Masks of the Literal

Saul Steinberg has always refused to be photographed: at the desk where he produces some of the sharpest, most visionary cartoons of our time, Steinberg keeps a couple of special masks, made from paper bags and decorated with parodies of his own face, to thwart any would-be portraitist. As if a photograph would catch his image in a distortion he could not control. As if being so revealed would endanger his perspective as self-appointed "inspector" of modern life--a term which is also the title of his new book of cartoons.

Cartooning and caricature have always been arts of the great cities. Daumier had his Paris, George Grosz the Berlin of the twenties, and Steinberg is best known through the New Yorker. Steinberg's New York, however, is more a city of the mind than anything else, a set of prejudices and routines which shape the life of the whole culture.

Cartooning has started making its way into art galleries in recent year, and for a time threatened to enter the realm of pure camp. Steinberg has had several shows, there was a Thomas Nast revival some time ago, and well-known commercial cartoonists are now able to sell their originals with relative ease. David Levine, whose caricatures of political and cultural figures helped propel The New York Review of Books into its ascendancy, is probably the best known figure. New York Times theater cartoonist Al Hirschfield, who specializes in seeing how many times he can scrawl his daughter's name into the details of his illustrations-- he indicated the number beside his signature--is currently having a very popular New York show.

But Steinberg is a little bit different from any of those. His view is wider, and more self-conscious. He is the creator of landscapes and illustrated parables as well as of imaginative characters. His line has a verve and sophistication which he has been learning from the best in "conventional" art for over thirty years. (The Inspector is his sixth book since 1945.) He has clearly learned a lot from Grosz's fat generals and Berlin prostitutes, from Paul Klee's wandering tactile line, and perhaps less noticeably, from the sketches of Picasso. The Inspector includes a number of collage drawings that resemble parodies of Cubist still lives -- tables overflowing with anonymous, fragmented objects -- that demonstrate this source particularly well.

Steinberg's appeal is not so much that of the social or political satirist, although there are strong elements of both kinds of satire in his work, but of his uncanny ability to literalize our everyday notions into striking images.

The Inspector is ample proof of this abiltiy: it puts together a myriad of figure and landscape styles, different qualities of line and shade, and images drawn from the Old Masters, Hollywood, or city streets. Juxtaposing all these sources and qualities, Steinberg shows himself a bricoleur in the finest sense -- the artist who filters through the refuse heaps of other arts to select parts for his own strange constructions.

Steinberg is fascinated with seals and hand-stamps. The round, official looking seals which he some years ago made one of his trademarks float at the edge of the horizon like suns, or, piled on each other, suggest a mound of bureaucratic rubbish, while pedestrians and lean dogs pass by. Automobile stamps mix with crocodile stamps in the wide space of squares or freeways; a dozen painters with easels pursue a dozen renderings of a peasant couple taken from a painting by Millet.

Turning the weapons of the bureaucracy against itself, Steinberg matches his rubber stamps with handwriting that extends across sky or building, looking like it came from some eighteenth century document and consistently unreadable. The dollar bill and the Great Seal of the Treasury dissolve under Steinberg's pen into the pyramids, flanked by sphinxes with the heads of businessmen, and the floating eye, which hangs above passing teeny boppers.

The world is that of simple, usual things, torn from everyday context and tossed together flippantly into generalized space. There are letters: big, blocky, physical letters, and simple words mapped out in a landscape, drawn with the qualities of their meaning. "Yes" rolls downhill on wheels, about to strike the barrier of a gigantic "but." Years of prosperity are shown as labeled building stones, arranged in reverse pyramid on top of the single block "1933." A rank of businessmen march with one step across the dotted line separating "Monday" from "Tuesday."

Street scenes become the arena for Steinberg's whole menagerie: skinny, whiskered gunslingers dodge policemen larger than their cars, while girls with legs drawn out and torsos shrunk down to miniskirts pass by. The neon signs in the shop windows advertise only "Rgh!", "Feh!" and "Pzz!". Elsewhere, several crocodiles are seen strolling in front of a basilica.

One has the sense that a lot of this is what the surrealists tried to do but were never really able: create a world where the everyday is recognized as bizarre. As conventional painting becomes more devoid of "real world" content, popular forms must more and more assume the role of externalizing -- and parodying -- the way we look at the everyday world. What Steinberg shows us so well is that the way we see time, imagine geography, look at city streets or television images is as much caricature as the drawings he produces. Reality may seem as plain as the features of one's face, but in fact it is as strange and elusive as the masks we make for ourselves.