The terrible curse of the consciousness of fame

Impossible to recount things … As always, I was more interested in myself (that is, trying to understand what sort of man I am) than in seeing outside things … Also coming home and finding myself no longer the same. I’m not working,” Saul told Aldo as June became July 1963 and all he could do was make collages in Braque’s 1912 style. He was mired in an “unhappy period—but not even unhappy, intense rather, but not bad.” He defined his malaise as stemming from a desire for “absolute happiness (who knows what it is)” and the resulting “confusion, which comes from not following the highest ideals.” He moped around until August, when Gigi’s return from her triumphant tour of Europe made things brighter. To celebrate her homecoming, he did something he detested: he drove to Idlewild Airport to surprise her by meeting the plane. And he did something else he disliked almost as much: he planned and organized a surprise party for her August 9 birthday, inviting everyone he knew to join them at Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton.

The party was an extravagance, for he was preoccupied by money and the fear that he did not have enough of it. He had wanted to go to Europe with Gigi and make the trip a truly grand tour that she would never forget, but he sent her alone when his income tax bill was much higher than expected. Shortly after, he learned that his 1961 return was being audited because the IRS wanted a dollar value for each of the eleven paintings he had contributed to the Library of Congress. He assessed the lot at a modest total of $2,000 and it was quickly settled, but he was still shaken by the experience. Although he had been in the United States for two decades, his initial reaction to any contact with authority aroused the same fear he had felt as a Jewish boy in Romania, always on the alert for arbitrary government persecution.

By the autumn his money worries had lessened, and he was in a slightly better mood after two covers on The New Yorker drew a large volume of fan mail. His satisfaction was enhanced when the critic Herbert Mitgang asked to buy a drawing of the Galleria Umberto I in Naples, where he had been stationed as a correspondent for Stars & Stripes during the war. Steinberg was further delighted when Mitgang described a visit to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Rome apartment, where he saw one of Steinberg’s drawings hung prominently among others by Klee, Kandinsky, and Morandi. Mitgang told Steinberg that when he saw where Antonioni placed it, he understood what he aimed for in all his films; when he told this to Antonioni, he replied with one word: “Exactly.”

Steinberg’s usual retainers brought a new influx of cash, starting with the annual $20,000 from Hallmark, and a new spate of litigation brought more before the year ended. Life and Time had infringed his copyright by using full-page ads drawn by M. Lado that depicted a wife drinking coffee while staring at a statue of her husband at the other end of the table. It was so close to one of Steinberg’s that had been in The New Yorker ten years earlier that Alexander Lindey agreed he had been “substantially injured” and brought suit and won.

Steinberg’s talents permitted him to straddle numerous areas within the art and design worlds, and this polymorphism often led diverse professional organizations to invite him to share his expertise. He was flattered but he usually refused the invitations, such as those to be the featured guest and principle speaker at conferences of the California Council of the American Institute of Architects and the California Eyes West group. Both were significant honors, which he declined because he did not consider himself qualified to dispense information to those whose work lay entirely within specific areas which he occasionally visited but did not fully inhabit: “I don’t quite belong in the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know how to place me.” He believed such honors contributed to “monumentalizing” the artist and carried the “terrible curse of the consciousness of fame.” To accept would have meant the difference between being an “Artist, with a capital A”—that is, one who made a living by assuming an aura of expertise—and being an “artist with a small a”—that is, one who went about his own work and left it to others to judge and evaluate it.

At the same time as these genuine honors came, there was also a fairly dubious one that marked a major change in his public image: he was no longer just an “artist,” who could count on being reviewed or written about every time he sold a painting, published a book, or held an exhibition; he was now a public figure, recognized as a bon vivant and man-about-town. The editors of the Celebrity Register, published by Cleveland Amory and Earl Blackwell, asked him to submit “another glossy portrait” because the one they had published in the first issue was “unsatisfactory.” Steinberg was flattered by the request, but as he had not given them the first photo, he ignored the request for the second.

THE BARRAGE OF FAN MAIL STILL poured in for several months after The New Yorker featured Steinberg’s dual versions of the letter E on the May 25 cover. It was another of the captivating drawings that signaled a shift in his subject matter, one that fell into the category of the quasi-philosophical drawings that left readers pondering and puzzling over his contributions to the magazine during the past year or so. His “strange, silent world” had been identified a decade earlier by Alexey Brodovitch as “peopled with chinless, blank-faced men, beady-eyed women with monstrous headdresses, precocious animals, and weird architectural fantasies,” but viewers mostly attributed it to a “comic technique” that raised many laughs but few questions. In the 1960s, when his letters, numbers, and punctuation marks either took on insistent anthropomorphic qualities or reflected the existential situations in which animals, little men, and disparate women find themselves, the influx of fan mail from the magazine’s readers burgeoned.

