The Passport (1954)
by Saul Steinberg
REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
Longtime New Yorker institution Saul Steinberg once declared that his illustrations "masqueraded as cartoons". But coming to his work fresh, one would be hard-pressed to figure out which was the real thing and which was the masquerade. Steinberg's body of work is a thrilling argument for the utility and effectiveness of cartoon art. Harold Rosenberg, writing for a Steinberg exhibition at the Whitney in 1978, said the artist's "metamorphosis of the cartoon into a vehicle for meditating on a seemingly limitless range of issues, including the central ones of art - illusion, self and reality - constitutes an expansion of the intellectual resources of flat-surface composition comparable to that of collage".
Steinberg's work is a skilful, encyclopaedic barrage of technique: deft simplification of line, making thematic points by working with several perspectives within one drawing, even using progressive imagery to fashion narratives from a single picture, as in his geographical cartoons. On top of his mastery of comics' formal properties, a lot of Steinberg's work is terribly funny, and he exhibited a playfulness best seen in his utilisation of methods more commonly found in other arts: automatic writing, paste-ups, and the appropriation of other artists' imagery.
The Passport is an excellent single-volume sample of Steinberg's work, one of a series of oversized hardcover books gracing the coffee tables of middle class, mid-century Americans. In addition to everything else laudatory about his work and driving artistic vision, Steinberg had a heck of a line, and one can spend hours visiting and re-visiting his most elaborate illustrations.
(from Twitter, January 2021)
Looking at TCJ's Top 100 from 1999, the most absolutely insane thing is Steinberg at #67 but Peter Arno at #21. Not sure Arno would crack top 100 today, but I imagine Steinberg would be in top 10.
FURTHER READING:
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