Madrid,
Until now, there have been few opportunities to contemplate Saul Steinberg’s work in Spain: his only monograph in our country was provided in 2002 by the IVAM in Valencia, and it consisted mainly of his drawings and some objects; His work was also part, twelve years ago, of the collective “Contemporary Cartographies: Drawing the Thought”, at CaixaForum Barcelona, and that same 2012, of the Círculo de Bellas Artes assembly “Pere
Curator Alicia Chillida met him in 1997 in New York, while she was preparing a possible anthology of his at the Reina Sofía Museum, but the death of this author frustrated the project, which has now been able to be carried out at the March Foundation and which, furthermore, , comes accompanied by good news for this institution and for all Spanish lovers of his images: the New York foundation that bears his name, and which began its activity shortly after the death of the Romanian, has decided to deposit 115 of his compositions in the March, within the framework of a policy of dissemination of its collections that has also reached European and North American centers such as the Morgan Library, the MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Center Pompidou in Paris or the library of the Pinacoteca Brera in Milan. These pieces will soon be collected on the Foundation’s website, which has also announced today its acquisition of the complete set of covers that Steinberg designed for the magazine The New Yorker between 1945 and 1999.
Born in Romania in 1914, Steinberg would be an early victim of anti-Semitism, which would determine his wandering life: he had to move from his native country to Italy, where he trained as an architect, and from here, under Mussolinian laws, to the United States, after passing through the Dominican Republic while waiting for his visa; precisely those responsible for The New Yorker They would be able to facilitate his American citizenship. Although his stay in Milan was not too long (he lived there between 1933 and 1941), it would prove key in his career: his teachers included Gio Ponti and Piero Portaluppi and he established friendships that lasted throughout his life, such as those of Aldo Buzzi -some of his collaborations are part of this exhibition- and Bruno Munari, who also visited these rooms in Castelló a couple of years ago.
There he already drew, in humorous pieces, for publications such as Bertoldo; Steinberg did not want to give much importance to his early period, in which he did not usually sign his creations or did so with a pseudonym, but the truth is that we can find in them, as Francesca Pelliciari, member of the curatorial team of this exhibition, has emphasized today together with Manuel Fontán, Chillida and Aida Capa, the geometric and precise line, typical of his studies as an architect, which would be the basis of his entire legacy: it acquires all the weight in him compared to color, although it became increasingly more flexible .
His presence in these media, especially in The New Yorker For half a century, he introduced his work and vision into many homes, which were able to receive without mediation the fruits of his keen observation and irony; The critic Harold Rosenberg even stated that, due to his attraction to pencils, ink and pens, and the intellectual acuity of his visions, he could be considered a writer, a very particular one, who established dialogues between word and image that motivated, even, that he was compared to James Joyce. He, even so, marked distances: he believed that, unlike writing, drawing creates its syntax on the fly, because the line cannot be mentally reasoned, but only drawn.
The March Foundation exhibition is titled “Saul Steinberg, artist” and that name is important: given that drawing and illustration were his main means of expression, his name has normally been accompanied by the labels of cartoonist either illustratorand his work in these fields would be enough to vindicate the artistic nature of his work, but he also created collages, photomontages, paintings, graphic creations and murals, some collected in Madrid. As Fontán del Junco recalled in the presentation of this retrospective, we usually associate the radicalism of 20th century art with abstraction, and not with figurative drawing or popular media, but even so this author was an avant-garde creator who He did everything, including writing well, as some of his books and his rich correspondence with Buzzi testify.
In a montage that seems to evoke the pages of an open book, including the fluidity of the line, all these aspects of his work will come before us (including masks, furniture and pieces on wood), in not strictly chronological chapters that permeate each other. its themes and that offer an easy-to-understand tour of Steinberg’s career, marked, in addition to the aforementioned errancy, by his conjunction of artistic genres and his lack of intention to distinguish between high and low culture. One of its most frequent (and attractive) motifs was that of spectators contemplating art, or that of the public looking at the public admiring paintings; He was very interested in the question of the mutual influence between the observer and the observed and that of interpretation (he worked on his own with respect to Mondrian, Malevich, Gauguin…) and he said of those readings that do not offer the truth, but they save us .
Surely for that reason, his intellectual references would be almost endless: in the literary field, he admired Gogol’s theater of the absurd, and after him Beckett, or the sculpture of Giacometti, and he followed in the footsteps of other exiled Romanians with whom he surely shared a very acute observation skills, like Cioran, Brancusi or Eugène Ionesco. He, for his part, earned the praise of Italo Calvino, who understood him well (The world has been transformed into a line, a single broken, tortuous, discontinuous line. The man too. And this man transformed into a line is finally the owner of the world, although he does not escape his condition as a prisoner, since the line tends, after many twists and turns, to close on itself and trap him.). Also those of Roland Barthes (Steinberg gives ideas. Or rather – something more valuable – makes you want ideas).
Architecture, from Italy or American cities, seemingly infinite, populates many of his creations; others (The rubrics) have to do, for obvious reasons, with the identity of the emigrant: it is possible to find, at the bottom of many of their lines, a deep interest in artifice understood as the way in which people and things invent themselves or are invented to present themselves to the world.
At his death, his celebrity was practically limited to the American borders, although between the fifties and seventies he maintained a discreet fame in Europe thanks to the translation of his illustrated albums and his participation, in 1958, in the Pavilion of that country in the Brussels Universal Exhibition, where he exhibited his mural The Americans. It is time, for Steinberg, for a tribute from the continent.
“Saul Steinberg, artist”
MARCH FOUNDATION
C/ Castelló, 77
Madrid
From October 18, 2024 to January 12, 2025
