Saul Music

SAUL STEINBERG plays with your mind. In his world, ornate vases tower over insubstantial people while gunny sacks and trash cans become city streets. His work is intimately contemporary, deliberately shirking any monumentality. With a draughtsman's feeling for line and form, a unique vision of twentieth century civilization and a not unsympathetic sense of satire, he fuses visual and psychological worlds.

The exhibit of drawings, paintings and Steinberg-ings in Robinson Hall at the Graduate School of Design is all Steinberg, all of his diversity. This is not a starling exhibit, however. The 36 pieces are methodically representative of his last decade, hung unimaginatively and restfully in the Robinson courtyard, but with good lighting and lots of space to move in.

Much of Steinberg's work aims at destroying a sense of physical recognition. Breaking down visual reality into its components, he loosens the viewer's death-grip on literal and contextural associations.

HAVING vindicated himself by making a statement of his own artistic humility, he attacks. He accuses the entire world of believing in its own artifices and of vesting them with pompous officialdom. Steinberg contrasts the substantiality of a painted chunk of rich brown earth and a simple tree, with the frenzied intricacy of man's nervous world, by juxtaposing the two scenes on cliffs separated by a narrow but precipitous chasm.

A similar physical set-up conveys a completely different spirit in Steinberg's alphabetic synopsis of America. The skies are filled with TWA and KLM, set slightly above NBC, CBS and RCA. The IRT comes up from a fat tunnel in the earth surrounded by AFL-CIO and IBM. He plays with these abbreviations to clinch the institutional American panorama.

WHILE he employs these conventional symbols, he also develops his own calligraphy to visually communicate otherwise intangible essences. Evoking the petty frenzy of the city, the pathos of a serious little king, the baroque speech of a gossipy lady, the spirit of Los Angeles, and the monumentality of a romantic clock, he uses familiar objects and simplistic design to capture the soul of his subject.

The trademarks of his work are the Statue of Liberty and Don Quixote, sometimes dressed as an Indian, sometimes as Uncle Sam, who represent America for him. The Statue of Liberty is a frumpy little lady, cheerful and a bit stupid while Don Quixote, her pal, forges around messing things up as he tries to help. They are the proof of Steinberg--packed with associations, uniquely interpreted, sad and silly and very brave.