Furniture as biography

I got to work as though out of remorse and work has become a vice. Here I’ve spent five days in a beautiful prison,” Steinberg wrote to Aldo Buzzi in February 1971 from Zurich, Switzerland. He had checked himself into the Privatklinik Bircher-Benner on the advice of Vladimir Nabokov, to see if he could stop smoking, cold turkey, through a regime of controlled starvation. There were also medical tests, examinations, and massages, but unfortunately the hunger treatment did not work, and he continued to smoke his several packs a day for another year or so.

He liked Zurich, a “clean and orderly city.” The clinic stay was actually a side trip tacked on to an exhibition of his work at Maeght’s Swiss gallery after it closed in Paris. It was one of his two solo exhibitions that year, the other at the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, and he was in three group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He had submerged himself in his own work with such a passion that his interests spilled over into activities within the art world and he became a more public artist. He was a judge for the American Institute of Graphic Arts show, chaired that year by Milton Glaser, and because of his friendship with Donald Barthelme (they met through The New Yorker), he donated the drawing “Two Women” to a show called “She” at New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery.

He was also turning out work at warp speed for The New Yorker, which featured five of his drawings on covers during 1971. Three of the five were quasi-philosophical and word-dependent, with the one for July 31, “I do, I have, I am,” among his most lastingly popular. It generated enormous mail, including a letter that Steinberg particularly liked from a fan who told him he must have befriended “a couple million scientologists” because the drawing represented the three conditions of existence according to Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard: “Be, do, and have.” Another cover was more quietly profound, a landscape peopled with vaguely figurative words either marching in a parade or floating ethereally alone and depicting states of being based on the verb to be.

As Steinberg drew these covers, he was already thinking of the kind of drawings his next book should include, and unlike the previous ones, for which the title was a last-minute decision, this one had a title that he had already settled on: The Inspector. He chose it carefully, to convey the idea that his was the all-seeing eye pointing out the enormous changes happening within culture and society, manners and mores. Steinberg always liked to meditate on the twin topics of art and reality, and he did so here with drawings that illustrated the onrush of tectonic shifts and changes in the art world of the seventies and of how the artist was affected by them. He dealt gently and humorously with the theme by featuring an artist-dog who stands on his hind legs holding a brush and palette to ponder the canvas on which he has just painted the adage “Beware the Artist.” Storm clouds explode over the artist-dog’s head as he critiques his work, perhaps an indication of the ferment and fracas that Steinberg glimpsed or heard about every day when he went to his Union Square studio.

The cover he titled “Bleecker Street” signaled another change in his subject matter, as it marked the time when Steinberg “left his study for the streets” and much of his work became “all about New York: its images, streets, and city scenes.”

Besides his sightings of what went on in Warhol’s Factory, which was in full swing a few floors below his studio, he could see and hear the noise, confusion, and chaos of the passing parade in Greenwich Village from his front-row seat on the balcony of his fifteenth-floor apartment. His version of what happened on Bleecker Street incorporated sentiments from his growing involvement with antiwar activity, his ongoing iconic imagery, and his serious explorations of materials and techniques that he had experimented with only briefly in the past. To render the drawing, he added graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor to his usual crisp black line, all of which were smudged, smeared, and softened in various degrees. They gave a blurred and unfocused quality to various parts of the drawing, which as a whole he intended to be unsettling but also to be instructive and educational. In this drawing, the process of making it was as important as the idea it conveyed, and he wanted viewers who studied it to see how he, as the artist, made the decisions that led to the completed work. To make sure viewers could see the process, he gave strict instructions to the magazine’s art department not to erase the many signs of strikeouts, erasures, and other changes and corrections he had made as he worked.

