Saul Steinberg New Yorker Line

Saul Steinberg: New Yorker Line

Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) was born in Romania, trained as an architect in Milan, and spent his career in New York producing drawings that occupy a unique position between visual art, philosophy, and comedy. His work for The New Yorker -- 85 covers and hundreds of interior drawings from 1945 to 1999 -- constitutes one of the most sustained single-artist collaborations in American magazine history.

The New Yorker Relationship

Steinberg's first New Yorker cover appeared in 1945. He was not a cartoonist in the conventional sense -- his work rarely carried conventional punch-line structure -- but something closer to a visual philosopher: drawings that made arguments about language, representation, America, art history, and consciousness. His line is clean, precise, and self-aware: it knows it is a line and occasionally says so.

View of the World from 9th Avenue (1976)

The most famous single image in New Yorker history, and among the most famous magazine covers ever published. The view looks west from 9th Avenue in Manhattan: 9th Avenue and 10th Avenue in crisp foreground detail, then the Hudson River, then a vastly foreshortened America -- with the Rocky Mountains a modest bump -- and then China, Japan, Russia, and the Pacific Ocean in summary shorthand. The cover ran on March 29, 1976, and was such an immediate sensation that it was widely stolen from newsstands. It has been endlessly parodied and localised.

Visual Philosophy

Steinberg drew identity documents, passports, and certificates of authenticity as art objects. He drew borders, maps, and the architecture of bureacracy as philosophical commentary. He drew figures that were themselves drawings of figures -- a meta-layer that anticipates postmodern visual art. His masks (literal drawn paper masks that his subjects wore for photographs) comment on the relationship between representation and reality. He influenced everyone from Art Spiegelman to contemporary illustrators.