The desire for fame

I was doing so well—playing the gentleman, drawing only as I pleased, and now once again I’ve got the desire for Fame and to compete with the other jackasses. A mystery, this wish to go against myself and court danger. In terms of the evolution of Steinberg’s oeuvre, 1966 was a watershed year. His subject matter took several interesting new turns as he used themes and ideas that had been successful in the past to create new work of a more philosophical nature, work that he said was “camouflaged as a cartoon” but did not really belong in that category. He wasn’t worried that it would not suit The New Yorker, because he and the editors had reached an agreement several years previously: “They only want me to be sure that I myself know what it means. They want to be more in the position of a reader who is puzzled and intrigued than of an editor who wants to judge it.” The editors knew that whenever he submitted a drawing, it was with the intention of making readers sense that there was “something else beyond the [initial] perception,” and that he wanted them to share “the voyage between perception and understanding.”

As a way of keeping ideas fresh for the drawing table and of jogging his memory later, he did a lot of doodling, calling it “a form of brooding of the hand [that] contains no reasoning.” Among some of the many doodles he made during this frenzy of creativity were lists of titles for groupings, which he separated into general categories such as “the Hyphen,” “the Accent,” and “The Dominant Species.” Occasionally he wrote commentaries that were meant to be explanations of a personal credo or instructions for what to aim for in future work, such as “say something interesting about Religion becoming autobiography.” After this he wrote “Tillich?” but did not clarify whether he was referring to the theologian Paul Tillich or to himself. Religion and autobiography were two subjects uppermost in his mind, two parts of a puzzle that engrossed him as he thought about an important new project.

The philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen had been asking Steinberg to provide drawings for a volume by Paul Tillich for the better part of a year, even before Tilllich’s sudden death from a heart attack in October 1965. Steinberg vacillated, because he was busy fulfilling other commitments but also because accepting the project would require him to think about himself as much as about Tillich’s personal credo. He had met Tillich in East Hampton shortly after he bought the Springs house, and in the years since had enjoyed discussions over the good dinners served by Tillich’s wife, Hannah. Steinberg almost never held the floor when he was with Tillich, for he preferred the role of “first-class observer” as he studied how Tillich’s unwavering spirituality and religious beliefs governed his every action. These were alien topics among most of his other friends, particularly the artists, and were hardly ever subjects for dinner-party conversation. Still, being with Tillich made Steinberg, who had always pondered questions about his cultural identity as a Jew, think about his heritage and how he expressed it (or not).

Ruth Nanda Anshen was an editor as well as a philosopher, and before Tillich’s sudden death she had commissioned his volume for the series she founded and directed. The overall title, Credo Perspectives, reflected her special interest, the relationship between self-knowledge and the meaning of existence. Anshen’s contributors to the Credo series came from many different walks of life; among them the art historian Sir Herbert Read; Pope John XXIII; Harvard president James Bryant Conant; and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. All were asked to write intellectual and spiritual autobiographies that would explain the creed by which they lived, how it related to their creative activity, and what aspects of their personal life had contributed to its formulation. Tillich was well suited for the series, and he gave her one of its most popular selections with My Search for Absolutes. The text was ready for publication before he died and lacked only illustrations.

Tillich died without suggesting an artist, but Anshen had two reasons for asking Steinberg. The first was that she discerned the philosophical musings in his earlier drawings and believed he was perfect for a biographical essay that focused on religious beliefs. Her second and more important reason was that she wanted to entice Steinberg into contributing a volume of his own to the series. He was perfectly willing to give Anshen a generous supply of drawings for Tillich’s book, but he was not sure he wanted to—or even could—contribute a volume of his own. It took him the better part of a year to accept the Tillich commission, because the very idea of a book of his own induced an almost irrational fear of what he would have to face and might unwittingly reveal if he tried to write about himself. Even if he only submitted drawings without text, he worried that they alone would give away far too much personal information. With great reluctance, he allowed Anshen to announce on the jacket of Tillich’s book that his own was forthcoming, but he found repeated excuses to postpone it, and eventually the series came to its natural end without his contribution.

