The uncertainty of his place

His choice of media, his use of humor, and his success at The New Yorker contributed to the uncertainty of his place in the art world. After exhibits at Maeght, Janis, and the Whitney retrospective, people still asked “Is it Art?” Saul Steinberg was cremated and his ashes were buried next to Sigrid Spaeth’s in the small plot enclosed by the white picket fence and beneath the tree she had planted.

Steinberg made his last will and testament on April 16, 1999, naming his attorney, John Silberman, as one of his two executors. He was the only person privy to the will’s content until after Steinberg’s death, when he informed Prudence Crowther that she was to be the co-executor. Before he died, Steinberg had told her that he planned to establish a foundation, but he was not specific about the degree of her involvement.

Silberman set up the Saul Steinberg Foundation, following Steinberg’s directives as described in its mission statement: “a non-profit organization whose mission is to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg’s contribution to 20th-century art.” In his will, Steinberg also appointed two other trustees for the original governing board, John Hollander and Ian Frazier. He also heeded Hollander’s advice that Yale University would make an excellent repository for his holdings, and the will stipulated that with the exception of a specific bequest of eight drawings to the Whitney Museum, his artworks were to be divided between Yale and the Steinberg Foundation: The university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library received his archives and sketchbooks, all works smaller than fifteen by seventeen inches in size, and all the black-and-white New Yorker drawings; the foundation retained all works larger than those given to Yale as well as the copyright to all of Steinberg’s texts and art.

Besides the generous financial bequests to his friends and associates, some of which he had changed from his 1996 will, Steinberg stipulated that his residuary estate was to be divided between his niece and nephew, Dana and Stéphane Roman. They received the New York apartment, the property in Springs, and his personal art collection. He left the library in the New York apartment to Anton van Dalen. Hedda Sterne received her choice of whatever personal property had not been effectively disposed of through his other bequests, and Prudence Crowther was designated to distribute the balance of what remained.

All his wishes were either being attended to or were fully satisfied by the time his family and friends gathered for the memorial service on November 1, 1999, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The invitation featured a playful photo of Steinberg taken by Sigrid Spaeth in which he holds a large leaf that almost covers his face; the program featured another photo, taken by Evelyn Hofer, of an almost smiling Steinberg wearing one of his trademark tweed caps and posing in front of one of the antique postcards in his collection, a Russian street scene that he had enlarged to poster size.

Hedda Sterne chose not to attend the ceremony, but Steinberg’s niece and nephew came from France, and the American cousins attended as well: his uncle Martin’s descendants, Judith Steinberg Bassow and her family, came from Denver, and those of his uncle Harry came from the East and West Coasts. The ceremony began with Gioacchino Rossini’s Duetto buffo di due gatti and ended with one of Steinberg’s favorites (also by Rossini), La Passeggiata. Dr. Torsten Wiesel introduced the six speakers: Leo Steinberg, Norman Manea, John Hollander, Mary Frank, Ian Frazier, and Saul Bellow.

Bellow spoke last, following five moving personal accounts of what the speakers’ friendship with Saul Steinberg meant to them. He was the only one who puzzled and dismayed some in the audience with remarks that seemed to be more about himself than about the man he was supposed to eulogize, offhandedly dismissing the friendship that Steinberg thought was one of kindred souls as little more than occasional meetings imbued with goodwill and cordiality. “Each of us wished the other well,” Bellow said. “But when he … was seriously up against it I had no relief to offer him. I learned with astonishment that he had died of cancer.”

The other tributes reflected the variety of relationships Steinberg had formed throughout his life and revealed many different facets of the man he was. Leo Steinberg described how some of the juxtapositions within Saul Steinberg’s oeuvre were “the most biting satire arriving always in draftsmanship of sweet open-faced innocence, instantly loveable.” Norman Manea offered insights into the friendship that had developed because of his and Steinberg’s shared Romanian heritage, recalling a telephone conversation when Steinberg asked how he was and Manea replied that he was well. Steinberg insisted that that was impossible: “We carry a curse, the place from which we come, we carry it inside us. It doesn’t heal easily. Maybe never.”

John Hollander spoke as the friend who was also a scholar and critic of Steinberg’s work and of how difficult it was to define his place within the broad spectrum of twentieth-century art. Hollander remembered hearing, when he was a perplexed teenager, Steinberg dismissed as a cartoonist even as his work was being shown at MoMA. Hollander said that if the art world persisted in classifying Steinberg as a cartoonist, it might be as one like Daumier but more likely as one akin to William Blake, for like Blake, he was a “visionary intellectual satirist, rather than a narrowly political one.”

Mary Frank came next, surprised by her invitation to speak despite the long and deep friendship with Steinberg that made her an obvious choice. Her remarks were the briefest and the most Steinbergian, to use the adjective that always gave its eponym enormous pleasure whenever he heard it. Frank listed the subjects of some of their conversations over the years: “the dreams of cubes,” “rubber stamps of teeth used by dentists,” whether horizons were “the future or the past,” and “how at dusk, the day (which is painting), turns into night (which is graphics).” She praised Steinberg as “a profound visionary artist who was prophetic from so far back about this country and our lives.” Her remarks touched the audience as she ended on a personal note: “Saul, in dreams I cry over you.”

