Saul Steinberg. Romanian-born artist, born in Râmnicu Sărat in 1914 and died in the United States in 1999. He studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest and later studied architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, graduating in 1940.
In 1936, while studying architecture, Steinberg began contributing cartoons to the Italian humor newspaper Bertoldo twice a week, and soon became one of the paper's most popular artists. Forced to leave Italy in the 1940s by the establishment of anti-Semitic laws, he received his architecture degree in 1940 and began the long and anxious process of finding refuge in another country.
Arrested by the police, he spent six weeks in an internment camp. He was finally able to leave Italy in 1941, with a visa for the Dominican Republic. After a year in Ciudad Trujillo (now Santo Domingo), he received his American visa, arriving in New York in early July 1942, where he began contributing to The New Yorker magazine.
Saul Steinberg is best known for his drawings published on the covers and insides of The New Yorker magazine, a close collaboration that lasted nearly six decades and brought Steinberg into American homes and shook up the ways of thinking of American society. His drawings, known for their spare elegance and incisive visual jokes, were based entirely on pictorial graphics and were keyed to the magazine's audience. Steinberg turned the magazine page into a place for art.
Famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, Saul Steinberg had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades, he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.
Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel yet integrated careers.