Some of Steinberg’s ideas about how to portray people in street scenes came from the underground comics that he had been collecting for several years, everything from R. Crumb’s eccentric vision to the characters in Japanese manga. From them he took grim, scary, and pop-eyed faces, shiny black-helmeted authority figures, and creatures either bristling with fear or armored and threatening

The last of the five New Yorker covers was far more serene, a collection of six small paintings he called “Six Sunsets,” positioned to resemble two rows of postcards, mini-canvases depicting Steinberg’s fascination with the way the light changed throughout the day at Louse Point. As he worked on this series for the next several years, he turned to executing both large canvases in oil and watercolor on paper, and a major component of the paintings became clouds. He was delighted with them and proudly included many that featured clouds in the Maeght exhibition of 1973, as well as in the exhibitions at Parsons and Janis. Hedda Sterne trained her critical artist’s eye on the paintings and found them seriously flawed, lacking in originality as well as technique, and they sparked one of her most stringent and caustic criticisms of his work. She told him she could not understand his fixation on such a mundane subject, saying that he, who had always known his strengths unerringly, had “evidently lost all sight of the uniqueness of your gifts. Thousands and thousands of idiots can outcloud you!” She admonished him to “have fun. Play!…Don’t underestimate your god-given ability to enchant and delight … beware of the wrong kind of pride and self-challenge!”

Without making direct references to Sigrid, Hedda was not only criticizing Saul’s subject matter, she was also criticizing the way he was conducting his personal life. He had not recovered from the shock of Sigrid’s affair with the Ethiopian, Reesom, but he succumbed to her tearful pleas that he should to try to forget it. Hoping that travel would work its usual magic toward reconciliation, he put her “on probation” and took her on a holiday to the Virgin Islands, Mexico, and Arizona. It was not the healing experience either wanted, for everywhere they encountered wealthy retired Americans who seemed to be turning idyllic scenery into “concentration camps for old folks.” They returned home despondent, and by Easter, when Sigrid claimed that Saul called her “a pig,” they had separated yet again.

STEINBERG RETREATED INTO A WHIRL OF work out of “remorse” over the distress in his life, and work quickly became an absorbing “vice” he could not get enough of. While he was churning out new drawings, an intriguing offer came from the Geneva publisher Albert Skira to contribute a book of writings as well as illustrations to the series called Les Sentiers de la Création (Pathways of Creation). Skira, who was renowned for his beautiful art books, invited an elite group of international artists, writers, and other intellectuals to write about the genesis of their personal creativity. Among those who had already written or accepted to write were Steinberg’s friends Joan Miró and Eugène Ionesco and an artist he admired and to whom he was pleased to be compared, Pablo Picasso. He relished being in the distinguished company of Michel Butor and Roland Barthes, whom he knew through their essays for the two volumes about his work in the Derrière le Miroir series; he had been acquainted with Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon since his encounters with the Sartre-Beauvoir existentialists at the Pont Royal bar in the 1950s; and he had been aware of the international theoretical influence of Jean Starobinski and Claude Lévi-Strauss ever since Hedda Sterne had encouraged him to read their books, along with the poetry of René Char and Octavio Paz. Steinberg was inordinately proud to be included in such company, and as “the writer who draws,” he set to work with alacrity in Springs and scheduled a meeting with Skira in Geneva on his next trip to Switzerland, in November. Steinberg did not come away with any insights into what Skira wanted after they met, because all the publisher talked about was Picasso. Still, he remained enthusiastic about the challenge, telling Maeght that “a writer’s work is a lot more difficult and tedious than mine is, but what a pleasure to learn a new craft.” The euphoria dissipated abruptly when Skira gave the book the title La Table des Matières (Table of Contents) and announced its imminent publication before Steinberg had written a word or made a single drawing.

WHEN HE MET WITH SKIRA, STEINBERG had just made his third flight to Europe in a single year, still something of a novelty in the early 1970s. He had flown to Zurich for the October 22, 1971, opening of his exhibition at the Maeght gallery there and joked to Aimé Maeght that going back and forth so much was bound to raise suspicion that he was smuggling heroin. He had made the two previous flights because he was worried about how his new work might make the forthcoming shows “risky,” and he wanted to do what he could to mitigate the danger.

