Saul Steinberg: Illuminations

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, organized at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York by The Saul Steinberg Foundation.

An introduction by poet Charles Simic tracks the origins of Steinberg’s darkly comic sensibility in the “Balkan bazaar” of his native Romania. Joel Smith shows how architectural training and an early rise to fame as a cartoonist in Fascist-era Milan honed the artist’s gift for subtle graphic invention, and explores why one of the most visible, prolific, potent, and cosmopolitan careers in postwar American art has so thoroughly evaded serious study. Tracing the evolving motives that underlie Steinberg’s multi-layered activity, this handsome volume also raises fundamental questions about the historiography of modernism and the vexed status of “the middlebrow avant-garde” in an age of museum-bound art.

Previously unseen sketches, documents, and printed matter from the artist’s papers illustrate the essay, career chronology, and entries for over 120 objects featured in this important book.