Steinberg was struck by how much Tillich’s essay resonated personally, and his earliest illustrations were as much about himself as about Tillich. The essay reminded him of his own quest for autonomy, particularly in the years when he left Romania for Italy and then Italy for the United States. He worried that he was revealing too much with “this game of autobiography,” but he could not keep from playing it and wondered if his interest in himself came from having read too many “biographies written by biographers—mediocre works really—where life is justified constantly by obvious causes, more like alibis.”

In the past, Steinberg’s wry and whimsical drawings had often disguised the seriousness of his inquiry (sometimes to his dismay, as when readers saw only the surface humor in his New Yorker cartoons and drawings), but the technique of whimsy was a perfect foil for Tillich’s profundity. Anshen described Steinberg’s playfulness as his innate understanding of life’s ambiguities and of how, “in what might be called a negative myth, [he] draws attention to the phenomenon of contemporary existence.”

Steinberg used many of his iconic figures light-handedly and lightheartedly, and yet each drawing compels the viewer to stop and ponder, to think not only about what there is to see on the page but also to consider the deeper meaning that lurks beneath the laughter. The viewer’s first response may be to smile, but almost always it is followed by emotions that might begin with perplexity but ultimately lead to the recognition of something personal. Steinberg plays with the question of existence in everything from the hand that holds the pen and draws the artist who wields it to the mazes, question marks, and the words yes and no in various ramifications. Evoking Descartes, he posits existence by poising a man on the edge of a large cube in the middle of an imaginary landscape, with a faithful dog sitting attentively behind him. The man’s head (both a caricature of Steinberg’s own and his usual version of Everyman) has a thought bubble above it that reads “Dubito Ergo Sum”—“I doubt, therefore I am.” It is Steinberg’s response to Descartes’s certainty that if one thinks, one exists, “Cogito Ergo Sum,” and it offers a perfect parallel to Tillich’s assertion that the tragic history of the twentieth century forced him and his colleagues out of the academy and “far closer to the reality” of the external world than their forebears ever were.

As Tillich plumbed his own life for the experiences that led him to create a system of absolutes, Steinberg provided him with expressive examples of deeply personal meaning for both the writer and the artist. Steinberg depicts the existential anxiety of every stage of life from infancy to old age by showing men, women, and children climbing staircases or ladders or standing on a seesaw that has one side firmly grounded on land and the other teetering on the edge of a precipice. Everything in life is a balance, and some of his figures are more successful in achieving it than others: Steinberg’s iconic figure of the artist holds a palette in one hand and a brush in the other as he draws the staircase on which he mounts steadily upward—until he reaches the top and finds that he has drawn himself inside a closed box. Boxes figure in the drawings, as do other geometric shapes that reflect the society in which his people live; buildings loom massively, overwhelming the phalanx of rubber-stamp figures that march in tandem beneath them—all except for a single figure who sports a thought bubble that depicts another self marching in the same direction as the others. Is Steinberg asking whether this is the beginning of mass man’s search for individuality? Tillich certainly asked the question.

Everything Steinberg drew for Tillich’s book was a veiled “confession” about his own life as well, which may have been why not all of his drawings were what Hannah Tillich had envisioned. She sent a letter saying that although she found them “strong and penetrating,” she needed to muster “courage (without wild onrushes of stubbornness)” to tell Steinberg that she had qualms about how he interpreted some of her late husband’s beliefs. She thought of “Paulus,” as she called him, as a bridge between outmoded systems of belief and the new one he promulgated, and she urged Steinberg to portray this literally: “Draw me one bridge (across the enigmatic question-marker monsters and cat-ghosts).” He gave Hannah Tillich the ladders and staircases that he thought reflected the text, but he drew no bridges. Mrs. Tillich was also insistent that the book jacket should feature a line drawing of her husband’s head, and she did not want Steinberg to draw it. Nor did he want to: Ruth Nanda Anshen had specifically asked him when he accepted the commission, and he had most emphatically refused. When Anshen sent Steinberg a copy of the finished book, she apologized for a jacket that was not in keeping with his drawings, insisting that the only thing that mattered was the “superb” content: “You and Paulus in the diversity of your unity.”