In June, depressed and in a bad mood after his travels with Sigrid, he had gone to Paris, mostly just to get away but also to make sure everything was proceeding according to plan. Once again he irritated everyone working at the gallery as he obsessed over what each picture should be called, where it should be hung, and how much it should cost. The last decision was the most crucial, as he had spent money lavishly during the past year and was so desperate for an infusion of cash that he had to ask Sidney Janis for an advance of $10,000 against future sales.

Steinberg spent the evenings systematically working his way through dinners with his sister and her family, his long list of friends, and the two women with whom he had been in sporadic long-term liaisons since the late 1950s. When he finished his business in Paris, he made his usual circuit of friends in Milan, including Ada and especially Aldo.

He had a difficult time in October trying to fit in everything that he wanted to do. There was his opening in Zurich, and as soon as his show was safely launched, he went again to the Buchinger Klinik but this time to the one in Bodensee, the Überlingen facility in the isolation of Lake Constance that Nabokov had recommended for overcoming his cigarette cravings. This time the starvation treatment worked, and two months later he told Aldo the “sensational news…no more accordion in the chest, no more human ashtray.” It made him feel so strange not to crave cigarettes that he used one of James Joyce’s favorite words to describe what happened to him: “metemphyschosis” [sic], a veritable transmigration of the soul.

The isolation on the shores of the frozen lake in the depths of winter brought on the need to reach out to friends he could confide in, and as always happened when he was away from home, his feelings toward Sigrid softened. He sent her a postcard that he signed, “Saul with warm blue scarf [her Christmas gift to him] who sends love.” Even though he had been away from home for the better part of 1971, and even though he claimed he was desperate to get back to his studio to settle down to work, the Zurich show sold so well that he was once again flush, with enough money for the travel bug to infect him. He wrote from the clinic to ask Sigrid to go with him to Africa and she was thrilled to accept. He didn’t have time to think about his impetuous action until he was back in New York in November, when he told Aldo he was “confused—but very busy.”

ON JANUARY 19, 1972, MR. AND MRS. SAUL STEINBERG (as it said on the tickets issued by Thorn Tree Safaris, Ltd., in Nairobi) left for a grand tour of every tourist destination on the African continent. They used Zurich as the point of departure because of the easy connection to Cairo. And because Sigrid felt the need to cleanse her system from drugs and drink before undertaking such a momentous journey, they both checked into the Überlingen clinic for several days. They flew to Cairo and Luxor, Nairobi, and Kampala, making stops at Paraa, Murcheson, Entebbe, Ngorongoro, Arusha, Lake Manyara, and Amboseli-Kilimanjaro. The trip meant different things to each of them, but for Sigrid it was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with Africa, particularly Mali, to which she returned as often as she could, sometimes with Saul, mostly alone, and often several times in a single year.

Africa thrilled Sigrid, and for years afterward she tried to explain how it touched the depths of her soul. One of her best paintings was a representation of the African continent, all done in luminous shades of browns and greens. Occasionally she kept journals and diaries in which she tried repeatedly to describe how much it meant to her to evolve from a nubile woman into the wise old one who had gained the respect and friendship of the local people, particularly in Mali. Africa became the only place where she was truly at peace, a sensation she felt from the very first trip, and some of her happiest memories were of driving in companionable silence in an open jeep across landscapes where the wind gently fanned their faces. She wanted to believe that the mere fact of being there was enough to resolve many of their problems and bring them closer.

For Saul, the trip was fine, but when anyone asked, he dismissed the African experience as just another “of these absurd trips in a world ruined by the damned race of tourists.” Once they were back in Europe, he returned to business as usual and became his brusque and peremptory self. He and Sigrid had been guests of the Maeghts at the Fondation in St.-Paul-de-Vence (to which the Zurich show had moved) and then stopped in Paris, where Saul tended to business and Sigrid spent time quietly painting in Cachan with Lica and her family. He was itching to go home to Springs, where he could be alone to sort out the swirling feelings aroused by his personal problems. They all came down to one: Sigrid, who was now thirty-six to his fifty-eight, and who in middle age had become a far different woman from the young girl who had entranced him.