After the appearance of the October 6, 1962, cover, featuring the numbers 5 and 2, readers demanded interpretations and answers to questions that became intense, urgent, and sometimes even angry. Basically, they were all asking, “What does it mean?” The scene is one of Steinberg’s traditional café tables, with a trim and tailored number 5 sitting confidently in a chair on the left, a thought balloon above its head brimming over with complicated mathematical equations and symbols. A highly ornamented 2 sits on the chair opposite, and if a number can be made to look dejected and depressed, this 2 certainly does, with its edges all frilled and furbelowed but with nary a balloon above it to show that it is capable of even the most ordinary thought.

Steinberg talked about this cover when he sat for a far-ranging interview several years later with Jean Stein, calling it “a dialogue between a No. 5 and a No. 2 … who are both drinking and trying to figure out their relationship.” He described the 5 as “more solid looking, made out of straight, simple lines,” whereas the 2 “has frills and is sort of pinkish; it denotes a woman.” As the 2 looks at the 5, she tries to figure out their “potential combinings,” while at the same time the 5 is figuring out “the same geometrical, mathematical, or arithmetical possibilities.” Steinberg insisted that the drawing worked because of the numbers he had chosen; if he had chosen a 6 talking to a 9, it would have been “unprintable.”

The love of numbers came from his childhood interest in typography, when he had played with the big wooden type that his father used to decorate mortuary wreaths. Throughout his life he remained “obsessed with the question mark, and numbers— one, two, three, four— big numbers.” The memory persisted of how, as a small boy, he held the oversized type his father used and how it comforted him. Steinberg was often asked about the many different ways in which he represented numbers, particularly the number 5, which he used so often. He depicted it lying in bed, wrapped erotically around a question mark, or wrapping itself like an oversized tuba around a little man who trudges disconsolately with the burden, or serving as the cupboard which a cat in search of food opens to find only apples and pears, which he cannot eat. Steinberg was uncharacteristically gleeful when he talked about the number 5, particularly the 5 as a cupboard. That one was “so simple—I even give hints. This is how children see the meaning of a number—as an abstraction: two apples and three pears make five—but five what?” By answering the question this way, Steinberg delighted in posing another, far more existential one. His questioner asked why the number 5 was always so predatory and unsettling. “Oh, that’s easy,” he replied as he leaned in conspiratorially to whisper, “You can never trust a 5.”

His seven pages of question marks in The New Yorker on July 29, 1961, were meant to depict this particular punctuation mark as “a problem, a weakness, or a curiosity,” and ultimately an erotic dialogue. When he drew a triangle in bed with a fat question mark, Steinberg saw “a line making love to a mass … a liveliness being made love to by reason.” It represented “a very noble idea” for him, the idea “that love itself, including sex, is a continuation of a dialogue.”

This series continued the trend toward the drawings that Joel Smith called “the serious core of this wordless comedy,” and the letter E on the May 25, 1963, cover was its next logical extension. Much of the fan mail about this cover’s meaning came from high school students, who spent their lunch hours in school cafeterias arguing about it. They wanted Steinberg to give them a solid explanation of what he meant, even as they offered their own interpretations and expected him to agree that they were right. One group thought it was simply an exercise in typography, while another was certain that it was a pun on the old song about keeping soldiers down on the farm after they’ve seen “Paree.” Most of the mail, however, came from people whose initial was E and who wanted to buy the original, or those who sent their copy of the magazine for him to autograph. He enjoyed the many interpretations, because they represented viewers whose responses ranged across a spectrum from shock to admiration to uneasiness. Whatever the response, his viewers were all made slightly uncomfortable by what they saw, and this was exactly what Steinberg wanted, for he believed that the artist had the responsibility to “make people jittery by sort of giving them situations that are out of context.” When he told this to the critic Grace Glueck, she offered her own interpretation: “In other words, you don’t want to make them reason, but you want to shake them up a little bit.” Steinberg agreed, admitting that even as he wanted his readers to figure out what each drawing meant for themselves, “The most difficult thing in the world is to reason.”

EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE GOING WELL as autumn lengthened. Gigi’s return had lifted his mood, as did another successful New Yorker cover on October 12, which provoked almost the same volume of fan mail as the earlier one in May. This one featured two of his spiky females with pointy features and garish red slashes for mouths and lips: one’s mouth spouts Steinberg’s version of a street map of Paris’s St. Germain-des-Prés, while the other’s spews a map of Sardinia. The women drink cocktails and boast of their travels, talking across each other without an inkling of true communication. Most of the mail for this one praised Steinberg’s comic vision, while his larger message of the women’s inability to communicate was not addressed. The cover’s overall effect was directly opposed to what he wanted: it made his readers laugh instead of making them jittery and unsettled. He took it personally, as another warning that he had grown stale and was not communicating with his audience. Whenever he felt this way, he knew he needed a change of scene, and that always meant taking a trip.

His restless mood made him seek out Elaine de Kooning, whose company he could normally tolerate only in small doses. She had begun to make frequent trips to Texas whenever she wanted to “get a gig for a workshop or a slide lecture or a commission,” and Steinberg shared her fascination with the state where everything seemed to be bursting with “frontier energy” and “everything is possible.” “Call Elaine about museum in Texas,” he wrote at the top of a very long list surrounded by doodles—always a dangerous sign that he was bored and didn’t want to do any of the irritatingly mundane items on it. After the one-sided reader response to his October New Yorker cover, he wanted to go to a place where he could look at the world with “a fresh eye, to put myself in a condition to have a fresh eye,” and there was no chance of finding a fresh eye in New York, what with all the details to which his long list attested.

Gigi was peremptory and demanding, and he had to buy “ice-scates and easle [sic], paint and colored pencils for you-know-who.” Friends asked him to write recommendations for grants and fellowships, an onerous task because he disliked writing official letters in English for fear he would misuse the language. Despite having a lawyer who took care of such things, he personally hounded Mrs. Jennie Bradley about long-overdue foreign royalties. He had begun to see more of the group of Upper West Side intellectuals that included Diana and Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald, all of whom routinely enlisted him in social causes and political events that meant lending his name, donating art, or giving money, and usually all three at once. His Buick was not running smoothly, and many phone calls and service appointments were not solving its problems. He had to call his accountant, deal with the Stedeliijk Museum in Amsterdam, pacify Galerie Maeght in Paris, and “think about [an unspecified] Research Institute” that wanted to use his name on its letterhead. And there was also his dear friend Inge Morath, who could sweet-talk him into just about anything but whose proposed book he had been stalling for months.

He was making desultory plans to follow Elaine de Kooning to Texas, and to use her contacts as the starting point for a jaunt to meet dealers and collectors throughout the Southwest, until November 22, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Steinberg joined the world in mourning, and going to Texas became unthinkable. The nation’s trauma left him more desperate than ever to get away in order to gain the distance he thought he needed in order to figure out how to represent it.

Kennedy’s assassination was a stunning personal blow to Steinberg, for this was anarchy, something he thought was behind him forever when he left Europe to embrace American democracy. His politics were always liberal and left-leaning, a reaction against the punitive social inequity of his youth, and he had voted for the young Kennedy because he seemed to be cut in the mold of one of his great heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Steinberg believed in a government that offered the greatest good to the largest number of citizens, and to him, Roosevelt’s New Deal was a monumental achievement. He never forgot how it offered meaningful work to artists and writers during the Great Depression, some of which he studied in search of ideas. With the Kennedy administration, Steinberg found another cause to believe in just as fervently, a shared antipathy to segregation.

Ever since his first trip to the South, he had been a supporter of the NAACP and CORE, and he also held separate memberships in some of the local chapters and organizations they sponsored throughout the region. He donated drawings as well as money whenever he was asked, and in some cases he volunteered to sign petitions for causes and affidavits for individuals. If he were to travel around the South after Kennedy’s death, what, he asked himself, could he possibly draw that would contribute to an understanding of, if not an explanation for, what his adopted patria had become? He had not loved his homeland for the past decade as unequivocally as he had when he had first arrived on its shores, but nevertheless, it was still the country he respected and admired above all others. He thought about the situation of the artist in a violently changed society for a week or so after Kennedy’s funeral and then decided that if he were ever to understand what had just happened in America, he needed to distance himself from it. He decided to go to Europe to see what he would find there and where it might lead him. He had the time and the money and would just let things happen.

HE WAS EAGER TO SEE HIS SISTER and observe firsthand what her daily life was like now that she and her family were so contentedly settled. He wanted to visit his mother’s grave and see the headstone that had been laid according to Jewish custom since his last visit. His primary need on this trip was an intense desire to renew himself through contact with other creative persons, especially non-Americans such as Eugène Ionesco and Jean Hélion, with whom he had developed sustained correspondence about their personal philosophies and their impact on their work. Steinberg wanted to avoid anything that smacked of actual work while he was in Paris, so he went out of his way to avoid having to see his publishers and gallerists. He thought, and rightly so, that they were more interested in the commercial prospects for work he had already done than in any new ideas he might have. He wanted to talk about this with Hedda Sterne, who was in Venice on a Fulbright scholarship.

