(b R?mnicul-Sarat, Romania, 15 June 1914). American draughtsman, painter, sculptor and cartoonist of Romanian birth. He entered the University of Bucharest in 1932 and travelled to Milan the following year, where he enrolled at the Politecnico and studied architecture for the next six years. During this period his first cartoons were published in Bertoldo, a bi-weekly magazine printed in Milan. In 1940 he graduated, and his drawings were reproduced in the American magazines Life and Harper's Bazaar. He left Italy in 1941 and arrived in Miami in 1942. In 1943 he enlisted in the US Navy, became an American citizen and had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. After serving in India and China he was transferred to Italy via North Africa. In 1946 he covered the Nuremberg Trials as a war correspondent for the New Yorker. Subsequently he travelled extensively in Europe, South America, the USSR, Africa, Asia and across the USA. Each post-war drawing by Steinberg reveals ingredients of a real or imagined autobiographical travelogue. All in Line (New York, 1945) and The Passport (New York, 1954) were among 11 books of his published drawings. Documents, passports, licences and bureaucratic papers of every description reappear regularly in his complex iconography. Similar to Dada humour, his comic adventures found a wide audience while exploiting the language of the cartoon. The cartoon format remained central to Steinberg's work as he expanded the limits of the genre. He thus insistently brought that popular means of expression into the sphere of the fine arts. Probing artistic and social conventions, his playful sketches are not as simple as they seem. Steinberg observed that his drawings simply 'masquerade as cartoons', and this was confirmed by his inclusion in the exhibition Fourteen Americans of 1946 at MOMA, New York. In 1952 he showed his work simultaneously at the galleries of Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis in New York. Steinberg was then deeply involved in a New York art scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism. In 1958 he painted a mural for the USA's Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Brussels.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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For more information on Saul Steinberg, visit Britannica.com.

1914–99, American artist-cartoonist, b. Samnicul-Sarat, Romania. He attended the Univ. of Bucharest (1932) and the Reggio Politecnico, Milan (doctorate in architecture, 1940). Steinberg's work began to appear in The New Yorker in 1941, a year before he arrived in the United States, and was featured in the magazine's pages throughout his life. Since the 1940s his work also has been exhibited in museums and galleries. A superb draftsman with a singular vision, he elevated the cartoon to a fine art. Employing humor often tinged with irony, he portrayed the richness of the American scene, treated questions of identity and mutability, and visually commented on various political, social, and philosophical questions. Frequently his work is self-referential (as in his simplified paper-bag mask self-portraits), filled with visual puns, and includes art-historical references. One of his most famous images is a New Yorker's shortsighted world view (large Manhattan, small world). His work has been published in numerous collections, such as All in Line (1945), The New World (1965), and The Discovery of America (1992).

Bibliography

See his memoirs, Reflections and Shadows (2002), ed. by A. Buzzi; study by H. Rosenberg (1978); J. Smith, ed., Steinberg at the New Yorker (2005).

Quotes:

"The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."

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