Visual Aphorist

The Inspector.
by Saul Steinberg.
Viking. 220 pp. $10.00.

“There is almost no artist alive,” wrote E. H. Gombrich almost twenty years ago, “who knows more about the philosophy of representation than this humorist.” Saul Steinberg is as far from being merely a humorist today as he was from being a cartoonist then; in the intervening years his art has become increasingly problematic and profound. Moving through parody, pastiche, satire, metamorphosis of conventional graphic modes, his oeuvre has developed joyfully and successfully under the pressure of its own demands, remaining, as far as the art world has been concerned, hors de combat. By drawing for publication, rather than for the rotting connoisseurship of the picture-buying world, he has managed, like many Renaissance artists in their published prints, to make his most personal statements his most public ones.

The Inspector is his sixth book of drawings to be published in this country, and critics, knowing that they have been overtaken by the career of a major artist, have been hard put to define its genres. Daumier has been mentioned as a parallel to Steinberg—a genius of political and moral caricature taking more privately to painting in later life, etc. But the comparison is trivial. Gombrich remains correct about the nature of his profundity, but Steinberg's pictures are not so much jokes or visual epigrams or even pictures about modes of picturing. Like G. C. Lichtenberg, the great 18th-century German about whom Goethe remarked that he never made a joke that didn't uncover a deep philosophical problem, the Rumanian-born, Italian-trained, American-fledged master is an aphorist. He draws pictures and conclusions' with the same line.

But the domain of visual aphorism is hard to define. Consider, for example, the new volume's word-scapes. These are pictorial maps of minimal sentences or short lists of related terms. Sometimes the written words will label the terrain (a black crayon sketch of the two cliffs on either side of a gorge, the left-hand one bearing a canvas on an easel, the right, the painter sighting down his extended brush across at it, the easel-side inscribed Aspera, the painter's ASTRA). More often, the letters will be objects in space, or grouped as elements in architectonic structures (for instance, a pen drawing of ALL EXCEPT YOU: the first word made of three ranks of parading cardboard cutouts, heading toward the huge, carved megalithic wall of the second word, in the shade on the far side of which lurks the smaller, humane, Henry Moore carvings of the word you). Some of these wordscapes, in wash colors and in oils, have recently appeared on New Yorker covers. They include paradigmatic confrontations of form and content, such as the words RED, BLUE, YELLOW, and GREEN—the first, colored a dark blue, lies in the plane of cast shadow of the second word, colored red; the third, in green, is inscribed in the vertical leg of the L in BLUE; the yellow GREEN, lying along the blue R of RED, casts a neat orchid shadow. The joke here is about the crudity of imitative form, and about the evasive complexities of what appears to be the simple notion of complementarity.

Steinberg also mythologizes in another picture the auxiliary verbs: I AM is carved out of vertical chunks of earth, grass-topped, and, at one point, flowering; I HAVE is the dreariness of possession strung across that earth—bits of ruined building, wired together, make up all the letters but the A and V, which are bits of patched, impossible laundry hanging sadly on a sagging line between them; finally, I do is a heavenly manifestation—flying saucers cum Ezekiel wheels cum fireworks, spinning whorls of color and energy in the sky above the two other phrases, the I angled somewhat and beginning to recede into the background. But the analytic wit of these wordscapes can dissolve into lyrical vision as well. Steinberg has a shore landscape in oils, a very painterly scene with a reach of inlet lying between sandy beach in the foreground and the foliage of a western shore opposite, light and cloud reflected in the water in a vague, bright cone pointing down at the lone, almost silhouetted figure in the foreground who faces left out of the picture, midway between two arrowed road signs, BEFORE and AFTER. It is in the direction of the latter that he faces. The conventional American vision that faces forward into a western tomorrow (the sunset into which the last movie-shot fades), is here redirected in the suspensions of twilight: the before and after are not ahead of or behind the scene, but toward the reader's left and right. It is only for the figure in the picture, the walker of beaches, the artist himself, that the sunset eternally composes its painting.