To live in Venice was expensive, even with the stipend from the Fulbright, so Hedda rented her New York house for the year she was to be away. She was counting on sales from her exhibition at Betty Parsons’s gallery in December, and because she was not able to attend to the details in person, she asked Saul to do it for her. As she was particularly worried about the photographic reproductions in the catalogue, he worked hard with Betty before he left to make it what Hedda wanted. Unfortunately, despite excellent publicity and a beautiful catalogue, not a single painting sold. Hedda hesitated to tell Saul, because she was determined not to take any money from him, but he knew and quietly deposited $1,000 into her bank account, telling her not to worry.

He accomplished everything he wanted to do in Paris in less than a week, so he flew to Milan and went directly on to Venice. Hedda had rented the house where the poet and painter Filippo De Pisis had lived during and just after the war. He had amassed a huge personal library that featured such works as Casanova’s memoirs and other “mild pornography” that Hedda was sure Saul would like. She joked that she would steal one of the volumes of Casanova’s Intrighi di Francia for him, and when he saw Di Pisis’s collection of erotica, he asked Hedda to look for erotic paintings of nude women, particularly the legend of Susanna and the elders. Like Hedda, he was intrigued by illustrated periodicals of the 1880s, and together they spent hours in De Pisis’s library turning pages and searching for his annotations, sometimes touching, sometimes very strange (he died insane).

Saul was worried about Hedda while he was with her, not because of her financial needs, which he intended to take care of, but because of her health. She had arrived in Venice wearing a black eye patch because her sight was impaired, and for the entire year she was there she had to be careful not to damage her vision further. As soon as she moved into the house, she came down with a lung infection, which she called pleurisy, bronchitis, cold, or flu, depending on the symptoms of the moment; whatever it was, it did not go away for the entire winter. Her health was run-down and her mood dispirited, mostly because everyone praised her work but did not buy it. In a gossipy letter to Saul about the Biennale, she told him that the museum director James Johnson Sweeney raved “enthusiastically” about all her “periods,” which led her to ask acerbically “why he don’t buy ten?”

However, it did them good to see each other, for it was apparent to both that once they had stopped being lovers they had become each other’s closest friend and most valued sounding board. Now that they no longer lived together as man and wife, they could talk about anything—and they did, from their views about the way art had become a commodity to their personal philosophy of how an artist should conduct him- or herself in an increasingly philistine world. At the Biennale, Hedda found “such poverty of spirit, imagination, or even simple talent” in so much of the art world, “and what savagery, brutality, in the fight for a prize, recognition!” She told Saul about “Castelli’s revenge,” as “the triumph of pop [art]” was being touted that year in Venice. She thought there were too many “fat middle aged ‘enfants terribles’ ” parading themselves before the press, with Robert Rauschenberg leading the lot with his “phony enfant terrible statements.”

Mostly, however, they talked about themselves. Hedda feared that she would sound pompous when she told how the luxury of a fellowship year was letting her clarify her views about art in general and giving her insights into what she valued about her own work. She was reading some of the volumes of art history in De Pisis’s library, and it made her feel “vaguely nauseated” when she came across critics who would say (as she paraphrased) “the painter speaks a truth he does not know,” implying that the work of art had no validity until the critic pronounced upon it. She went to an exhibition and was horrified to find that there were two names printed in the same size type and given equal prominence in all the advertising: the artist’s and that of the critic who wrote the introduction to the catalogue. Hedda said she made up her mind then and there that she would have no more of “this ‘career’ business” in her life. When she painted, she would transfer only the purity of her thoughts to her canvases, and the world would be free to evaluate the paintings on those terms. She told Saul she hoped this did not sound “pompous” and said how grateful she was to have these conversations.

As such talks had always done throughout the twenty-some years of their relationship, the discussion turned specifically to Saul’s version of his current unhappiness, of his inability to concentrate on work, his constant need to travel in search of new places, his inability to tolerate most of the people he knew, and his frustration over the lack of communication with others. Hedda was no longer afraid to risk offending him, so she told him that from here on, no matter what transpired between them, she felt the obligation to tell him the truth as she saw it. In this instance, she hoped it would lessen his despair when she told him that his current state of mind was nothing special or unusual; it was the same malaise that infected any creative artist worthy of the name, and rather than fighting it, he should accept it for what it was, a tribute to his genius.

