Saul Steinberg, Vintage Poster Saul Steinberg Galerie Maeght Paris France, 1971

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SAUL STEINBERG (American 1914-1999) Via Air Mail Geometric Design Lithograph. Sheet: 21 1/2 x 28 inches; Frame: 22 1/4 x … Read more SAUL STEINBERG (American 1914-1999) Via Air Mail Geometric Design Lithograph. Sheet: 21 1/2 x 28 inches; Frame: 22 1/4 x 29 inches. Plate signed and dated l/r with sticker upper right corner.

Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914 – May 12, 1999) was a Romanian and American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker, most notably View of the World from 9th Avenue. He described himself as "a writer who draws".
Steinberg was born in Râmnicu Sărat, Buzău County, Romania to a family of Jewish descent. In 1932, he entered the University of Bucharest. In 1933, he enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano to study architecture; he received his degree in 1940. In 1936, he began contributing cartoons to the humor newspaper Bertoldo. Two years later, the anti-Semitic racial laws promulgated by the Fascist government forced him to start seeking refuge in another country.
In 1941, he fled to the Dominican Republic, where he spent a year awaiting a US visa. By then, his drawings had appeared in several US periodicals; his first contribution to The New Yorker was published in October 1941. Steinberg arrived in New York City in July 1942; within a few months he received a commission in the US Naval Reserve and was then seconded to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He worked for the Morale Operations division in China, North Africa, and Italy. Shipped back to Washington in 1944, he married the Romanian-born painter Hedda Sterne.
After World War II, Steinberg continued to publish drawings in The New Yorker and other periodicals, including Fortune, Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s Bazaar At the same time, he embarked on an exhibition career in galleries and museums. In 1946, he was included in the critically acclaimed “Fourteen Americans” show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibiting along with Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell, among others. Steinberg went on to have more than 80 one-artist shows in galleries and museums throughout the US, Europe, and South America. He was affiliated with the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries in New York and the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Since 1982, he has been represented by The Pace Gallery. A dozen museums and institutions have in-depth collections of his work, and examples are included in the holdings of more than eighty other public collections.
Steinberg’s long, multifaceted career encompassed works in many media and appeared in different contexts. In addition to magazine publications and gallery art, he produced advertising art, photoworks, textiles, stage sets, and murals. Given this many-leveled output, his work is difficult to position within the canons of postwar art history. He himself defined the problem: “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me.”

Select Bibliography
Iain Topliss, The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Joel Smith, with an introduction by Charles Simic, Saul Steinberg: Illuminations. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.
Saul Steinberg: L’Écriture visuelle. Strasbourg: Musée Tomi Ungerer, 2009.
Mario Tedeschini Lalli, “Descent from Paradise: Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years, 1933-1941.” Published in Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, no. 2, October 2011.
Bair, Deidre. Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (2012)
Corrections to Deirdre Bair, Saul Steinberg: A Biography
Melissa Renn, Andreas Prinzing, Iain Topliss, et al., Saul Steinberg: The Americans. Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2013
Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Chapter 5, “Saul Steinberg’s Vanishing Trick.”
Mario Tedeschini Lalli, “Descent from Paradise: Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years, 1933-1941,” Published in Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, no. 2, October 2011.

Select Collections
MoMA NYC
The Saul Steinberg Foundation
The Art Institute of Chicago,
The National Gallery of Art,
Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Yale University Art Gallery
Whitney Museum of American Art,
Library of Congress
Menil Collection
The Museum of Modern Art
Pace Gallery
Condé Nast Collection
Adam Baumgold Gallery
Cooper-Hewitt Museum See less