him to give up the idea of trying to buy a house in which to live semi-permanently. Living in Italy would have been too great a change and might have made him “forget all the good or wrong things of America.” He told Hedda, “We have no idea how much we are protected in America.” Also, he was aware for the first time that no one in Italy, not even his closest friends, still thought of him as Italian. Although he remained close to the old friends—Aldo, Zavattini, Rogers, and others from his days at the Politecnico—and to the new friends he had made since the war—Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Primo Levi, and so many others—he was still, to them, “the immigrant,” or even in some circumstances, when Americans were disliked, “the goy, the abuser.” This marked the first time that he considered himself fully American, and it made him realize that he could not make a permanent home in any other country.

His feeling of being an outsider continued in Rome, where he saw Nicola Chiaromonte and Ennio Flaiano. He did not see Aldo, who was working on a film in Yugoslavia, but he did take Bianca to dinner before he headed north for one final day in Milan. The realization that he was no longer considered to be an Italian was so disorienting that he had to go to the Politecnico and walk around familiar places for a while before he could become fully functional within the rest of the city’s geography. It was as if he could relax only by sticking to favorite haunts, such as the bookstore in the Galleria, and only buying books that were in Italian. It was a shock to read Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and find that he could not fully understand the Milanese and southern Italian dialects in which it was written.

STEINBERG CONTINUED ON TO NICE, where he girded himself for one final visit with his family. He did not relish his “undesired role as head of the family,” and to fortify himself he made an unplanned excursion to Picasso’s Villa Californie, high on a hillside overlooking Cannes. Both Aimé Maeght and Daniel Kahnweiler had been urging Steinberg to do so for some time, as they agreed with the many other critics and scholars who saw similarities in the two artists’ vision and who also called them the best draftsmen currently working. In his influential 1915 essay, “The Rise of Cubism,” Kahnweiler was the first to interpret Picasso’s approach to art as a language and to suggest the link between the cubism he practiced at the time and what Kahnweiler called “scripts,” or sign systems. In the 1950s, when Maeght began to show Steinberg’s work, Kahnweiler believed this was true of Steinberg as well, and he thought a meeting between them would be interesting and perhaps beneficial. Earlier in 1958, when Kahnweiler was in New York, he had invited Steinberg to a cocktail party and once again entreated him to find a way to meet Picasso.

The afternoon at La Californie passed pleasantly enough, but the artists were a bit wary of each other until Picasso proposed that they play the surrealist game cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). A sheet of paper was folded into small squares, and first one man, then the other, would draw a line or fill a square. When the squares were all covered, the paper was unfolded, and most likely a nonsensical drawing resulted. Picasso gave the paper to Steinberg as a souvenir of the afternoon, which turned out to be their one and only meeting. Years later, Steinberg remembered Picasso as “an old Jewish man in the Florida sun—all torso and shorts. The voice of a cigar smoker … the falsetto of a cello.”

WHILE IN NICE, STEINBERG PLANNED to spend most of his time in his hotel room working on one final curtain for Spoleto. As always, no matter how irritated he was at having to do a commercial project, once he began to do the work he became engrossed in it, and feelings of satisfaction, even happiness, suffused him by the time he finished. The work was steadying, and it prepared him for the uncertainty and chaos he found when he visited his family. There were many legal obstacles obstructing the Roman family’s attempt to move to the United States. The French government would not let them go to Paris, where it would have been easier and faster to make the arrangements, but would provide visas only for several months at a time and then only for the Alpes-Maritime province in which Nice was located. The United States government still considered them to be in transit between France and Israel, which meant they could not be put on any country’s quota list, and none of Steinberg’s influential contacts could persuade either government to bend so many conflicting and contradictory rules and requirements.

Meanwhile, Rosa decided that the Romans could not leave Nice because she was too old to consider another move, even to an apartment that would take her closer to them. Moritz was still sad that Rosa had refused to go to Israel, where he could have been happy, surrounded by all their relatives and friends from Bucharest. Now that there was a possibility that Lica and her family might have to go to Israel, he hoped silently that Rosa would agree to follow them. Saul was so appalled by the family’s indecision on every front and so alarmed to think of what his life would be like if they were in New York that he insisted they stop trying to immigrate to America and think instead about where they could all best live together, whether in Israel or in France. He promised to give them whatever financial assistance they needed to make everyone content, if not happy. He was willing to pay any price to keep them an ocean away.

The Romans were seriously considering Israel, because Rica had a better chance of working in the legal profession there than he had in France, where he faced barriers in becoming certified to practice law on top of his difficulties in learning the language. But whenever they tried to talk about Israel, Rosa became hysterical and claimed to be felled by everything from heart palpitations to migraine headaches. She could not stand being with the children, whom she called “noisy savages,” but she still went to Lica’s apartment every day to berate her for her many faults, from her inability to control her children to her continuing loss of weight and the depression that kept her in bed or unable to leave the apartment. Saul understood that the Romans were having a difficult time making the transition from life in an Iron Curtain country to the tremendous freedoms of life in France, but Rosa chose to blame everything wrong in their lives on Saul, saying that he was obviously writing unpleasant letters to Lica because he never wrote to her. Nor did Hedda, at whom Rosa aimed one barbed dig after another.

While she scolded them for not writing to her, she was whining and writing to them to ask for things like a new television (it had to be the same brand as the last one), a new coat (a fur, but not too heavy), a trip to a spa where she could take the waters (someplace refined, with a good clientele), and money for her ongoing dental problems (her dentures were ill-fitting and needed constant adjustment). Meanwhile, Moritz took her pills, because she would not give him an allowance to buy the ones he needed to keep his erratic heartbeat under control; nor could he do anything pleasant, because she refused to give him an allowance. When they first arrived in France, Moritz won a small amount of money on the lottery, all of which he spent on Rosa, staying at home while she booked rooms in expensive hotels near the various “cures” she claimed she needed. Whenever Saul’s checks arrived and he asked for spending money, she insisted that he still had plenty of lottery francs and could entertain himself with those. Moritz wrote secretly to Saul, asking him to send money separately from the household allowance and to wrap it in a different-colored paper so that he could surreptitiously remove it when he opened the letters before Rosa’s prying eyes.

Saul told them all to think seriously about moving to Paris, where Rica had a better chance of finding work, where Lica could return to her painting, where the children would receive a better education, and where he would be better able to buy a house large enough for them all to live in, his parents separately from the Romans but still together. For the rest of the year, the family drama consisted of anguished letters about whether they should move or not, whether they should all go or just the Roman family. He left them to sort it out and prepared to return to New York.

As he left Nice, he realized that he had made several important decisions, starting with the one that he would not allow his family to join him in New York. France or Israel, he didn’t care; it just could not be New York. An equally important decision was the one not to live in Italy. Having made these two, he felt such elation that he swore he was no longer depressed. He drove back to Paris, arranged to ship the Jaguar by boat, and flew to New York on May 21, confident that he could face whatever was waiting for him.

CHAPTER 23

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