VARIETY
S FOR STEINBERG
You want to begin talking about
Steinberg with an elaborate S, the
ends squiggling out in illegible callig–
raphy, so infectious is his flourished
line. Yet his sixth book,
The Inspector,
1
is his least playful. The first to fall
under a mood, it is stark-grotesque,
funny-strang.e. Here on barren
plains broken by updated 20th
Century-Fox and Le Corbusier build–
ings; here among cross-patched
rocks under tiffs of clouds; here
among people made of dots, or
labyrinths, women all legs and head,
rows of paper-bag faces, single faces
uttering teeth charts or abstractions
like designs for machines-people in
so many styles and shapes -that the
human seems a lost category, a myth
of Renaissance painting; here among
crocodile-and-jackal-pursued pedes–
trians in wired compounds or
bordering Futurist streaks of cars or
colossal collision heaps; people ar–
ranged on stepped pedestals and
stairways to nothing; people incom–
municative, without vital innards:
here weighs a bleak silence, a weird
absence of anything to be said. Here
too, round official seals give earnest,
like the stamps on money, of gov–
ernment approval. And here appear
the inspectors, mostly dark-clad
sloping-shouldered men in round
hats, looking as at home as they
would in Kafka's
Trial.
In
the final
picture these sinister rubber-stamped
figures, grouped on hills under solar
notary seals, have nothing left to
inspect, everything having become
arid, official. Their faces obscure,
they stand looking off in what seems
to be the direction of the reader. . .
Now and again old-style Steinberg
gives humorous if not metaphysical
relief. Long-familiar motifs-unique–
ly his-reappear with delighting
inexhaustibility. We find more
funny-sad variations on the theme of
days, weeks, years (a man standing on
NOW, for instance, being fired upon
by EVER) more, too, of those draw–
ings, often involving huge question
marks, that turn human perplexity
into block-lettered or geographical
situation comedy. And if you thought
Steinberg could improvise no further
on music composition paper, here are
several surprises. Finally-treating
solemn, indeed fierce , activity
lightly-appear still more cartoons of
the Steinbergian artist, busy as always
completing or elaborating his own fi–
gure, since he is what he creates as
well as creator, or drawing what
otherwise escapes the drawing board
(the drawing being more idea than
paper, more sensuous impulse than
idea). All show the combination of in–
cisive conceptual wit and airy com–
mand of line that is Steinberg's bril–
liant charm.
So the old Steinberg laughs along
with the new, who doesn't even seem
to be smiling. And this, in truth, adds
needed spirit to the volume. For the
new-style drawings languish under
1. The Inspector.
By
Saul Steinberg.
The Viking Press. $10.00