STEINBERG WAS WORKING ON HIS NEW book during the time he worked on Tillich’s, and when he finally settled on The New World, he called it “a great title which says nothing.” That may have been true, but the content was something else altogether. He meant this book to have a strong, serious, and unified theme, to be a collection of metaphysical drawings that represented problems and situations in life, “like a novel with a beginning, a development, an ending, and an epilogue.” After the modest success of his previous books—or, in his mind, the lack thereof—he wanted this one to achieve the sales and reviews usually associated with blockbuster bestsellers, despite the fact that 133 drawings had already appeared in The New Yorker, so that his biggest audience might not be willing to rush out to buy a book they had, in effect, already read. Still, he worked harder on this book than he had on any of the others, for he was used to adulation and was determined not to settle for anything less. Also, there were three exhibitions on the horizon, at Maeght, Parsons, and Janis, and he wanted the book to create an audience and a market for the drawings on display.

In preparation for the book’s launch, Steinberg gave a series of interviews to his friend Jean Stein in the summer of 1965, where he explained his work with far more honesty and openness than he had ever done before. There were other writers and critics who pursued him during this period, when he was in the public eye to a degree unprecedented in his past, but he chose Stein to convey his creative truths and Life magazine to be the venue for their widest possible dissemination. For those who might be newcomers to his work, and for those who were already familiar with it as well, he went through The New World with Stein, drawing by drawing, intent to explain how he himself interpreted his work. It was uncharacteristic for him to speak so freely about it, especially because he was working on the Tillich book at the same time and was often filled with panic and terror at the thought of having to contribute his own autobiographical volume to Anshen’s Credo series. What makes the conversations with Stein extraordinary is that Steinberg spent so much of his life using casual evasion or outright deception to lead astray critics, art historians, and especially would-be biographers. Now he made the conscious decision that he was willing to lift his curtain of privacy in the quest for, at the very least, recognition, and at the most, fame.

One of the most personally revealing drawings in The New World is “the biography of a man, a famous man,” who walks briskly along a path, followed by a hyphen that precedes the numbers of his birth year, 1905. Steinberg called this drawing “the monumentalization of people, this freezing of life,” and with an almost sly relish told Stein that “anybody who is clever destroys fame or tries to mislead his admirers and biographers by being unpleasant or unreliable.” Any “good man” who did this and got away with it was “a skunk,” and Steinberg gleefully counted himself among them.

The title page featured the drawing that he called the “motto” for the entire book, one of his chubby little middle-aged men with pointed nose and chin, this one in profile, with hands in his pockets and a thought bubble that reads “Cogito ergo Cartesius est.” In Steinberg’s translation, it meant “I reason—so it must be true that Descartes exists.” His little man was a “symbol drawing” that could be used to explain every drawing in the book: A “symbol drawing [means] that what I drew is drawing. The meaning in terms of my work—my drawings—is that drawing is drawing. It’s not a reality.”

Steinberg with Papoose, the cat he loved as his best companion. (illustration credit 31.1)

He explained further by using as an example his most important symbol drawing from the beginning of his career, and one which remained the most important until the end: the line, the straight flat line that “never makes any pretense of being anything else but a line.” The line was the central component of almost every drawing in The New World; anything that appeared on or near the line, from shadows or flowers to trees or buildings, had no importance to or influence on the line itself, which was “a form of art criticism, a satire on drawing.” The first full-page drawing in the book exemplified the importance of the line, where a man is poised at one end of a seesaw that is balanced by his drawing of spirals and doodles on the other end. Steinberg called this quest for balance a recurring motif in his art, that of “the relationship between a man and his work.” The seesaw tilts slightly toward what the man has created, because “the work is his platform and the work is heavier than he.” Steinberg meant for this man to be seen as an artist, and the work was “probably the only form of altruism the artist has. It’s through his work where his arrogance and self-centerism stops.”