Ian Frazier evoked a similar response when he told how he found himself seeking the company of others who loved Steinberg just to be able to share memories of the man everyone agreed was “a marvel in nature.” Frazier captivated the listeners as he told of Steinberg’s adventures in teasing the U.S. mail delivery system, citing Hedda Sterne’s contention that “reality accommodated Saul.” Quoting Sterne, Frazier spoke of Saul’s “great tenderness for the world” and of how he would suddenly turn to a friend, put out an arm, and demand, “Embrace me.” “And you would embrace him,” he concluded.

THE MEMORIAL SERVICE TOOK PLACE six months after Steinberg’s death, but the tribute paid by his patria, The New Yorker, came a swift twelve days after he died, when the May 24 issue featured a cover drawing and a three-page spread accompanied by Adam Gopnik’s tribute, which called Steinberg “the greatest artist to be associated with this magazine and the most original man of his time.” His death, Gopnik concluded, “takes a world away.”

The obituaries, articles, and other tributes were instantaneous and worldwide, laudatory but nevertheless equivocating, as, like John Hollander in his memorial eulogy, they all addressed the question of where to slot Steinberg within the history of twentieth-century art. None seemed able to take a stand, let alone come to a decision. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica devoted an entire page to an obituary and three related articles that asked and then evaded the question by concentrating instead on Steinberg’s Italian ties and his love of all things Milanese, especially the dialect. In France, Libération also allotted Steinberg a full page, arguing that his fame was such that it would be necessary to invent a special cenotaph in which to place him, while Le Monde agreed that despite his fame as an artist, he was nevertheless impossible to classify. In an appreciation in the New York Observer, Hilton Kramer praised Steinberg as one of the best-known and most admired artists of his time but wondered why, curiously, he was never written about or seldom mentioned in the many historical studies of twentieth-century art.

The question of what to call Steinberg and where to place him preoccupied those who wanted to lay him to rest in a tidy little time line and those who wanted to send him into artistic eternity with honor and praise. A prime example of the dichotomy appeared in the front-page obituary in the New York Times: the headline writer called Steinberg an “epic doodler,” while the writer Sarah Boxer described him in her first sentence as the “metaphysically minded artist and cartoonist” who was solely responsible for raising illustrated comics to fine art. Michael Kimmelman echoed most others when he described Steinberg’s “in-between status in the art world” and wondered why American cartoonists such as R. Crumb were considered major artists while Steinberg was ignored. Art Speigelman was more succinct as he evaded the debate entirely: “He was neither cartoonist nor painter. He was Steinberg.” Boxer gave the most sustained attempt at categorization in her obituary when she repeated much that Harold Rosenberg had written in his essay for the Whitney retrospective catalogue. She noted how many comparisons had tried to place Steinberg among painters like Picasso and Klee, writers like Beckett, Ionesco, and Joyce, and even the film antics of Charlie Chaplin. But then she veered into what almost every other obituary would cite, if not actually stress: that he was known best of all as “the man who did that poster.”

The critic Peter Plagens dubbed Steinberg’s famous poster “the most iconic image in American art since Grant Wood’s American Gothic,” and if the many ways it was used in various media were proof of the contention, it certainly was. “Only he could have dreamed up the poster,” Robert Hughes insisted, while Jean Lemaire called it quite simply “Steinberg’s most famous composition,” Steinberg himself often said he could have retired on that poster if royalties had been paid for all the rip-offs and knockoffs, but, as Boxer wrote, “They weren’t, and he didn’t.”

BUT STILL, WHERE TO PUT HIM? The question proliferated in the years after his death until 2007, when a major retrospective of Saul Steinberg’s art was organized by Joel Smith for the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. It then moved to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York before traveling for a full year to other museums throughout the United States. A major publication accompanied the exhibition, Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, and even though it was intended to be the first comprehensive study of Steinberg’s contribution to twentieth-century art, it too raised the question—albeit obliquely— of how to classify Saul Steinberg and where to put him. The jacket copy described how the book was designed to show Steinberg’s evolving vision through his many different kinds of artistic activity and stated the book’s intention as one of raising “fundamental questions about the historiography of modernism and the vexed status of ‘the middlebrow avant-garde’ in an age of museum-bound art.”

Steinberg’s friend Charles Simic wrote a brief introductory essay for the volume that summed it up best: “Seven years after his death, Saul Steinberg is both a familiar name and an artist in need of discovery. This strange, posthumous fate would have puzzled him and confirmed his suspicion that the critics never had any idea what to do with him.” Steinberg addressed this himself, way back in 1973, when he told a newspaper reporter, “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon, or magazine world … they just say ‘the hell with him.’ They feel that he who has wings should lay eggs.” He placed his work squarely in “the family of Stendhal and Joyce,” with a half-nod toward Goya. Like them, his purpose was to provoke his audience into looking for something beyond mere perception. “That’s what I’m playing with,” he insisted, “the voyage between perception and understanding.”

In the end, he was content that he had become what he wanted to be: “I am the writer who draws.”

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