HE COULDN’T TELL HEDDA WHAT HE was going through because he was too proud to admit that his personal life was not as placid as he pretended, nor that he had no idea of how to smooth it out. Also he couldn’t talk to Hedda because of something that had happened some time before between the two women. Sigrid had tried to make Hedda assume the role of mother/ big sister, which she made many other women play, but Hedda refused and told Sigrid what she already told Saul when their liaison began: that she did not want him to ask for advice or confide personal details to her. When Sigrid tried later to do so, Hedda told her that they could never be close friends or confidantes; Sigrid could always expect cordiality and politeness, but that was all. When she related this to Saul, he knew it was Hedda’s way of telling him not to expect her to help him sort out his problems with his younger lover.

The only other person Saul had ever trusted as implicitly as Hedda was Aldo, so he continued to confide in him, but a shade more openly than before. They had always written in Italian, and although Saul considered it his first language, he had been away from Italy long enough that he had become removed enough from the language for it to provide a buffer from the harsh reality that came when he expressed embarrassing or emotional thoughts in English. He was as honest as he could permit himself to be when he told Aldo that once he was back in New York, he was going through “a special period, I mean a sad one— changes—not feeling like myself.”

At the time, the word depression had not come into general casual use, nor was it in Steinberg’s vocabulary, so he passed off his feelings as an inexplicable malaise or melancholy. When he had to address his general lack of enthusiasm for life and work, he told different stories to different people. To Hedda, he said merely that overwork had made him tired and perhaps he had also picked up a bug in Africa that he could not shake. To Aldo, he said he was working steadily but had wasted too much time on the book that became The Inspector and “like the previous collections will be mixed and confused.” He only found “freedom and diversion” when he could “invent new work,” but he had little time for it because of all his responsibilities and commitments. To Aimé Maeght, he said everything was just fine and he was working cheerfully for his own amusement, but the rest of his letter contradicted the comment.

Of all the work connected with the 1973 Paris show, he was surprised by how pleased he was with the lithographs, especially the drawing he called “Le mois du coeur” in homage to February and Valentine’s Day. It had always been a very special holiday for Sigrid, and he was puzzled about what led him to produce such a drawing during a time of unsettled, possibly tumultuous feelings about their relationship. Other projects were not even that clear-cut: he promised to sign off on the Derrière le Miroir proof (“bon à tirer”) during the summer, but when autumn came, he had to apologize for being late. He blamed everything on his “struggle against tobacco,” with the excuse that he was so “vigorously not smoking” that it had become his full-time occupation. In truth he was convinced that the absence of tobacco in his body had altered his “chemical composition” and changed him into “somebody else—less fun or actually boring.” He was grateful to have something external to blame for his increasingly melancholy state of mind.

IN JUNE 1972 HE COULD NOT DECIDE where his oil paintings fit within his canon or whether they even contributed to it. Just looking at them made him go through his files to contrast them with drawings done long before. By comparison, the old work looked so “beautiful and simple” that he questioned why he was driven to waste so much time on “paintings that look printed.” Obviously Hedda’s letter chastising his cloud fixation had struck a chord. She was the only person who could criticize his work and get away with it, so anything that displeased her rankled him.

As a respite from painting, and because he now had a second studio assistant, Gordon Pulis, to help him in Springs, he found another diversion when he decided to work in wood. He joked that he turned to wood because he had two carpenters in his employ and had to invent work to keep them busy, but that was only partially true. He was unable to identify his other reason, saying that he thought it “a bit sinister” that he had become nostalgic for “things from architecture school and in general from the drawing table.” He watched in awe as Pulis and van Dalen cut the wood to his exact specifications for rulers, triangles, T-squares, pencils, and pens, leaving him to draw the markings delineating inches and centimeters. Sometimes he found a remnant that lent itself to an illustration directly from his imagination, without any help from the carpenters, such as the slice of pinewood bisected by a natural crack that he turned into the drawing known as “the Montauk Highway Map.” He began to make other objects as well, everything from wooden dog tags like the ones he had worn in the navy to a series of wooden cameras that he gave as gifts to photographer friends, among them Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. Eventually his vision expanded, and so too did the works in wood when he began to make large-scale tables, both flat tabletops and three-dimensional stand-alone structures.

