EAST HAMPTON, NY.- On view through May 21, 2023, The Drawing Room is presenting the gallery’s third Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) exhibition in East Hampton, where the artist lived and worked for nearly half a century. Important ink and watercolor drawings completed during his extraordinary career at The New Yorker are central to the installation, which also highlights oil paintings, watercolors, prints and objects used on his Drawing Table reliefs. The focus is on Steinberg’s original approaches to conventional art mediums and conceptual practices such as Trompe L‘Oeil, assemblage and “found” objects.

Many of the drawings have important exhibition histories. The earliest is a green tinted zincograph, the profile of a woman with a notable nose and a feathered hat, Untitled 1945. A closely related impression on blue paper was included in Fourteen Americans, an exhibition curated by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946. An eccentric ornamental watercolor, Turkish 2, 1951, was shown in the joint Sidney Janis - Betty Parsons exhibition in 1952. The lively drawing of the anthropomorphic cat shouting Now! c. 1960-65 was in the 2021 Triennale in Milano. The hallucinatory Untitled, 1964 – a map of a twisted U.S.A. labeled with the acronyms of America’s corporations, institutions and products, is featured in Joel Smith’s catalog, Saul Steinberg Illuminations, which accompanied a show that traveled to four venues in the United States.

Passionate about drawing as a child in Romania, Steinberg went on to architecture school in Milan, where he honed his skills and became intrigued by representation and, in particular, perspective as a phenomenon to explore in drawing. Included in the show are the rare trapezoidal drawings, a form of Trompe L’Oeil, on panels of wood. Drawing a cityscape or landscape as one experiences it from an angle rather than straight on, Steinberg explores how we choose to see the world. His slanted imitation of a Mondrian painting as seen by an art viewer is an enigma of perception.

In his serene oil paintings and sumptuous watercolor landscapes and seascapes from the 1970s, Steinberg approached those conventional artistic traditions with refreshing irony. The human figure appears in the form of a rubber stamp of a man with a top hat roaming the earth. The tiny existential human re-appears wandering across the thin, stretched colored pencil landscapes on wood slats. One might interpret the ever present stamped “everyman” as the artist, or the immigrant, or the viewer? In 1971 he explained to an interviewer “with my stamps, I create series, as if my characters emerged from a computer, identical to each other, regimented the way they appear in our rigid society; in this way, I destroy conventions more effectively than with drawing and painting."

Steinberg’s drawings and prints of women artists at work are featured in serious and humorous compositions. In the etching Provincetown two ladies are dressed up in high heels painting “en plein air” at their easels in the dunes. Untitled, 1949 appears to be a drawing from life of a lady immersed in her own drawing with compositions strewn on the floor.

Engaged by carving, whittling, drawing on wood and etching on metal plates, Steinberg made the objects on view which include life size ledger books, carved and colored treasure boxes with hinged tops, ring binder note pads, a pencil box, Art Deco ornaments, bureaucratic stamps with fake insignias, tin clocks, still lifes etched on metal, and a music box. These objects were his “at hand“ inventory as he composed three dimensional Drawing Table Reliefs on wood panels.

The relief panel titled, The Cabinet, 1970, was shown in The Whitney Museum’s 1978 retrospective, curated by Harold Rosenberg. Steinberg replicated one side of a trunk similar to steerage class crates packed with the few possessions immigrants could bring on their passages from Europe to America. Official stamps and signatures are scrawled all over the surface suggesting many ports of entry. With its worn surface and many official stamps, The Cabinet invokes the determination of the immigrant’s journey. Steinberg’s name appears in metal type as the owner of the trunk.