by Chris Ware
First published 2017
This collection spans four decades of work by Romanian-American artist Saul Steinberg, whose drawings graced New Yorker covers for nearly sixty years. Cartoonist Chris Ware and curator Mark Pascale examine how Steinberg's visual language developed throughout his career, from his early black ink commentaries on 1940s America to his later watercolor paintings of the 1980s. The book features sixty works that demonstrate Steinberg's approach to collapsing boundaries between fine art and popular culture. His drawings, collages, prints, paintings, and sculptures reveal an artist who used wit and invention to capture the postwar era. The collection shows how Steinberg moved from sharp observations of his adopted American homeland to more complex artistic explorations in his mature period. Readers discover an artist who refused to separate high culture from everyday experience, creating work that appeared in both museum galleries and magazine pages across six decades.
Genres: biography, art, 20th-century, biography-memoir, 21st-century, art-history
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: America, New York
Period: 1940s, 1980s
72 pages · Hardcover · Art Institute of Chicago