Steinberg believed that working in wood brought him closer to “the rather animal world of painters.” As he watched the carpenters, and as he took over to contribute his vision to the raw shapes he asked them to cut, it gave him the only “pleasure” he could find within his work: “The mind is at rest, it’s the happiness of a horse … it makes me work and even dream that I’m working.”

“I think there were many too many [tables], but he just loved the idea of them,” van Dalen recalled after Steinberg hired a carpenter, Sig Lomaky, to do the actual construction. He himself may have been unable or unwilling to learn carpentry, but even before the wood was touched, he always knew what it should become. “He was all about ideas,” van Dalen said, and Pulis agreed: “He could make it look like I did it, when really it was all his own doing.”

One of the earliest tables, entitled “Politecnico, ” was a precisely arranged collection of objects that hinted at Steinberg’s past experiences as a student in Milan. Pencils, an old-fashioned straight pen, and a ruler frame the other objects on the table; at the bottom, varnish smoothes and blurs three photographs just as memory might do, while above them, a languid landscape is populated by rubber stamps of human figures, with one of Steinberg’s fake seals hovering in the sky above as if to bestow authenticity on the scene below. On each side of the landscape he arranged two small plywood wedges carved and striated to represent receipt tablets. At the top of the tableau, a piece of thin wood colored and scored to resemble an etching plate provides architectural detail, as it depicts a mythical building in the brutal style so popular in Mussolini’s Italy when Steinberg studied there.

He began to make the tables, both the flat tabletop assemblages and the three-dimensional stand-alone pieces, in the early 1970s and continued until the last three years of his life. If all his work was an autobiography of sorts, the tables are among the most teasing, as they conceal even as they reveal. Steinberg called one of the most intriguing (and possibly concealing) “Furniture as Biography.” It was one of the three-dimensional pieces which he chose not to sell and kept in the basement at Springs for years, although he allowed it to be shown late in his life, in 1987, under a different title (“Grand Hotel”); once again he refused to sell it, and finally he partially disassembled it. On this table was a collection of furniture of the size usually associated with dollhouses— chairs, tables, beds, dressers, armoires, and chests of drawers. Many were three-dimensional replicas of furniture that was loosely reminiscent of the hotel rooms he stayed in during his travels, a lot of which he drew in his sketchbooks. Whether he referred to them or drew from memory is not known, because he worked on the furniture alone, with no help from Pulis. When the table was finished, Pulis posits, Steinberg thought it too crudely assembled to let it be seen; Hedda Sterne thought it was because it might have brought back too many memories that he decided were best left in the past.

One of the most revealing wooden constructions is the one he called “Library,” a high, spindly, and large-as-life bookcase-cum-secretary on which two shelves resembling a wooden crate hold a collection of some of his favorite books, all ornamented with his lettering and cover drawings. His taste in literature was eclectic and occasionally surprising. While he raved about Richard Hughes’s novel The Fox in the Attic and recommended it to all his friends, he chose instead to commemorate another of Hughes’s novels, In Hazard, which he liked less. He loved anything Italian or about Italy; Norman Douglas is there with Old Calabria, and he honored his friends Aldo Buzzi and Ennio Flaiano along with Kipling and Jack London in the Italian translations in which he read them. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Gogol, and Nabokov are on his shelves, as are Jules Verne and Dostoevsky in the Romanian translations he read as a schoolboy. Curiously absent is his all-time favorite novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses. However, Steinberg enjoyed a Joycean in-joke when he included a book whose author’s name suited his subject: W. M. Oakwood’s Carpentry and Cabinet Making. As he played with wood, he marveled over everything about it, telling Aldo that he was so captivated that “in fact, I’m preparing a show for Maeght in October [1973] all tables.” Working with wood was akin to a miracle: “Who would have said old Saul would be revived and obsessed by work!”

CHAPTER 35

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