Another article from graphic designer Art Chantry. This time Art shares his insights on Saul Steinberg of The New Yorker magazine fame. The introduction is from an interview dating about fifteen years ago with Art.
Chantry:There used to be a time when designers were trained in the history of design and art concepts, composition, all these issues you have deal with on a daily basis with design, and now you’re not. Now you just buy a fuckin’ piece of software and now you’re a designer.
Roto:I think it’s opened it up to people who don’t necessarily care about design one way or another, they see it as an easy way to pay off the computer.
Chantry: Yeah, that’s true too, you’ve got technicians doing design, and of course corporations and business people are going in-house and designers are used as technicians — design is not a skill any more, it’s now a technical knowledge base. Which I think is also a dangerous precedent, because people had worked really long and hard to set design apart as a real art form, as something to contend with, finally being defined as a language separate from the written language, as a visual language, and all of a sudden it’s being dumped in the hands of non-linguists! Amateurs! So I’m at this weird crossroads in my life, where if I continue to work this way I’m going to be eliminated by the process.Read More: http://www.rotodesign.com/art/art.html
Art Chantry. www.artchantry.com art@chantry.com
ART CHANTRY: Saul Steinberg is probably the single most recognizable illustrator that ever lived. i spotted this little book in a huge pile in a “books for a buck” bin at a thrift store among, maybe, 500 books in a heap. I lazered in on it immediately, like i saw nothing else. I knew who this was instantly. These are some little “un”happy face… gearheads worked into a title on an old book binding and I still knew immediately it was ‘steinberg” (as he was originally called when he started out). I don’t think i could even do that with Robert Crumb. There’s just too many crumb imitators out there. But, NOBODY copies Steinberg. you can’t.
www.artchantry.com
After Saul Steinberg first emerged in the ww2 period, he struggled to survive like every other young guy trying to survive in the new civilian world after the war. He was a classic New York cosmopolitan intellectual. He was also a bit of a morose serious presentation and personality (so far as i could tell.) what writing he did (articles and the like) were stunningly cynical and entertaining as all get-out. He seemed to be a really eccentric piece of work.
He picked up what work he could get – doing book covers like this, gag cartoons for whomever would publish them. He even did some clip art.But, it was his regular appearances in the New Yorker that really cemented him with the public his droll twisted sense of the absurd that made him famous.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/24/nyregion/20071125_ARTSWE_SLIDESHOW_2.html
Ever serious, he began series of cartoons that weren’t really cartoons in the classic sense. They were more like peculiar spot images – drawings. quickly, the ‘caption’ usually placed beneath the image to make it a good ‘yuk’ disappeared all together.He was one of the very first cartoonists who only drew a picture – and it was wondrous. It was completely up to the viewer to deduce the subtle wit and humor. He never talked down to his audience, but he expected them to sometimes work hard to catch up with him. everybody fell in love.
A peculiar thing happened to Saul Steinberg -is that he morphed into a ‘fine artist’. not many commercial illustrator/cartoonists actually ever make that switch. When they do, it’s not ever complete – their past haunts them. The ‘commercial’ art world is so despised by the fine art culture that once you’ve “whored”, you are never really ever allowed fully in the doors of art world “klass”. Such was the fate of Saul Steinberg.
"Saul Steinberg's marvelous New Yorker cover from October 8, 1969 (see Figure 1), provides thebest picture of human consciousness I have encountered. Not just words, but colors and shapessucceed each other in delicious association. Even the genius of Steinberg can't quite renderaromas, tickles and sounds on the cover of a magazine, but at least he suggests the likelihood oftheir inclusion. And the whole rendering is made possible by his exploitation of a familiarcartoonists' convention, the thought balloon or thought bubble. Calling this a conventionunderplays its naturalness; I doubt that children ever need to have the convention explained tothem--it's quite wonderfully obvious what it depicts, metaphorically: the stream of consciouscontents in the mind of the man looking at
From gag panels in men’s magazines and clip art, he became the hottest smartest new yorker cartoonist of all time. All the while, he continued to make images, and then OBJECTS that he presented as ‘images’ to the public – a bathtub with the drawing of a nude woman reclining in it. Brown paper bag ‘masks’. False documents. prints. furniture with stationery drawn on the surface. crazy, funny, poignant things that were amusing and sad simultaneously, like looking through a glass darkly into an alternate world.
Very quickly, he was able to stop the grind of regular cartooning and concentrated on doing ‘essays’ – series of images that inter-related in a sort of gestalt instead of a story. These would be published as ‘special feature’ in the new yorker. people began to buy his originals. he, much to even his surprise, became a hot ‘artist’. For such a cynic and curmudgeon, he barely knew what to do with his new success.
ANdrew Graham Dixon: It is the summer of 1970 and Saul Steinberg, principal cartoonist at the New Yorker, is thinking dark thoughts. The Artist is the title of his latest drawing, an acerbic meditation on what it might mean to be “a painter of modern life” – to borrow Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century phrase – in late twentieth-century America. The artist in question turns out to be a Mickey Mouse figure. He stands on the summit of a barren hillock, Steinberg’s mocking symbol of a modern Parnassus, with his precariously perched easel before him. Meanwhile, all hell is breaking loose. A cruise missile heads straight for the painter’s canvas. A great fanged bird dive-bombs him from another quarter of the sky, while a crocodile, jaws gaping, creeps up on him from behind. Lower down the hill, a topless floozie clutching a crucifix lies comatose next to an emaciated Minnie Mouse in fishnets. Empty whisky bottle beside her, stiletto in hand, Minnie might be contemplating suicide but lacks the energy to do the deed. A solemn dog and anguished cartoon cat constitute a chorus of dismay. This much is clear – the drawing is no disguised portrait of its creator, because the Mickey Mouse painter is the very image of the artist Steinberg was determined not to become. He is decorated with a tricolour sash, indicating that he has sold his soul for honours. He is oblivious to the chaos surrounding him, indifferent to sex and drugs. ...Read More: http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/readArticle/583
He seemed to withdraw and concentrate solely on his little fantasy world depicted in his art. of course, the more he worked, the more in demand he was, the more he withdrew and the more he sold. a classic spiral. You began to get the impression he hated everybody – and everybody LOVED him for it.
His ‘grumpy gus’ persona was always completely in contrast to his sparkling dry wit evidenced in his work. His eye was perfect, it was unique and it was without error. Steinberg is like no other ‘artist’ in the museums. he is collected by the highest levels of fine art mavens. But, you never see him exhibited. His stuff just doesn’t fit in. Nobody in the cartoonist world ever seems to mention – or even remember – his amazing career, either. He slipped over and straddled two worlds, leaving both of them in the dust – never again fully accepted by either. Which i think may have suited him just fine.
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