Numbers appear throughout the book, and Steinberg uses them to combine “an illusion of reality with an abstraction.” The number 4 was especially interesting because it offered the opportunity to include one of his real-life passions, cats. He had them when he lived with Hedda and he became enamored of one of Sigrid’s, which he named Papoose, a black-and-white, intensely curious cat who figured prominently in many of his drawings. Four was a number he particularly liked because it could “arouse the curiosity of a cat,” and indeed he drew a generic cat peering into a 4. He dismissed the number 8 as too visibly closed, and therefore “a cat has no business to look inside”; cats should peer into something that is “a little bit open, a mystery.” Three was too “obvious” to elicit much interest; and the number 1 was a “nothing.” A 5 is “maybe more intriguing,” but only a 4 is “perfectly designed.”

Another of his iconic totems, the crocodile, makes an appearance as “a monster—a dragon—who is the real essence of beauty.” The crocodile had fascinated Steinberg since his trip through Africa, and he tried to describe it to Grace Glueck, saying that he was frustrated by wanting to get “some sort of idea of what a crocodile looks like, and I didn’t.” A surprised Glueck replied, “But you know what a crocodile looks like.” Steinberg said, “I know, and I don’t know … The main thing is to find out what sort of technique the crocodile is employing to show itself.”

By the time of Stein’s interview, the crocodile had become a recurring symbol, and in this book he depicts it as an “ambiguous line” in which the creature’s backbone becomes “the horizon line on which a gooey, disgusting, so-called beautiful landscape appears with all the elements of beauty: moonshine, moon, clouds, palm trees reflected in the calm water, a swan—the true elements of beauty.” That may be, but Steinberg meant the drawing to convey a sarcastic message: “Beauty is crocodilian.”

He returned to a theme from the Tillich book when he pictured people coming up from somewhere underground to find themselves adrift in a landscape. He called this “a sort of sadistic play on perspective,” because the people cannot locate themselves in space and therefore have to learn how to become located in time. “Time,” said Steinberg, “is much quicker and plays tricks with us. Space is more reasonable; it has to be accounted for; it has to be logical.”

He returned to the subject of the individual adrift in the middle of life when he placed two drawings facing each other on adjacent pages. In the first, a man walks on a horizon line toward a tree, a house, a windmill, and other objects denoting civilization, while behind him the line that was the horizon curls into a spiral. This was “his past; there is nothing; it’s completely canceled.” The man is walking toward his future, but the past is following dangerously closely in order to “eat him up.” In the facing drawing, the man cannot look to the future to keep himself alive because he is inside the spiral of the past and it threatens to engulf him. “This is a sort of frightening drawing,” Steinberg concluded. It represented “the expressionist who lives by his own essence … unconnected with the political and moral life of people or of the artist.”

He returned to the sadness of people who are unable to communicate when he represented several conversations “in a stenographic way.” On a sofa and several chairs he seats a “fuzzy” spiral, a “boring labyrinth … with a hysterical line,” a “giggling, jittery bit of calligraphy,” and several comic-book symbols for speed, noise, and confusion. When Steinberg lost his usual precision and drifted into a convoluted explanation of the many meanings a spiral could have, Stein asked if this was because he saw himself in any of the stenographic figures. “No,” he said emphatically, “no place.”

Various kinds of drawings representing uncommunicative conversations follow, from thought bubbles with his unreadable false writing to the paper-bag cutouts of figures spouting maps of their travels. They all lead up to one of his most popular drawings of all time: a boss who sits behind a big desk, smiling sadistically at a timid worker while over the boss’s head a huge NO looms, entirely filled with unreadable false writing. When it appeared in The New Yorker, so many people wanted to buy the original that it generated the most fan mail Steinberg had received in all his years with the magazine.

Stein wanted Steinberg to talk about the many drawings that featured question marks, but he cut her short: “Let’s not talk about question marks; it’s boring. They are obvious by now, I’ve made so many.” He wanted to talk instead about three other drawings that he thought were vitally important for an understanding of the book’s general thesis. The first was of another of his fear-inducing spirals, this one a “misleading” series of concentric circles in front of a man who holds a pen in his hand and is visible behind it. In a nod toward his architectural background and the riddle of spatial relations, Steinberg called this drawing “a form of perversion.” Because the man behind the spiral is visible, “actually this space does not exist … This is a spiral line that contains an even mass of space instead of opaque and transparent space the way I indicate here.” What he had done in drawing such a picture, he insisted, was beyond perversion: “It’s a form of cruelty.”

