What makes an item art? There will be those who say without hesitation that the intention, those who say that the criticism, those who think that the passage of time, and those who say that the context. To this last group of people belonged Saul Steinberg (Râmnicu Sărat, Romania, 1914 – New York, 1999), one of the most influential illustrators of the 20th century whose work has arrived in Madrid in October.
The Romanian illustrator said that “people who see a drawing in The New Yorker automatically think it’s funny because it’s a cartoon. If he sees it in a museum, he thinks it’s artistic; and if he finds it on a fortune cookie, he thinks it’s a prediction.”
![Saul Steinberg, 'Still life chair' [Naturaleza muerta silla], 1981](https://www.march.es/sites/default/files/styles/style_1312/public/2024-03/34522A_STEINBERG--SSF6339.jpg?itok=lCoMmXHX)
His cartoons and illustrations, then, will only lack to come out in fortune cookies to cover all the formats he posed. The work of Steinberg, who is considered one of the most outstanding illustrators of postwar art and who defined himself as “a writer who draws,” arrived at the Fundación Juan March (Castelló, 77) on October 18 and will remain until January 12.
Saul Steinberg: A Career in The New Yorker
Steinberg’s drawings incorporated a multitude of techniques ranging from painting to collage to photomontage. And the platform on which his work could be seen was the popular magazine The New Yorker, for which he collaborated for six decades.
The critics of the time compared him to other contemporary artists such as Picasso or James Joyce, due to the variety of aesthetic languages he used. Languages and also materials, techniques, media or semantics.
A display of humor and criticism -satire, in short- that will arrive at the Fundación Juan March through nearly four hundred pieces from different collections.