The Inspector

Saul Steinberg (1914 - 1999) was a Romanian American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker, most notably View of the World from 9th Avenue. He described himself as "a writer who draws". Steinberg's long, multifaceted career encompassed works in many media and appeared in different contexts. In addition to magazine publications and gallery art, he produced advertising art, photoworks, textiles, stage sets, and murals. Given this many-leveled output, his work is difficult to position within the canons of postwar art history. He is best described as a "modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and stoned (low) art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination. He himself defined the problem: "I don't quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn't quite know where to place me." Some of the most amusing - and some of the most menacing - facets of modern life are portrayed in this book of drawings by Steinberg. In his "illusionist double language", as one critic called it, Steinberg gives us streets and avenues, time and space, words and letters, music writing, rubber-stamp architecture, the law of gravity, urban war, cloud formations, crocodiles, cowboys, dinners, parades. It all adds up to an exhilarating inspection of territories both strange and strangely familiar.