Saul Steinberg
Saul Steinberg ( born June 15, 1914 in Râmnicu Sarat; † 12 May 1999 New York ) was a Romanian- American illustrator and cartoonist. He was known primarily for his cartoons and covers for The New Yorker magazine. For this magazine, a title picture was taken ( published on 29 March 1976), which would later become a popular Motif: a distorted perspective map, the starting maps of a New York street part of the globe and as graphic idea for any other locations was modified.
Life
Steinberg was born in 1914 in Romania Râmnicu Sarat, the son of a bookbinder and cardboard manufacturers Maurice Steinberg and his wife Rosa Jacobson Steinberg. He began to study sociology and psychology at the University of Bucharest. In 1932 he moved to Milan and moved there in 1933 at the Polytechnic to study architecture, which he completed in 1940. During his studies he began to draw and published his drawings in the humorous weekly newspaper Bertoldo, which he founded together with the journalist Giovannino Guareschi 1936. The profession of an architect, he never exercised.
In 1941 he emigrated with a passport stamp which he himself had forged over Portugal in the U.S., but was deported from Ellis Iceland in the Dominican Republic since the admission quota for Romanians was already exhausted. From there he sent the New Yorker magazine some of his cartoons, in the hope of inclusion in the U.S., what actually happened. Since then, he remained a regular contributor to the New Yorker. The abstract expressionist painter Hedda Sterne was his wife in 1943. They separated in the 1970s, but never divorced.
During WW2 Steinberg had in China, Maoist guerrillas in the bridge blasting teach and then fled over the mountains to India. Then he was sent by William Donovan, head of the U.S. Intelligence Office of Strategic Services (OSS ), to North Africa and Italy. There he was to draw cartoons that made the Nazis and fascists ridiculous. The cartoons were reprinted in The New Germany OSS leaf and dropped behind enemy lines.
After the war, his style became more abstract, philosophical and symbolic.
He created the collage The Americans for the American Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. It consists of eight wall panels with a total length of 70 meters. Steinberg is the American life between big-city bustle and the rural idyll dar. After the end of the world exhibition panels, cut up for transport and storage in 84 parts, ultimately incorporated into the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, where they were came. Rarely individual panels were shown; until 2013 they were again presented as a unit in a special exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
End of the 1960s, his drawings were more pessimistic in tone, especially in relation to the city life of New York ( building facades as frightening mazes, Mickey Mouse boots as a terrorist ).
Saul Steinberg died in 1999 in New York.
Works
- All in Line, New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945
- The Art of Living, New York, Harper & Bros., 1949
- The Passport, New York, Harper & Bros., 1954
- Dessins, Paris, Gallimard, 1956
- The Americans, Expo, Brussels, 1958
- The Labyrinth, New York, Harper & Row, 1960
- The New World, New York, Harper & Row, 1965
- Le Masque, Paris, Maeght Editeur, 1966
- The Inspector, New York, Viking Press, 1973
- Saul Steinberg, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978
- The Discovery of America, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
- Reflections and Shadows, New York, Random House, 2002
German editions:
- Steinberg 's dealing with people, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1954
- Steinberg 's Passport, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1954
- Steinberg 's Labyrinth, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1961
- Steinberg 's paperback, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1964
- The inspector, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1973
- Saul Steinberg, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1979
- The discovery of America, Zurich, Diogenes, 1992
- Shadows and reflections, Zurich, Diogenes, 2002
Exhibitions
- 2013: Saul Steinberg - The Americans, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.