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he shows how ridiculous it is that some objects resemble each other and
that others do not. He uses graph paper for office buildings, loaves of
twisted Jewish
challeh
for cars, wash drawings for photographs, photo–
graphs and fingerprints and rubber stamps for drawings, and continu–
ous lines for both people and the worlds they populate. He makes up a
series of pairs of married couples who look so much unlike each other
that each is drawn in a completely different style, using cartoonists'
and painters' stereotypes alike. Often he shows us how sad it is that
some people are shorter than others.
With the exception of the documents, however, it is architecture
that seems to dominate the book. The eighteenth-century architectural
fantasies of Piranesi and Hubert Robert celebrated classic ruins and ro–
mantically juxtaposed them with Baroque churches and stables. Stein–
berg, loving structural intricacy in much the same way, goes a step
further and imposes different graphic conventions on his actual raw
material; conversely, by using similar pen techniques for Victorian
horrors and suspension bridges, he paints up the overloaded ornateness
that we seldom look at in structural steel. Like Klee, he continually
confronts us with the treachery of our own styles of obseIVation. After
his brilliantly argumentative use of different graphic styles to represent
the chaos of cultural fashions, he urges a final
reductio ad absurdum
in a series of nightmares of graphic logic, in which people carry various
portraits of themselves, people draw themselves and each other, and,
finally, a man pompously but pleasantly bears before him a vertical
line. Steinberg's strategy is unrelenting, and peIVades even the tiniest
details, such as the different styles of picture frame that enclose the
drawn photographs of the same woman from 1905 to the present. Per–
haps it is the equally unrelenting sharpness of his satiric eye that pre–
vents him from painting (which involves, after all, a serious commit–
ment to the style that one creates): his paintings would only end up
like those of a goateed and besmocked Mondrian that he draws at work
in a Mary Petty sitting room. Steinberg never appears to look at any–
thing without seeing, looming up in black and white around it, the
visual context that makes it absurd.
It is perhaps this incredible sensitivity to the visual limits of se–
riousness that he may be said to inherit from Klee. His earlier work,
like that of other cartoonists, may show more obvious influences, but
it is only now that he has chosen to limit himself in a completely dif–
ferent way, that any comparison is possible. Steinberg has moved from
cartooning, even in its broadest sense, to the same domain of visual