The second drawing depicted “a completely droll situation,” an art lover standing in full emotional thrall in front of painting in a museum. Steinberg ridiculed viewers who gaze rapturously for long periods of time at art: “It’s something intellectual that must be perceived in a fraction of an instant; the true lover of art going through a museum goes on roller skates and is extremely tired after five minutes.”

The last one he wanted to discuss was the top one of two drawings on the same page, this one representing “the hero fighting a giant baby.” On what appears to be an altar or the plinth of a gigantic monument, there stands one of his “mechanical” drawings, a doodled Don Quixote complete with shield and spear who points his horse toward a gigantic upside-down baby that is balanced on top of the plinth by its wiry strands of hair. In one hand the giant baby dangles a kitty-cornered midget version of itself. Steinberg said there was a “key” to this drawing: “the dragon the hero picks out for himself to fight, and anybody who fights a giant baby is really a dragon; it’s not a hero.”

For the cover, he found a sheet of the marbled paper used on the inside covers of old books and created what could easily pass for a journal, ledger, or diary, a blank slate on which readers could affix their own personal meaning. Steinberg left the marbled paper plain and unornamented except for “real gummed labels.” The one in the center of the page that bore his name and the book’s title could have graced any ordinary file folder. On the upper and lower edges he placed triangular blue protectors used to mount photos in albums, and he ran a red leatherized protective strip down the length of the spine. When his publisher questioned why he used such things to make a simple cover for a complex book, Steinberg said, “I liked them and they stuck and that simplified the whole thing.” Stein was also puzzled by the simplicity of the jacket, especially because it gave no indication of the often startling content within. She asked why he chose not to use a drawing that would immediately identify him as the book’s author, as he had done on his previous books, especially The Labyrinth, the cover of which showed a drawing that became one of his most famous, the man with a rabbit inside his head. In The New World, this drawing appeared on the back jacket flap, which Steinberg defended by saying that he had “no business to put a drawing on the jacket of a book of drawings.” He thought it best to leave the rabbit man where he was, where he would be the reader’s last (and lasting) impression as he closed the book.

STEINBERG WAS PROBABLY WISE TO CHANGE the title of the book from “Confessions” to The New World, for when the drawings are taken as a whole they create a very different impression from when they are viewed individually. Like the man with the rabbit in his head, the reader cannot help but wonder what was going on inside the head of the artist who produced them. The wit combined with seriousness that Steinberg portrayed so elegantly in the Tillich book is certainly present, but the overall message is darker, the tone harsher, and the subject matter progresses in almost unrelieved starkness. When taken all together, the words Steinberg used to explain the drawings become—to use his word for the “Gog” drawing—an “interesting” way of interpreting the book. He labels some of them “satire” and says they are “sadistic,” “frightening,” and “unconnected,” with components that are “hysterical,” “giggling,” and “jittery.” In the conversations with Stein, he uses the words destroy, destroying, and destruction repeatedly to describe what is happening within various drawings. He is pleased that a number are deliberately “misleading,” and “cruelty” is a recurring and satisfying theme. In short, the drawings in The New World convey a far different message from that of the illustrations in Tillich’s Search for Absolutes.

STEINBERG’S EXHIBITION AT GALERIE MAEGHT WAS to open in March, and he went to Paris a month beforehand to oversee the work connected with it. Sigrid assumed that she would go with him and was stunned when he told her he planned to go alone. She flew into a rage when he refused to discuss his reasons, but when he stayed silent and would not engage in argument, she grew still herself. She was hurt, but she was also afraid of provoking him to an irreparable breach.

