Steinberg Retrospective at NY’s Morgan Library

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The Morgan Library & Museum is presenting the first full-scale Saul Steinberg career retrospective, “Saul Steinberg: Illuminations,” through March 4.

The exhibition features more than 100 drawings, collages and sculptural assemblages by the artist whom many regard as not only a comic genius but among the greatest draftsmen of the modern era.

Steinberg is best known for his work for The New Yorker, including his widely adapted 1976 rendering of a New Yorker's view of the world.

The exhibition brings to light the prolific and diverse activity for which Steinberg was celebrated from the time he arrived in New York in 1942, and it includes rarely seen works from the collections of private lenders and The Saul Steinberg Foundation.

Having studied architecture in Milan, where he gained early fame as a cartoonist, Steinberg came to America to become a propagandist, illustrator, fabric and card designer, muralist, fashion and advertising artist, stage designer, and tireless creator of image-jammed books. Until his decision, in the 1960s, to concentrate his efforts on gallery art and The New Yorker, Steinberg's sleek, barbed, inventive line was seen—and mimicked—everywhere from highbrow journals to Christmas cards, disseminating the look of modernism to a popular atomic-age audience.

After the Morgan, the exhibition will travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Cincinnati Art Museum, before concluding at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.