Saul Steinberg “100th Anniversary Exhibition”
The Pace Gallery (32 E 57th St)
This event has ended.
Widely celebrated for his contributions to The New Yorker, Steinberg was a nimble artist who adapted to whatever medium fit his exploration of the world. The exhibition encompasses five decades of work and covers the breadth of his artistic practice. On the second floor gallery, Pace will exhibit a survey of the artist’s work in different media, while Pace/MacGill will dedicate its presentation on the ninth floor to a focused study of Steinberg’s photographic works in conversation with a selection of drawings. The exhibition will include more than eighty works, featuring some of Steinberg’s most iconic images as well as works that have never been publicly exhibited.
Steinberg’s varied output reflects the defiant curiosity and fiercely modernist attitude of an artist trying to make sense of the chaotic postwar period. An immigrant to the United States, Steinberg crafted his visual outlook to explore the radical upheaval of the world and examine American values. Unlike his peers who receded into pure abstraction, Steinberg pursued a pictorial agenda, projecting his anxieties and uncertainties outward, into both the world of fine art and the homes of Americans through popular magazines. His influences spanned Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and Pop, but Steinberg was never content to just produce works of aesthetic interest. Instead, he sought to confront the world, creating what he called puzzles that elicited critical contemplation, raising questions without providing answers.
His career attests to a sustained commitment to understand the world at a human scale. Steinberg described his images not as landscapes but “manmade situations,” marking each work with a measure of human invention or scale: people, cars, buildings, pyramids, even rubber stamps. In Untitled (Nine Postcard Landscapes with Figures) (c. 1970s), the artist depicts diminutive figures against landscapes with fabricated stamps standing in for the sun. He sidesteps any attempt at the sublime, presenting landscape imagery as a postcard cliché and a consequence of constant human reinvention. Harold Rosenberg wrote, “the matter of his art is artifice, the way people and things make themselves up, or are made up, to present themselves to the world.”
Although Steinberg produced photographs at various points in his career, his most prolific output occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Steinberg’s photographs—more aptly “hybrid photo-drawings” as Joel Smith wrote—function in two modes: photographs of surfaces on which he has drawn and manipulations atop printed photographs. His additions alter scale and perspective, transforming detritus into bustling urban landscapes and familiar scenes into uncanny grounds for drawing. These works dislocate any assumed objective representational authenticity of the photograph. “A photograph, for all the vaunted uniqueness of its medium, was…just one more piece of paper whose special qualities made it a Steinberg waiting to happen,” wrote Joel Smith.
Steinberg never conformed to a specific movement or art historical moment. He forced his viewers to critically confront not only the content of his images but how they were constructed. Driven by this vision, Steinberg never fit neatly within any historical category yet stands as a canonical figure. Harold Rosenberg wrote that Steinberg “made it impossible for art to acknowledge his legitimacy without changing its conception of itself.”
Media
Schedule
from September 11, 2014 to October 18, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00