He went alone to Paris, where he burst into a flurry of activity, going every day to the printer in Levallois to oversee the production of Derrière le Miroir, the original lithograph for the exhibition posters, and the series of lithographs and prints that would be sold along with the drawings. Le Masque had become a much larger book than the one he had originally envisioned, but he was pleased with how it looked. He also liked the preliminary plans for the accompanying DLM and was content with the studio space in the gallery that Maeght set aside for him, where he could work on his mural and the panels on which Inge Morath’s photographs would hang. Everything conspired to give him pleasure, and he was surprised to discover that even though he was exhausted, the work made him happy. All around him were “tables, light, cabinets for drawing, all my familiar objects.”

He had been living in a hotel but was tired of it, and Morath insisted that he move into her apartment when she and Arthur Miller returned to Connecticut. He was happy to be there after a full workday, when he was too tired even to go to the movies. He stayed in and read books about the Greek islands, because he had relented and wanted Sigrid to come to Paris and go there with him on vacation after the show was safely launched. “I’m happy,” he wrote to her, enclosing a check for apartment expenses and an airline ticket, “NYParisNY.” If she wanted to do him a favor before she came, she could buy a pair of his favorite English shoes at a Madison Avenue store, but she was not to bring “too much stuff” for herself, because he wanted to buy her whatever she needed in Paris.

Sigrid was wary of his sudden change of heart and did not join him in Morath’s apartment. She booked a room at the Hotel d’Angleterre and said she would “show up at the opening for a moment.” She assured him he would have “nothing to worry about. I don’t expect you to stand there holding hands with me but I have to do what I consider right.” In her last letter before her flight, she told him she was “very hysterical and full of anxieties,” especially after the people she occasionally worked with at the design firm gave her tranquilizers as a going-away gift, and only half in jest. It was not the most soothing message he could receive on the eve of a reunion that was bound to be tense.

The exhibition opened to great success, with large crowds, good reviews, and excellent sales, especially to new collectors. All his friends were there, among them Hélion, Geer van Velde, Matta, Ionesco, and Sandy and Louisa Calder. Lica came with her family, and Sigrid spent much of the evening standing quietly with them instead of near Saul. She was ill at ease, and he made it worse by simmering angrily over her lack of poise and self-confidence. Some years later, when she was trying to relive the events of their relationship in a journal meant to help her understand it, she wrote about the strain of this opening and others that followed: “I never fitted, never was quite at ease with his friends. I don’t have enough manners, class. And I don’t have the clothes. I only embarrass him and myself.”

Sigrid stayed on in Paris after the opening, but things remained strained when they took their holiday in Athens, Salonika, and Crete. Afterward, Saul went on alone to Rome and Milan before returning to Paris and Morath’s apartment, while Sigrid flew there directly and moved back into her hotel. Saul let himself be caught up in the whirl of Paris socializing and did all that he had been too tired to do before the opening, dining out every night with old friends and new, especially with Maeght and the flock of collectors who had purchased drawings from the show and wanted to be seen with the Paris art season’s current sensation. Sigrid was mostly on her own until May, when she went to Trier to see her father for what turned out to be his last birthday (he died in September).

Things continued to deteriorate badly between them. In a cryptic entry in her journal jottings, Sigrid wrote the single sentence “This is when he hit me.” She neither explained the comment nor referred to it ever again. Saul never did either. Whatever happened remains known only to the two of them.

WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES, Steinberg holed up in the country, spending the summer and early fall hard at work on the Parsons and Janis exhibitions, which loomed in November “like an exam in a French Lycée.” He knew from the start that the joint show was “going to generate a lot of interest and excitement” because it came on the heels of the French one and was his first American exhibition in thirteen years. The year 1966 had indeed been a memorable one, overwhelmingly full of new experiences generated by the two successes, the exhibition in France and the publication of The New World in the United States. Both gave him a huge boost of self-esteem; as he said tongue-in-cheek to Aimé Maeght, “Seeing the book always makes me realize how great I am.”

He used this combination of arrogance and self-confidence to deal with the onrush of reporters and photographers who clamored to interview a suddenly newsworthy artist who had just received two exceptional honors: he was about to become the first ever artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institution and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French government. The medal was conferred in September at a ceremony in the French embassy in Washington, where Steinberg’s “embarrassment” was eased by the French cultural counselor Edouard Morot-Sir’s “very nice speech” about him. The Smithsonian appointment was widely viewed as “another medal of honor,” which Steinberg was to earn by spending two to three months in Washington, beginning in January 1967. He had to begin to think about the details involved in making the move as he juggled all the work for the joint exhibition and a host of other projects. Steinberg told Aldo that he was “in that state of trance of soldiers or actors who must do something without any longer knowing why.”

