Art: Hard Lines

The satiric drawings of Saul Steinberg appeal to brows of all elevations. They have been admired in The New Yorker hung in some of the world’s great museums, and reproduced on wallpaper fabrics and greeting cards. Last week 350 of them appeared in a book (The Passport—Harper; $5). Most books of cartoons pall pretty fast; thumbing them drubs the funnybone to numbness. With Steinberg’s book: the drubbing is acute and varied enough to remain a slightly painful pleasure for an hour or so despite the fact that the book is clumsily laid out and padded with his second-best sketches.

Steinberg was born 40 years ago near Bucharest. His father manufactured fancy boxes for toilet articles and his mother made cakes with elaborate icings that he recalls, were “too beautiful to eat.” Steinberg spent seven years studying architecture in Milan before finally giving in to his own inherited taste for lighthearted art. He found it no work at all to whip up drawings that were usually biting, and sometimes skirted close to the beautiful as well. Commissions for The New Yorker helped bring him to Manhattan.

His fame rests as much on his draftsmanship as on his wit. The rule for cartoonists is to develop an instantly recognizable style, and stick to it. By ignoring this rule Steinberg has made himself the Picasso of the profession. He can enclose what he sees in a few simple lines, like bent coat hangers, or dissolve it into a haze of dots, a la Seurat. He draws on top of photographs, and occasionally draws imitation snapshots. He can and does mimic passports, old maps, and documents with ink drawings that look fairly convincing and 100% illegible. He will make a thumbprint do for a man’s face, a chest of drawers for an office building and a soft roll for an automobile.

Steinberg needs no captions to explain such mincing mimicries or to underline his jibes at the world. If he did use words, the effect might become altogether too brutal. Commenting on one of his Christmas cards, which shows Santa’s sleigh drawn by a tiny bird, Steinberg once sighed that “the bird every so often gets a tremendous hit with that whip.” And a gentle smile perked for just an instant his sad mustache.