HE LEFT VENICE IN A FAR BETTER MOOD than when he had arrived. Being with Hedda was restorative and gave him the energy to push onward in search of “the fresh eye,” which still eluded him. The entire trip became something far greater than he had originally envisioned after he attended a reception for the diplomat Carlo di Bugnano, who was then the Italian ambassador to Indonesia and who invited him to visit. Steinberg had not thought about where he would go after staying in Rome for a week or so, but while in Venice he mentioned offhandedly to Hedda that he sometimes thought about returning to the places in North Africa where he had been stationed during the war and that retracing his postings might help him to put the past fifteen years into perspective. She told him to think about it, because he could always cross North Africa and fly back to New York from Algiers. At the time he shrugged it off as a whim, but after he met Bugnano, he decided to expand the trip to include many places in Africa he wanted to return to or to see for the first time. It made him think of India, where he had flown across the Hump; China was off-limits to Americans, but there was British Hong Kong, and if he went to Hong Kong, he might as well go to Japan. The next thing he knew, he had a round-the-world itinerary.

On the spur of the moment he decided to leave Milan and go to Florence on his way to Rome, to spend several days as an art tourist. He did not plan his African itinerary until he got to Rome, so he decided to get there via Athens, because he wanted to see the ruins again and smell the magical flavors he always associated with Greece. He flew from there to Cairo, where his main sightseeing was of the Pyramids. They inspired him to visit his old friend from the Politecnico, Sandro Angelini, in Ethopia. Steinberg flew from Asmara to Gondar, where he saw the royal compound of Fasil Ghebbi. He stayed briefly in the capital, Addis Ababa, and then went to Lalibela, where he toured the rock-hewn twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches built by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. It was always a pleasure to see Angelini, but as a trained architect himself, Steinberg thought the churches in Lalibela were “stupidly made,” poor imitations of Coptic Christian churches. His only praise was for the setting, “a terrific plateau with purity and magic, a concept of heaven.”

He flew from Lalibela to Nairobi, Kenya, where he saw for the first time “gazelles and giraffes and hippos and crocs and so on,” and with the “fresh eye” he was thrilled to find had been rejuvenated: “By cutting my bridges, by being in a condition that is new to me, I suddenly have the eye that sees, the nose that smells. All my senses are active. I’m not taking for granted anything the way one does when living day after day in the same routine.”

His next stop was India—first Bombay, where he was most impressed by the architecture of a railway station that the natives insisted had been built by Rudyard Kipling, and then Calcutta, where his flight, “Great Eastern 229!” touched down at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1964. He spent the next day at the New Market, happily engaged in one of his favorite pastimes, buying “junque.” Early the next day he boarded a Swissair flight to Bangkok, where he visited temples during the day and went to the movies at night. Thailand did not impress him, so the next day he flew to Hong Kong. On January 6 he flew to Tokyo, where he checked into the Imperial Hotel. He played tourist the next day, visiting the Ginza with “Mary,” whose name appeared in his datebook during the eleven days he toured the country. He stayed at inns as well as posh hotels, visited geisha houses, took trains into the countryside, played pachinko, visited temples, and saw sand gardens that reminded him of some of his own drawings of labyrinths and mazes. From Tokyo he circled to Osaka, Nagasaki, Beppu, Kobe, Kyoto, and Saigo before returning to the capital city on the nineteenth. On the twentieth he went to American Express and found a letter from Gigi. He had done enough traveling to regain his fresh eye, and now it was time to go home and put it to use.

HE WAS BACK IN NEW YORK early in February 1964, but it took several weeks to get used to being there. “I’m still confused,” he told Aldo on February 19, because returning to New York was akin to being back in Romania. He had seen so much that it was difficult to find the words to describe such things as the wild animals in Kenya and the hot baths in Japan. It would all come out eventually in his drawings, but for now, “as always, I was more interested in myself (that is, trying to understand what sort of man I am) than in seeing outside things.” He thought his confusion at returning to so-called familiar circumstances might have been as disorienting as that of explorers who returned to civilization after long stays in primitive lands. Steinberg wondered if they felt as he did after “coming home and finding myself no longer the same.”

A short time later he was still questioning his role and place in New York, in the United States, and, by extension, in the art world. He made another list, on which he noted that he had given money to an organization that wanted to do away with all organized charities, because he detested all the “monks and missionaries of bureaucracy.” But most of all he had his own mission: “Artists of the World Unite. You have nothing to lose but your balls.”

CHAPTER 29

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