Viewing page 4 of 12

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Steinberg
By NIGEL GOSLING

WITH our modern love of frontier-demarcation we confidently label artists as "comic" and "serious." This is a vague and dangerous practice (as false, perhaps, as assuming that all which inclines us to smile is funny, or to weep, sad) which would not have been tolerated in the day of Bosch or the cathedral sculptors, and is defied in our own days by artists like Picasso, Klee or Miró. Saul Steinberg inhabits border country: while still on the light side, he makes ever-increasing forays into serious territory, even penetrating now into the Victoria ans Albert, who have bought a drawing from his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Though some of the exhibits at this show are no more than whimsies (the fascinating false "diplomas" for example) none of them contains a joke: they are arabesques based on a wonderfully rich fancy which now and then approached real imagination. Beautifully placed on nice large sheets of paper, they are executed in thin wavering lines with a kind of lyrical detachment, as though they had been traced unaided by a sharp but kindly pin. Here and there delicate colouring, or bolder, blacking treatment shows that he has plenty of cards up his sleeve.
The theme of these drawings, as of most of his work, is the froth of irrelevant detail thrown up by our culture, a froth of which we are normally unaware. He is no straight satirist: his attitude to his subjects is ambivalent. He clearly draws what he loves-- a distinctly European and urban choice of memorials, encrusted buildings, processions and all the conventions of public life as well as the complicated paraphernalia of private habit. But at the same time he explodes under them continually the sly crackers of ridicule. One subject he consistently attacks-- the over-dressed woman-- and one he lovingly explores-- the elegant lineal network of railway stations. These produce some of the best drawings in this truly astonishing collection, but everyone will have his favourite.

A superb, but mostly different, range of his work is included in "The Art of Living" (Hamish Hamilton, 21s.). This book does include some genuine jokes (visual ones-- there are no captions), as well as one or two women's heads which hint that Steinberg could be more alarming if he chose. These drawings, with their amazing fecundity of ideas and precise execution, show a great advance on the earlier volume of his work, "All in Line" (Penguin, 12s. 6d.), where the influence of Thurber is often too apparent. But the complete Steinberg fan will want both.
Steinber does no deal with individuals or types. He is truly contemporary in that he sees Man dwarfed by the System. It is our whole way of life which he innocently and gaily dissects.