On top of the work connected with the gallery shows, he was overseeing the curators who were installing some of his other work in several museums. Maeght moved most of the Paris drawings and murals to St.-Paul-de-Vence, where his Fondation Maeght hosted another show after the one in Paris closed, and the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels planned to show the mural panels from the 1958 World’s Fair. The Cincinnati Art Museum exhibited several of the murals Steinberg had made for the restaurant in that city and wanted to know if he would consider making several others. He sent a telegram saying, “My fee today would be seventy-five thousand dollars,” and there the matter rested.

Money was pouring in from the sale of his drawings and the reprints that he had authorized as illustrations for books and articles. One of the many buyers was the Hamburg, Germany, newspaper Die Welt, which used them to illustrate John Steinbeck’s article “America Today.” Steinberg was pleased to be associated with such a distinguished writer and gave permission readily.

With all these requests came a new series of legal concerns. Steinberg objected that he would have no control over the drawings sold in the Parsons-Janis exhibitions, as the owners would normally have the right to do whatever they pleased with them. He wanted the same agreement with the galleries that he had always insisted on with publications, that he sold the drawing for one-time use but all rights of reproduction remained with him. This was fine for periodicals but was not usually the case with gallery sales. Alexander Lindey told him that copyright was “a complex subject that resists simplification” and his only option would be to rely on “statutory copyright” if he insisted on retaining all other rights. He advised Steinberg to draw the standard symbol for copyright (the letter c in a circle) somewhere on each drawing, and to photograph every one, making sure that the symbol showed clearly. He also advised him to make a rubber stamp reading “© 1966 by Saul Steinberg. The sale of this drawing covers only the physical drawing itself. The artist reserves all other rights in it, including copyright.” And he warned Steinberg to make sure that the catalogue was copyrighted in his name and not in the names of the galleries.

In retrospect, Steinberg was wise to retain control of his drawings, for the works in the Parsons-Janis shows sold even better and for much higher prices than those at Maeght. He bragged about it to Aimé Maeght: “I sold eighty pictures at respectable prices— even more and at higher prices than Paris. Naturally, this gives me great pleasure.” He told Aldo it gave him “paternal satisfaction” to watch his drawings being “sold at high prices.” Even the articles and reviews gave him pleasure, particularly two he singled out for their “high quality,” Vogue and the New York Times.

By the time of the American exhibitions, the publicity bandwagon was clipping along at an astonishing speed. Journalists were first alerted to the possibility of a good story when Time and L’Express wrote about the Maeght exhibition. Time described crowds who rubbernecked, chuckled, and occasionally snorted, saying that the scene was “ready-made for a Saul Steinberg cartoon.” The article also noted that Steinberg was “breaking a 13-year self-imposed ban on exhibitions,” and journalists lined up to find out why. When Pierre Schneider took Steinberg on a walking tour of the Louvre and published their conversation as “an unsettling trip through art history,” the flood of requests took off like one of Steinberg’s cartoon rockets. Many interviewers came from Europe, and before the year ended Steinberg had been filmed for programs dedicated to his life and work on German and Italian television networks, and others were in the works. In the United States, in the heyday of magazine popularity, some of the leading cultural critics ensured that he was everywhere: Jean Stein’s long article appeared in Life, he was photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, Hilton Kramer wrote about him in the New York Times, and Harold Rosenberg published one of their conversations in Art News. He was actually disappointed when the Times story did not feature him or his work on the cover, as he had been led to believe. Rosenberg commiserated, but only slightly: “Congratulations on your non-appearance on the cover of Times. By this time you must be sick of this whole business of appearances and realities.”

