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Saul Steinberg: A Biography
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Published:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2012
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From National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair, the definitive biography of Saul Steinberg, one of The New Yorker's most iconic artists.
 
The issue date was March 29, 1976. The New Yorker cost 75 cents. And on the cover unfolded Saul Steinberg's vision of the world: New York City, the Hudson River, and then...well, it's really just a bunch of stuff you needn't concern yourself with. Steinberg's brilliant depiction of the world according to self-satisfied New Yorkers placed him squarely in the pantheon of the magazine's—and the era's—most celebrated artists.
 
But if you look beyond the searing wit and stunning artistry, you'll find one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. Born in Romania, Steinberg was educated in Milan and was already famous for his satirical drawings when World War II forced him to immigrate to the United States. On a single day, Steinberg became a US citizen, a commissioned officer in the US Navy, and a member of the OSS, assigned to spy in China, North Africa, and Italy. After the war ended, he returned to America and to his art. He quickly gained entree into influential circles that included Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Willem de Kooning, and Le Corbusier. His wife was the artist Hedda Sterne, from whom he separated in 1960 but never divorced and with whom he remained in daily contact for the rest of his life. This conveniently freed him up to amass a coterie of young mistresses and lovers. But his truly great love was the United States, where he traveled extensively by bus, train, and car, drawing, observing, and writing.
 
His body of work is staggering and influential in ways we may not yet even be able to fully grasp, quite possibly because there has not been a full-scale biography of him until now. Deirdre Bair had access to 177 boxes of documents and more than 400 drawings. In addition, she conducted several hundred personal interviews. Steinberg's curious talent for creating myths about himself did not make her job an easy one, but the result is a stunning achievement to admire and enjoy.
The electronic version of this title does not contain the 35 Saul Steinberg illustrations that are available in the print edition.

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Format:
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Street Date:
11/20/2012
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780385534987
ASIN:
B007WKFLCI
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APA Citation (style guide)

Deirdre Bair. (2012). Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Deirdre Bair. 2012. Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Deirdre Bair, Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Deirdre Bair. Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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        DEIRDRE BAIR received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Anaïs Nin were chosen by The New York Times as Best Book of the Year (Beauvoir) and Notable Book of the Year (Nin).

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Saul Steinberg
fullDescription

From National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair, the definitive biography of Saul Steinberg, one of The New Yorker's most iconic artists.
 
The issue date was March 29, 1976. The New Yorker cost 75 cents. And on the cover unfolded Saul Steinberg's vision of the world: New York City, the Hudson River, and then...well, it's really just a bunch of stuff you needn't concern yourself with. Steinberg's brilliant depiction of the world according to self-satisfied New Yorkers placed him squarely in the pantheon of the magazine's—and the era's—most celebrated artists.
 
But if you look beyond the searing wit and stunning artistry, you'll find one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. Born in Romania, Steinberg was educated in Milan and was already famous for his satirical drawings when World War II forced him to immigrate to the United States. On a single day, Steinberg became a US citizen, a commissioned officer in the US Navy, and a member of the OSS, assigned to spy in China, North Africa, and Italy. After the war ended, he returned to America and to his art. He quickly gained entree into influential circles that included Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Willem de Kooning, and Le Corbusier. His wife was the artist Hedda Sterne, from whom he separated in 1960 but never divorced and with whom he remained in daily contact for the rest of his life. This conveniently freed him up to amass a coterie of young mistresses and lovers. But his truly great love was the United States, where he traveled extensively by bus, train, and car, drawing, observing, and writing.
 
His body of work is staggering and influential in ways we may not yet even be able to fully grasp, quite possibly because there has not been a full-scale biography of him until now. Deirdre Bair had access to 177 boxes of documents and more than 400 drawings. In addition, she conducted several hundred personal interviews. Steinberg's curious talent for creating myths about himself did not make her job an easy one, but the result is a stunning achievement to admire and enjoy.
The electronic version of this title does not contain the 35 Saul Steinberg illustrations that are available in the print edition.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review
      • content: "Gripping and revelatory ... There is much that is new in Bair's book, and Steinberg emerges from her account as a paradigmatic 20th-century exile and traveler, crossing and recrossing fixed boundary lines in both his life and his work ... Steinberg certainly produced his share of classics, and in the process he helped pave the way for a culture of boundary-blurrers ... He showed that literature can be created without using a single sentence."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Wall Street Journal
      • content: "A meticulously researched and soberly written portrait revealing an artist whose personality was both more troubled and more troubling than his fans would have ever imagined ... A tour de force of biographical craftsmanship."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review
      • content: "The pre-eminent New Yorker cartoonist leads a life worthy of his own ironic art in this scintillating biography ... Steinberg emerges as a tangle of neurotic contradictions ... Bair's long and amply researched biography unfolds in a graceful prose that's stocked with absurdist scenes and colorful characters ... Her breezy writing works subtly and slyly to unearth psychological depths beneath that amusing surface of the Steinbergian picaresque."
      • premium: False
      • source: Chris Ware, cartoonist
      • content: "With this enthralling and exhaustive biography, Deirdre Bair traces the first complete portrait of the private, astringent (and now formerly) inscrutable artist/cartoonist in a nonjudgmental manner, all the while gaping at the famous friendships, expansive career, and, most surprisingly, messy affairs that Steinberg so peripatetically and painfully inhabited. Steinberg was not only the most 'twentieth century' of twentieth century artists, but also one of the most flabbergasting."
      • premium: False
      • source: Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra
      • content: "Does his reading Huck Finn in an Italian concentration camp, his belief that Cyrillic 'looks like sneezes,' his TV commercial for Jell-O, or the hunch that Mickey Mouse was black explain Saul Steinberg? Not entirely, but Deirdre Bair does the rest, in her sensitive, stylish portrait of an American original. A rich, sparkling joy of a book."
      • premium: False
      • source: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of Van Gogh: The Life
      • content: "The definitive portrait of an illustrator, an artist, who created some of the defining images of the 20th Century. Bair has written the enchanting and illuminating biography that Steinberg always deserved."
      • premium: False
      • source: Françoise Mouly, Art Editor, The New Yorker
      • content: "I thought I knew Saul Steinberg, yet in Deirdre Bair's biography I learned of the extraordinary life, replete with his most intimate musings, this guardedly private man lived. It brought back the unique wit and humanism that make Steinberg one of the towering creative forces of the 20th Century."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Boston Globe
      • content: "[Full of] fresh revelations ... A comprehensive and engaging biography."
      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        October 1, 2012
        National Book Award winner Bair (Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over, 2007, etc.) exhaustively explores everything related to Steinberg. It is well into the book before the author digs deeply into the thoughts behind his art. Born in Romania and educated in Milan, Steinberg was an extremely private man who was terrified of exposing himself by discussing his work, but he had an extremely active social life and a desperate need to seduce any woman who took his fancy. His wife, the artist Hedda Sterne, as well as his lovers, let him get away with it. Perhaps his generosity assuaged their furor. Like so many artists of that age, he seemed to be able to escape to rest his mind for large parts of the year. Bair chronicles all of Steinberg's trips, noting every flight, sailing, hotel, train and bus ride. His dealings with galleries are interesting; travel plans and his digestion are not. Steinberg produced a wide array of work, from cartoons, books, murals, stage sets, fabric designs and even greeting cards. Call to mind View of the World from 9th Avenue, which appeared on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976, and you'll see how his mind allowed him to lead us through his free-association world. His works with "5" and "E" are masterpieces of wordless comedy, and his images were so intense that words were never needed. Bair's book, though overlong, will help readers understand the breadth of Steinberg's talents. Followers of the postwar art world will love this book but may be disappointed by the lack of examples of his work.

        COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        June 1, 2012

        The creator of fabulously spiky, satirical drawings and cartoons--everyone knows the iconic New Yorker cover that makes the rest of the country look like a really little slice of the pie--Steinberg was born in Romania, educated in Italy, and became a U.S. citizen, a commissioned navy officer, and a member of the OSS in a single day. National Book Award winner Bair got to rummage through 177 boxes of never-before-seen materials to write this biography.

        Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from November 1, 2012
        In this lavishly researched, pointillistic, and revealing biography, National Book Awardwinning biographer Bair seeks to decode the pleasure and puzzle of Steinberg's witty and profound creations and the paradoxes of his life. She finds clues to Steinberg's instantly recognizable visual lexicon in his childhood as a thoughtful, introspective Jewish boy in anti-Semitic Romania. A passionate reader and first-class noticer, his major preoccupations then and always were girls and drawing, and his approach to both was complicated and contradictory. Steinberg's nightmarish exodus from Nazi Europe was followed by a bizarre, world-roaming stint as a U.S. Navy psychological warfare artist. Once established in New York, and on the pages and covers of the New Yorker, Steinberg, with his keen eye for absurdity and injustice, perpetual drive to create, questing intelligence, metaphysical imagination, and sharp sense of humor, became one of the world's most industrious, successful, and conflicted artists. A self-described writer who draws, he was torn between commercial and fine art, his hunger for attention and fame and his need for privacy. As Bair chronicles Steinberg's complicated marriage to painter Hedda Sterne and tragic 35-year relationship with a much younger mistress, and richly illuminates each creative leap and fall into depression, Steinberg emerges as a philosopher-cartoonist-artist of prodigious talent, vision, and duality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from October 1, 2012

        National Book Award winner Bair (Samuel Beckett: A Biography) meticulously connects the puzzle pieces of the complex, often paradoxical life of graphic artist Saul Steinberg (1914-99), the luminary best known for his postwar New Yorker cartoons but also notorious for his scandalous affairs even while he was married to artist Hedda Sterne (one of many of his peers whom Bair interviewed for the book). Bair offers a balanced portrayal, noting Steinberg's sometimes conflicted generosity (e.g., his lifelong financing of family and friends) with the same evenhandedness with which she acknowledges his philandering. Steinberg was at once a hardworking fine artist, a sharp intellect, and a commercial success who hustled his witty illustrations even during bouts of depression. He spent various periods in North America and his native Romania, and served as an OSS officer in Italy, China, and North Africa. His address book read like a volume of Who's Who, with entries for Joan Miro, Alexander Calder, Vladimir Nabokov, and others. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Steinberg, as well as Bair, who will snatch up this substantial biography steeped in postwar popular culture and art. Readers will only wish there were more illustrations for comic relief. This celebrity life, told without sensationalism, will fascinate. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/12.]--Marianne Laino Sade, Maryland Inst. Coll. of Art Lib., Baltimore

        Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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From National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair, the definitive biography of Saul Steinberg, one of The New Yorker's most iconic artists.
 
The issue date was March 29, 1976. The New Yorker cost 75 cents. And on the cover unfolded Saul Steinberg's vision of the world: New York City, the Hudson River, and then...well, it's really just a bunch of stuff you needn't concern yourself with. Steinberg's brilliant depiction of the world according to self-satisfied New Yorkers placed him squarely in the pantheon of the magazine's—and the era's—most celebrated artists.
 
But if you look beyond the searing wit and stunning artistry, you'll find one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. Born in Romania, Steinberg was educated in Milan and was already famous for his satirical drawings when World War II forced him to immigrate to the United States. On a single day, Steinberg became a US citizen, a commissioned...

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