DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: Saul Steinberg:
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Description of Pictures: Saul Steinberg
September 12, 2017 – May 18, 2018
This special installation of 18 drawings, two photographs, and an assortment of small sculptures by Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) is part of an initiative—dating from the reopening of the East Building galleries in 2016—to include selected modern drawings, prints, and photographs as part of the permanent collection display.
Revered by millions for his outstanding covers for the New Yorker magazine, Steinberg was an extraordinary draftsman whose line, according to the art critic Harold Rosenberg, was “delectable in itself.” Whether making independent works or ones for publication, Steinberg brought a mordant wit and a sharp eye to all his art, creating works that disarm, enchant, and electrify. The installation spans the years 1945 to 1984 and includes a wide range of subjects and types: from World War II air raids to New York hipsters, from collages incorporating real stationery to bogus documents enhanced with fake signatures and seals.
Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Slide Show: Want to see the pictures as a slide show?
[Slideshow]
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
NGESTE_171001_001.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) was born in Romania to parents of Russian Jewish descent in an anti-Semitic climate. No matter how famous he became as a cover artist for the New Yorker magazine or for his works exhibited in galleries and museums, he continued to see himself as an immigrant to the United States and an outsider -- an awareness that colored much of his work.
Steinberg moved from Bucharest to Milan in 1933 to study architecture. There he became deeply engaged in drawing, contributing cartoons to Bertoldo, an Italian newspaper specializing in humor and satire. However, racial laws imposed in 1938 by Benito Mussolini, which included barring Jews from most professions, put a halt to that. Steinberg remained in Milan long enough to earn his architectural degree, but all the while he looked for refuge in another country. He finally arrived in Manhattan in the summer of 1942, already having published drawings in the New Yorker. On February 19, 1943, the same day that he joined the US Naval Reserve, Steinberg became an American citizen. While he gained quick acceptance in his adopted country, he always maintained his status as an outsider, a visiting inspector of sorts, with a mordant wit and a sharp eye.
This installation celebrates a gift to the National Gallery of Art from The Saul Steinberg Foundation. The generous gift comprises 34 drawings, a sketchbook, and a photograph. A selection of these works is displayed here.
NGESTE_171001_005.JPG: Saul Steinberg, Self-Portrait, 1984,
The images depicted on the wall behind Steinberg were ones that inspired him. They include, at upper left, a reproduction of Piet Mondrian's Composition with Blue and Yellow, a painting in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Vincent van Gogh's L'Arlésienne (lower left); and Jean-François Millet's The Sower (lower right). At upper right, a portrait of a military officer resembles ones by Japanese artist Hibata Ōsuke of American navy men in Commodore Perry's Japan expedition. Looking strangely foreign in a Japanese-style setting, the gaze of the bespectacled officer seems aimed at Steinberg.
Curiously, Steinberg did not depict himself with the mustache he had the year this drawing was made. He also seems never to have smoked a pipe.
NGESTE_171001_012.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Vichy Water Still Life, c 1953
NGESTE_171001_016.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Untitled, c 1950
NGESTE_171001_019.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Untitled, c 1950
NGESTE_171001_058.JPG: Saul Steinberg, Untitled (Factory), 1969
Steinberg had rubber stamps made to his specifications and used them often in his drawings -- in this one, nearly exclusively.
NGESTE_171001_065.JPG: Saul Steinberg, Untitled (Cocktail Party), 1953,
Each guest at this chic cocktail party is represented in a different style. Steinberg used a pointillist technique to depict the woman at right in black-rimmed eyeglasses. He employed a stippling method for the seated woman at lower left -- a figure so insubstantial as to be in existential crisis. The man in the checkered suit, seated on the couch, is the art critic Harold Rosenberg, a friend of Steinberg's and a renowned supporter of abstract expressionism.
NGESTE_171001_089.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Germany, c 1945
NGESTE_171001_096.JPG: The envelopes and notepad displayed here are made of wood, not paper. In fact, most things here are not what they appear to be (including the notepad's spiral binding, composed of common staples). Steinberg fabricates such objects to incorporate in larger sculptures and reliefs, and sometimes to present as gifts to friends. These ones date from the 1970s to about 1990. In addition to wood, they are made of pencil and paint and include postage stamps, a jar lid, bottle caps, a thumbtack, a film canister, a bike reflector, and assorted hardware.