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These pictures have evolved their own genre. But this has always been true of Steinberg's major work. In the past, his inventions unambiguously remained extensions of drawing. From the period of the volume called The Passport (1955), the line drawings invaded and digested other graphic areas. Simulations of handwriting, document and banknote engraving, written language rendered unintelligible by official stamps and seals (at its simplest, a visual premonition of a Jacques Tati soundtrack), comprised a graphic language open to all the stylistic vernaculars of published picture—steel and photo-engraving, etching, watercolor, photography. The rhetoric of all our fashions of public visual expression became the subject of Steinberg's continuous essay on politics and the visual language. By the late 50's, he was designing his own rubber stamps—at first mock-official, they became figures of people and animals and, most recently, visionary seals containing smudged, unreadable landscapes and heraldic figures. In the late 60s, when Steinberg first started to paint lyrical landscapes in oil, his scenes of Long Island sand, water, and sky would be given needed scale not by a painted human figure, but by a rubber-stamped one. This completed an ironic cycle, humanizing a scene (for as Blake's demonic proverb goes, “Where man is not, Nature is barren”), putting a stamp of visionary approval on it, by means of the otherwise brutal, bureaucratic device.

The evolution of both his visual language and his artistic purpose continued in other ways. Drawn, simulated photographs in the 50's and early 60's gave way to collages of photo and line drawing, and, finally, in Le Masque (1966), to collages in reverse, so to speak, photographs of people wearing paper-bag heads, painted by the artist and having the same kind of grim relevance to the clothed bodies and the mise en scène which they dominated as those that linked the groups of pictorial elements done in varying graphic styles in previous volumes. His visual punning, too, began to extend beyond the kinds of play on gross form—where the drawn line, itself a Chaplinesque satirist of similitude, would yoke by reductive violence together the unlike things, to the detriment of both and of the whole visual world we share with them. The puns come to operate on styles of representing form, rather than form alone, and a characteristic Steinbergian sense of the world made itself manifest. By the late 50's, one saw his hand and eye everywhere: Vladimir Nabokov's observation about the smile on the back of an unopened envelope that you know contains a check is early Steinberg of the formal punning. But this, from a short story by Edith Wharton, is of a later period: “She lived, not far from Irvington, in a damp Gothic villa overhung by Norway spruces and looking exactly like a memorial emblem done in hair.” For Steinberg, every architectonic arrangement, every structure, is a facade, every human visage a false face.

In his most recent exhibition, Steinberg further extended his realm of the drawn. He showed a series of wooden work-table tops, with pencils, pens, brushes, boxes of this and that, all carved from pine or balsa. At one level, an aphorism was directed at trompe l'oeil representation: the sculpted pencils and brushes were neither real nor made to look real, but were painstakingly accurate versions, in the round, of Steinberg drawings of pencils and brushes. They looked, in short, as if you could reach out and not touch them. The tables were three-dimensional drawings. At another level, they carried an allegory of art history, in thumbing their wooden nose at the simplistic pretensions of pop art. (The next step beyond these, inevitably, is to add to the table tops finished or half-completed pictures, and oils, simulated Old Master Drawings—themselves done in oil on canvas—old photographs, etc.: all appear in those he is preparing for a show in Paris this fall.)

This newest volume contains genre scenes, parades, wordscapes, painted landscapes populated by rubber stamps (my favorite has six occurrences of the couple from Millet's L'Angelus and nearly twenty of a painter with an easel painting them), photo-collages, etc. New, fierce forms, derived from primitive cartoon-strip, begin to emerge, and an obsession with the rhetorical effect of the Gizeh pyramids in their reduced, Masonic form (as on the U.S. one-dollar bill). In between its plangent and melancholy jacket paintings, Steinberg, The Inspector of civilization and its discontented inscriptions—on paper, in the ground, against the sky—continues his steady work. But the use of oil painting is a new and serious matter. (I do not mean color in the drawings—there has always been that, and in Le Masque, in particular, there was a good deal, including adaptations of such non-colors as the official red-and-blue of airmail envelopes.) In the new work, paintings have become parts of the drawings the way writing, stamps, and photos had earlier. Steinberg had treated the relation of painting to drawing—drawing for reproduction, always—as that of the private to the public worlds. Of his own paintings in the past five years or so, he has remarked that whereas most painters learn to paint early and only gradually may possibly become artists, he had spent years becoming an artist, and now could afford to learn to paint. This is not merely an allusion to the almost apocalyptic painterliness of the abstract expressionist decades in America, but to a realization of the power of his own art to work its metamorphic magic even on its own most precious and most privileged glimpses. The visionary pastoral country beyond Steinberg's drawn urban world can only be read, after all, through those shining and wise spectacles.