Drawing Inspiration: The Discovery of America by Saul Steinberg
I recently wrote about Saul Steinberg's work, and now it's time to present my favorite collection of his artwork. In the introduction to The Discovery of America, written by Arthur C. Danto, we read:
“In one sense, every life is the history of simple discoveries, a progress of cognitive additions as we learn about the contents of our world. (…) It is possible to view Saul Steinberg’s discovery of America in this way, as a series of simple discoveries of what American cities and villages are like, how Americans memorialize and enshrine, what their government buildings look like - all drawn with a somewhat comical line, postcards of things seen, for the educated amusement of sophisticated recipients. As a matter of biographical fact, Steinberg born in Romania, European to the core, was shaken loose from a form of life that was altogether congenial to him by the turbulence of politics and war, and cast ashore in America after a certain number of adventures. This was no desert island, but Steinberg really was a Robinson Crusoe, and he set about exploring this extravagant culture, making a certain number of simple, useful discoveries on his various expeditions by bus, train, and motorcar, learning from the outside what ordinary Americans took for granted as the fabric of their lives. (…) But in this spirit of simple discovery, he saw the most ordinary of ordinary things as marvelous. In the sense of simple art history, with its narrative priority, Steinberg led the Pop artists to the discovery of the commonplace, the exocitism of the ordinary.”
As Steinberg first came in Miami in 1942, we can find a lot of inspiration from Art Deco in his work:
Steinberg studied architecture in Milan, and we see a lot of it in his drawings, particularly New York City buildings:
I like how Steinberg was attempting to make sense of the new reality he had found himself in through drawing. It can be seen in many of his drawings dealing with the topography of the United States, which are also my favorite:
More violence can be seen in the drawings from the 1970s and 1980s, which corresponds to the socio-political changes occurring at that time:
Overal, it is a beautiful collection of illustrations that, to those who arrived in America with knowledge of a different culture, makes a lot of sense . It was fascinating to me as an immigrant to see how another person discovering America did it at the time. It's also a fantastic depiction of life in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s.