NGESTE_171001_118.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Untitled (Man and Woman in a Spatial Illusion), 1968
NGESTE_171001_129.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Via Aerea, 1969
NGESTE_171001_138.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Canal St. Station, 1981
NGESTE_171001_154.JPG: Saul Steinberg, Untitled (A Conversation), 1962–1964
This drawing was published in the New Yorker in 1962, but without the addition of the strip of paper at the top, thus omitting the expanded, elaborate gesture of the central "figure" on the couch. The drawing was modified again -- the fireplace and mirror at left, for example, were temporarily masked out -- and published in Life magazine in 1966.
NGESTE_171001_155.JPG: Saul Steinberg
The Smithsonian, 1967
NGESTE_171005_026.JPG: Saul Steinberg, Self-Portrait, 1984,
The images depicted on the wall behind Steinberg were ones that inspired him. They include, at upper left, a reproduction of Piet Mondrian's Composition with Blue and Yellow, a painting in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Vincent van Gogh's L'Arlésienne (lower left); and Jean-François Millet's The Sower (lower right). At upper right, a portrait of a military officer resembles ones by Japanese artist Hibata Ōsuke of American navy men in Commodore Perry's Japan expedition. Looking strangely foreign in a Japanese-style setting, the gaze of the bespectacled officer seems aimed at Steinberg.
Curiously, Steinberg did not depict himself with the mustache he had the year this drawing was made. He also seems never to have smoked a pipe.
NGESTE_171005_062.JPG: Saul Steinberg, 1978
NGESTE_171005_066.JPG: Saul Steinberg
Vichy Water Still Life, c 1953
NGESTE_171005_093.JPG: Saul Steinberg, Untitled (A Conversation), 1962–1964
This drawing was published in the New Yorker in 1962, but without the addition of the strip of paper at the top, thus omitting the expanded, elaborate gesture of the central "figure" on the couch. The drawing was modified again -- the fireplace and mirror at left, for example, were temporarily masked out -- and published in Life magazine in 1966.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: ) directly related to this one:
[Display ALL photos on one page]:
2023_DC_NGAEW_Longo: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: Robert Longo Drawings: Engines of State (15 photos from 2023)
2023_DC_NGAEW_Interior_Life: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The Interior Life: Recent Acquisitions (45 photos from 2023)
2023_DC_NGAEW_Guston_Now: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: Philip Guston Now (166 photos from 2023)
2023_DC_NGAEW_Guston_Nixon: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: Poor Richard: Philip Guston's Nixon Drawings (85 photos from 2023)
2023_09_29F6_NGAEW_Ancestors: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans (98 photos from 09/29/2023)
2022_DC_NGAEW_WWoman: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler (100 photos from 2022)
2022_DC_NGAEW_Night_Moods: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: Night Moods (41 photos from 2022)
2022_DC_NGAEW_Double: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900 (178 photos from 2022)
2022_DC_NGAEW_City: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The City (50 photos from 2022)
2022_DC_NGAEW_C2Create: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South (77 photos from 2022)
2017 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000.
Trips this year:
Civil War Trust conferences in Pensacola, FL, Chattanooga, TN (via sites in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) and Fredericksburg, VA,
a family reunion in The Dells, Wisconsin (via sites in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin),
New York City, and
my 12th consecutive San Diego Comic Con trip (including sites in Arizona).
For some reason, several of my photos have been published in physical books this year which is pretty cool. Ones that I know about:
"Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture" (David Lemmo),
"The Great Crusade: A Guide to World War I American Expeditionary Forces Battlefields and Sites" (Stephen T. Powers and Kevin Dennehy),
"The American Spirit" (David McCullough),
"Civil War Battlefields: Walking the Trails of History" (David T. Gilbert),
"The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956 — Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia" (Marvin Kalb), and
"The Judge: 26 Machiavellian Lessons" (Ron Collins and David Skover).
Number of photos taken this year: just below 560,000.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Limiting Text: You can turn off all of this text by clicking this link:
[Thumbnails Only]