The Message in the Medium

There were jittery calligraphs, concentric circles, anxious labyrinths and hysterical lines, not to mention stickpin Indians, Uncle Sam sphinxes, and cats and dogs and question marks, all up on the wall. As Frenchmen filed through Paris' Galerie Maeght last week rubbernecking, chuckling and occasionally snorting, the scene seemed readymade for a Saul Steinberg cartoon. As a matter of fact, Steinberg probably will make a cartoon of it--it's his show.

Hints from Embroidery. Breaking a 13-year, self-imposed ban on exhibitions, Steinberg picked Paris to display his recent work because the city "has a tradition of intellectual painters, and I think of myself really as a writer who paints." That link with language all started, he figures, in Rumania, where he was born 51 years ago, the son of a box manufacturer. "My father printed messages of condolence for the departed on the ribbons that go with mortuary wreaths," he recalls. " 'Eternal Regrets' or 'Crushed by Sorrow.' These messages were printed in big wooden type, and I often composed my name with the same type. To this day, I am obsessed with the question mark and numbers."

After studying sociology and psychology at the University of Bucharest, Steinberg took up architecture in Milan. His eye was also nourished by Egyptian paintings, latrine drawings, primitive and insane art, Seurat, embroidery and Paul Klee. His first drawing was published in 1936 in Milan. "It took about ten minutes to draw," he remembers, "but when it was printed in the magazine, I took a very slow promenade along each line." Ever since, he has been taking millions of viewers along, mostly by means of The New Yorker, in which his drawings have appeared since 1941.

Brown Paper Masks. Steinberg drawings are meant to be read, and over the years they have developed into an increasingly sophisticated sign language. The vignettes can be metaphysical or as simple as a curious cat peering into a number 4. Fond of visual puns, he pokes fun at the art of drawing; the artist often grows out of his own pen, winds up as a square, or worse, becomes thoroughly entangled in his own shenanigans. His masks painted on brown wrapping paper are cutting satires. "They are not caricatures," Steinberg insists. "They are the faces, the masks of the middle class. What people do, especially in America, is to manufacture a mask of happiness for themselves. They put a perpetual, reassuring smile on their faces; it makes them look nice, friendly and healthy, and we don't have to worry about them."

Steinberg's wry humor may also be a mask. In the past ten years his drawings have taken a cerebral and sometimes sobering turn. Doubt and anguish are registered by a tiny figure poised atop an enormous question mark, which is itself hovering on the edge of an abyss. Brave but hapless little Indians combat a great American sphinx.

As to what they mean, Steinberg likes to leave that up to the viewer. "People who see a drawing in The New Yorker will think automatically that it's funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it is artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie, they think it's a prediction." In many ways, his message is best conveyed by his pages of elaborate, cursive script, in which the occasional images are understandable while the words are illegible. "Words are like vitamin pills," he explains. "We swallow them and think we have got something valuable inside us. But we don't. When we look at a drawing, we must hunt and invent our own meaning."

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