NEWS

EXHIBITIONS

Saul Steinberg: L’Écriture visuelle/Visual Writing

At the Musée Tomi Ungerer, Strasbourg (November 27, 2009-February 28, 2010). Nearly 120 works, photographs, and archival material borrowed from European collections. Curated by Thérèse Willer, the exhibition and catalogue present the full range of Steinberg’s art in all its graphic variety. The installation, organized thematically, covers such subjects as false documents, literature, music, man-animal, masks, landscape, architecture, and America.

"I am a writer who draws," Steinberg once said. With this declaration in mind, the exhibition focuses on his drawings, paintings, and relief sculptures as a form of visual writing, a means of commenting on the social and political world of the 20th century no less than on art itself. Also included is a section entitled "The Heirs," which reveals Steinberg's influence on French and American cartoonists and illustrators.
http://www.musees-strasbourg.org/sites_expos/steinberg/en/index.php?page=parcours

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations

This major traveling retrospective, the first comprehensive look at Steinberg's extraordinary contribution to 20th-century art, completed its 8-stop American and European tour in June 2009. Steinberg's role, in curator Joel Smith's presentation, was that of a modern-day illuminator, putting word and image in play to create art that spoke to the eyes, and minds, of readers. The exhibition assembled examples of the remarkable range of works Steinberg produced during his prolific 60-year career--drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, paper-bag masks, collages, murals, holiday cards, and stage sets--many of them never before exhibited.

Organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, the exhibition opened at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, in 2006, then traveled the following year to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Cincinnati Art Museum; the US tour closed at the Lehman Loeb Art Center. The European tour began at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in 2008 and continued on to the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.

The European tour of Steinberg: Illuminations was supported by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, with additional funding from PaceWIldenstein Gallery.

At the Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris (October 2-November 29, 2008), a selection of 26 works covering 50 years of Steinberg’s art, from a 1946 drawing of Arthur Rimbaud, one of Steinberg’s culture heroes, to the artist’s take, in the mid-1990s, on the year 2000.

Sterne and Steinberg: Critics Within

At The Menil Collection, Houston (May 23-August 17, 2008). Guest curated by Sarah Eckhardt, the exhibition presented a focused and intimate look at the shared interests of Steinberg and his wife, Hedda Sterne, in the 1940s and 1950s, their years together. Although their work looks very different, both artists, from within their circle of New York artists, dealt with issues of artistic subjectivity and American life at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

The Americans, Steinberg's monumental collaged panels for the American Pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, represent the climax of his career in public murals. Assembled from individual panels nearly 10 feet high, the 8 sections, treating such themes as Main Street--Small Town, Downtown--Big City, and Cocktail Party, offered a wry take on American life for Europeans visitors. The entire series, more than 260 feet long, is normally housed in the storerooms of the Musées Royaux de Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the World's Fair, the museum has reassembled the above three and set them in the context of other contemporary art at the Fair. May 16-September 21, 2008.

Saul Steinberg: L'Écriture visuelle.

A fully illustrated 200-page catalogue of the exhibition at the Musée Tomi Ungerer, published by Éditions des Musées de Strasbourg, 2009. In French. Includes catalogue entries on each work, a biography and bibliography, as well as a memoir by Steinberg’s niece, Daniela Roman; essays by Iain Topliss on Steinberg’s “art of living,” Philippe Dagen on “Steinberg, postmodernist?”, Jean-Philippe Theyskens on Steinberg’s mural “The Americans” at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, and Thérèse Willer, curator of the show and organizer of the catalogue, writing on Steinberg’s legacy.

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, the richly illustrated catalogue of the retrospective exhibition, is the first scholarly treatment of Steinberg's art. Published by Yale University Press, with an introduction by Charles Simic and essay and catalogue entries by Joel Smith. Its 288 pages and more than 300 reproductions include all the works in the show, along with previously unseen sketches, documents, and printed matter from the artist's papers as well as an extensive bibliography and career chronology.

German edition published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008.

Saul Steinberg, with an introduction by Iain Topliss, Delpire Éditeur, Paris. With more than 120 reproductions, this 5th volume in Delpire's Poche Illustrateur series offers a wide-ranging survey of Steinberg's career, from his cartoons of the early 1940s through his magazine features, drawings and gallery art, to the deeply personal work of his late years. Page after page reveals Steinberg's witty, incisive take on 20th-century life, seen through an eye never satisfied with one style, one way of rendering the world. Available in French. www.delpire.fr

Saul Steinberg, with an introduction by Philippe Dagen, a full-color, 80-page catalogue of the exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, including details of many of the works. With chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography. In French and English. www.claude-bernard.com

Steinberg at The New Yorker, by Joel Smith, with an introduction by Ian Frazier, 240 pages, 363 illustrations (Harry N. Abrams, 2005). Nearly six decades of Steinberg's covers are reproduced in color, along with many examples of inside art, from black-line drawings to elaborate color portfolios.

FILM

La ligne de Steinberg/Steinberg's Line

This 26-minute documentary, the first made about Steinberg since his death in 1999, was directed by his niece, Daniela Roman. It is a portrait and tribute by French cartoonists--Cabu, Desclozeaux, Geluck, Siné, Trez, and Wolinski--comprising interviews intercut with Steinberg drawings and footage from a 1968 film of Steinberg drawing and creating masks.
Available in French and in French with English subtitles: thf83@free.fr