Steinberg was not actually sick of the publicity merry-go-round, but it was a mixed blessing. He was no longer just an artist whose work was easily recognized on sight (primarily by readers of The New Yorker); he had become famous and he was a celebrity. On the popular television program College Bowl, contestants were asked to identify “the line philosopher-artist-cartoonist.” Without even seeing a drawing, they all answered, “Saul Steinberg.”

Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him. Groups and organizations that recognized the cachet of using his name invited him to lend it; others simply wanted to welcome him among them. The Romanian Socialist Republic requested his company after the opening of the eighteenth session of the United Nations General Assembly; he was horrified by the invitation and ignored it. SACO (the Sino-American Cooperative Association), the organization of those with whom he had served during the war, invited him to the annual reunion; he never joined, never paid dues, and ignored this one too. Those he did not ignore tended to be political, but he was cautious about how he showed his support. A committee known as Angry Arts, whose members included David Dellinger, Paul Goodman, Grace Paley, and Robert Nichols, invited him to join a protest against the Vietnam War by appearing in support of those who planned to burn their draft cards in Central Park. He supported the protest but did not attend, and when this same group wrote to Picasso to ask him to withdraw Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art, Steinberg offered vocal support for that as well, but he did not sign his name to the letter. He had never hidden his support for civil rights and was pleased when a drawing he donated to support the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., was put on view in the Museum of Modern Art; when the Congress of Racial Equality asked him to join other artists in donating one of his works to raise funds, he sent a drawing of a knight on a horse aiming his spear at a tiny alligator. His support for Jewish organizations was always unwavering, and when Brandeis University’s Women’s Committee asked him to contribute to its annual auction, he sent ten signed catalogues of the Maeght show, which they estimated would bring in a minimum of $500, a substantial sum at the time.

There were too many invitations, and because he still did not have a gallery assistant to help with the work or a full-time secretary to help with correspondence, he tended to ignore anything he did not want to do. A committee that included Philip Pavia and Lester Johnson felt the need for a new place where artists could gather and invited him to join the Second Street Workshop Club (formerly the 8th Street Club). He did not respond. When he ignored a letter from the Guggenheim Museum inviting him to lecture on his affinity with Paul Klee—a facile association that was beginning to irritate him more and more, and one that he did not want to promote—he not only ignored the initial letter, he also ignored the several that followed.

Everything went well in 1966, and 1967 augured to be much the same. “I go on working (like the winners of lotteries),” he told Aldo, “recognizing that it’s the only valid pleasure.” To Aimé Maeght he described what he would be doing next: “I’m going to live in Washington for three months, in grand style in an elegant house, with a Chinese cook, etc. etc. Come see me!” He was not as welcoming to Sigrid, telling her to stay in New York and keep herself busy, as he would not have time for her. This time she did not confront him but confided her anger and dismay to a collection of diary jottings.

Her insecurity pervaded what she wrote about how he had dictated every aspect of the relationship and she had gone along with whatever he wanted just so it would continue. Now she found “the constant fear of insults … unbearable.” It was “amazing” to see how unkind he could be, but she warned that if he continued to be so cold and undemonstrative, he would have no problem getting rid of her: “I may be slow and sticky, but even I slowly accumulate enough resistance to resign myself … As long as I am with you, I am dependent and my misery is at least partly your responsibility.” She blamed him for “getting me down, putting me down, and making me miserable.” Their relationship had disintegrated into “a constant watch on either side, for the offense from the other, or …” Unable to finish her thought, she left it there.

She was alone on New Year’s Eve and saw very little of him before his departure on January 25. By February, even though there had not been anything like a separation, she was begging him to take her back, telling him she was “down” and not sure she should be writing at all: “Don’t mind my vocabulary. I’ll never be a pleasant or elegant letter writer—or probably person—for that matter.” When he did not respond, she tried a different tack. As he was in Washington, she asked, “How does the whole Viet Nam story look from there? Here it becomes more and more unbelievable. Maybe everybody including me should do something.” He did not respond to that either. He was conscious that he was not American by birth and careful not to make any overt gesture that might bring criticism. He had been reading Henry James and found a quote that he particularly liked: “It is a complex fate to be an American.” It came to mind often during his three months in Washington.

CHAPTER 32

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30