NYAB Event - Saul Steinberg Exhibition

Saul Steinberg Exhibition

Adam Baumgold Gallery (60 E 66th St.)

This event has ended.

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of 35 works by Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) from the 1950's to the 1980's. The exhibition will include drawings, works on paper and mixed media constructions by one of the 20th century's most enigmatic and inventive artists.

Featured in the exhibition will be several emblematic works from Steinberg's retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1978, and from the Steinberg Illuminations, retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum in 2006. The drawing Bleecker Street, 1971, is a famous New Yorker cover that was in both the Whitney and Morgan retrospectives. It depicts the promenade as a locus of culture of all types—an encyclopedic view of diverse, comic, city folk and creatures amidst the urban jungle. The large work on paper Biography, 1969 that was included in Steinberg’s Whitney retrospective is a combination of many of the artist’s signature motifs: postcard skylines, fake official seals and documents, a portrait and a blurry family mock photo that yield no definitive clues about actual narrative content.

The exhibition will highlight Rodozachari Table, 1981, a large mixed media table assemblage that incorporates the tools of Steinberg's art: whittled wooden pencils, paint brushes, and drawing pads, as well as his speech balloons, rubber stamps, assorted themes, symbols, and obsessions, "his ‘erotica,’ as he likes to call them," Harold Rosenberg said, "they are extensions of himself… Once again, Steinberg presents a fabrication that stands for him but also hides him. The tables continue his autobiography in personal terms that betray no secrets."

The early masterful drawing Drugstore, 1946, that was reproduced in Steinberg’s book The Art of Living, depicts old New York, with a crowded luncheonette counter and a pharmacy teeming with activity in a dazzling perspectival display. Also included in the exhibition is the drawing Allegory, 1963, where “virtually every detail invites one-to-one symbolic translation and gendering a sense of familiarity that feels like understanding. A stork is birth; a skeleton death; Uncle Sam climbing Jacob’s ladder is some kind of progress. Art finds her ideal subject in the mirror, while Reason (a Pythagorean diagram is caressed by voluptuous Beauty…”2 Any connection among the symbols of Allegory becomes illusory. Steinberg said of his art, “what I am playing with is the voyage between perception and understanding.”3

This exhibition will include several drawings from the 1950's and 1960's that were reproduced in the Steinberg books All in Line, The Art of Living, The Passport, The Labyrinth, The New World, Le Masque, and The Inspector.

[Image: Saul Steinberg "The Waltz" (1953) Ink on sheet paper. 14 1/8 x 19 in. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARS, NY]

Media

• Drawing
• Other

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