Enneagram Movie Board Archive
SAUL STEINBERG (1914-1999) - E5 cartoonist/artist
Posted by Jan den Breejen on May 16, 1999 at 12:42:12:
Saul Steinberg
Saul Steinberg was born in 1914 in Ramnicul-Sarat, Rumania. He studied at the
University of Bucharest and the Polytechnico, Facoltà di Architettura in Milan. In
1943 he became a U.S. citizen. His art has increasingly come to seem not "eccentric"
but absolutely central in large part because the thing that Steinberg does
naturally-that is, make up intense original pictorial equivalences for ideas and
emotional states-has become an institutionalized ambition of modern art. Although
frequently mislabeled a cartoonist, Steinberg is largely indebted to the Surrealists
and borrows from a number of other modern styles. His work has been described as
a commentary on the history of modern art. Steinberg's work is in the collections of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institute,
Washington, DC, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Israel
Museum, Jerusalem.
Steinberg's cartoons looks very E5-ish; dry, mild humor without illusions. Lots of inventiveness and tendency to relativate things combined with great fanatasy makes: E5. He's not moralising but makes people ridiculous in the way the other E5 cartoonist Gary Larson does with his Far Side. Typical E5 are his frequent drawings of graphical instruments like rulers. Also we often see question marks in his works. In an interview Steinberg said: 'you are curious how things work' to explain the Q-marks. His works are architectonic technical masterworks.
Jan