Steinberg City: Cartography of a Metropolis

Abstract

Saul Steinberg was born in 1914 in Râmnicu Sarat (R umania). In 1933 he moved to Italy and enrolled at the School of Architecture of the Royal Polytechnic in Milan, earning a doctoral degree in architecture in 1940. In those years he began to publish his drawings in magazines such as Bertoldo . Because of anti-Semitic laws of Fascist Italy, Saul Steinberg immigrates to the United Stat es in 1941, country where he settled permanently. In 1942, The New Yorker magazine began to publish his drawings, and thus began his close lifelong relationship with the publication until the end of the artist’s life in 1999. Saul Steinberg is a haunting figure in the contempo rary art and, as noted by his main critic Harold Rosenberg, … Steinberg is a frontiersman of genres, an artist wh o cannot be confined to a category … The paper we present at the table City and Communic ation, aims to analyze a selection of drawings of the arti st Saul Steinberg and his unique vision of the city and its population. In the drawi ngs of the Steinberg City the main character is a great urbe. We’ll analyze how Saul S teinberg describes what a metropolis is. We’ll review topics such as: • City morphology. We’ll see which elements interest him and why. • How a metropolis is thought and designed? Which one is the method that Steinberg uses? • Behind the drawing of Steinberg there is a way of t hinking. To which model does it respond, to the scientific thinking or to the savag e mind? • How Saul Steinberg reflects the “metropolitan life” , is it an amalgam, a melting pot of imported styles? We will introduce the paper cit izen, his documents, his universal portrait, his signature. • Ad city, show city. We’ll think over the metropolis and the communication, the cliché and the motto: a formal order and a form of control . • Museum City, as the city that by itself is a museum of abstract characters in invented places and we’ll think over the collage-city.