Saul Steinberg @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

Saul Steinberg 

Pace Gallery, Seoul 

March 31 – April 29, 2023 

Pace presents an exhibition of work by Saul Steinberg at its arts complex in Seoul. The show brings together works on paper and wood sculptures conveying the defiant humor, curiosity, and modernist attitude of an artist trying to make sense of the chaotic postwar period. This exhibition, which marks the artist’s first presentation in Seoul, will focus on his unique, worldly perspective, which was shaped by his experiences as an immigrant in America, a New Yorker, and an observant traveler both within and outside of the US.

The Romanian-born artist emigrated to the United States from Europe in 1942 during World War II. In New York, he became an integral part of American Modernism. He married the artist Hedda Sterne, who was already connected to the city’s pioneering artists. Establishing himself in New York’s avant-garde community, he earned critical acclaim for his inventive drawings, prints, paintings, collages, and sculptures, which defied easy categorization by reflecting a multiplicity of artistic styles, rendered with characteristic intellect.

Saul Steinberg became best known to the public for his drawings in The New Yorker. Among his most famous images for the magazine was the March 1976 cover known as View of the World from 9th Avenue, which wryly comments on the solipsism of New Yorkers by depicting the majority of the United States as a thin strip of land sandwiched between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean.

Influenced by and engaged with the aesthetics of Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism, Saul Steinberg’s art often explores visual and philosophical paradoxes, while offering oblique commentary on the state of culture and society. Among the works included in the upcoming exhibition in Seoul are the works on paper Abidjan (1973), Cairo (1974), and Nebraska (1966), which meditate on the absurdities and contradictions underpinning daily life and societal norms.

Saul Steinberg’s identity as an émigré is reflected in many of his works. The American Corrida (c. 1981), which will be on view in the upcoming show in Seoul, depicts a duel between Uncle Sam and a figure wearing traditional Native American dress. Onlookers to the spectacle include Abraham Lincoln, a bald eagle, and the Statue of Liberty.

In addition to the works on paper, Pace’s exhibition in Seoul showcases a rarely exhibited Table sculpture by Steinberg. With Summer Table (1981), a mixed media collage on wood, the artist engaged with the history of trompe l’oeil and foregrounded his interest in the poetic possibilities of everyday objects, including carved replicas of paint brushes, notebooks, and a range of banal items that accumulated on this worktable and in his domestic surroundings. This playful yet intricate sculpture can be understood as a portrait that captures the inextricability of Steinberg’s expensive practice and daily life.

Also included in the show is the sculpture U. S. Post Office (1984), for which Saul Steinberg situated a mixed media, three-dimensional rendering of a post office atop an elevated wooden base. In Saul Steinberg’s hands, a seemingly mundane, bureaucratic structure is imbued with an ineffable, surrealistic sense of whimsy.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Soul

www.pacegallery.com

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Saul Steinberg @ Cincinnati Art Museum

Saul Steinberg: Mural of Cincinnati
Cincinnati Art Museum
Debut: February 16, 2018

Saul Steinberg 

Mural of Cincinnati

© The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Saul Steinberg’s Mural of Cincinnati will be on view to the public in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s newly renovated Schmidlapp Gallery beginning on February 16, 2018. Sponsored by the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Founders Society in honor of its 30th anniversary, the mural will be on display long-term for the first time since 1982.

Saul Steinberg’s Mural of Cincinnati has a one-of-a-kind history. It adorned the wall of the Terrace Plaza Hotel’s Skyline Restaurant, an icon of modernism, starting in the late 1940s. Cincinnati businessman John J. Emery, Jr. commissioned a mural for the hotel’s Gourmet Room from Joan Miró and a mobile for the lobby from Alexander Calder. Saul Steinberg’s mural was the third commission.

Saul Steinberg, a Romanian émigré artist known principally for his witty drawings for The New Yorker, was also expanding his reputation through the exhibition of his work at art galleries and museums. This validation by the art world, combined with his success as a commercial artist, led to commissions for murals. The Cincinnati mural, his second, created a delightful atmosphere in its chic setting by including city landmarks—Tyler Davidson Fountain, the Roebling Suspension Bridge and the Mount Adams incline—amid imaginary architecture and whimsical vignettes of urban entertainment.

When Thomas Emery’s Sons, Inc. sold the hotel to the Hilton Corporation, Emery donated the three works of art to the Cincinnati Art Museum. In 2006, a prestigious Save America’s Treasures Grant funded the conservation of the Steinberg mural, restoring the balance between the delicate linear design and the white background. Steinberg’s Mural of Cincinnati will be reunited with the Terrace Plaza’s Miró mural and Calder mobile, both on view nearby in the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr., Gallery adjacent to the museum’s Terrace Café. 

The museum re-opened the modernized Schmidlapp Gallery on October 12, 2017. The innovative transformation was funded partially by a $1 million grant from the Jacob G. Schmidlapp Trusts, Fifth Third Bank, Trustee along with additional financial support from the State of Ohio.

Installation of the Saul Steinberg mural was generously sponsored by museum Trustee Barbara Weyand and the many donors who matched her gift in honor of the 30th Anniversary of the Founders Society.

The new space includes a wall of windows for natural light, couches and chairs to encourage congregation, individual looking lounges and detailed curatorial interpretation around singular artworks, new flooring to visually connect to the Bimel Courtyard, lighting and state-of-the-art temperature and humidity systems for the artwork. It also includes MyCAM, which features touch tables to help visitors create thematic art hunts to personalize their museum experience. 

“Adding Steinberg’s Mural of Cincinnati to the new Schmidlapp Gallery reflects our mission of inspiring people, connecting communities, and creating a more vibrant Cincinnati,” says Louis and Louise Dieterle Nippert Director Cameron Kitchin. “Combined with the gallery’s innovative design, we are excited to continue to welcome patrons in a new way to discover, discuss and connect with the museum’s encyclopedic art collection.”

In celebration of Steinberg’s mural, over 200 of the museum’s donors and supporters will attend a special private Schmidlapp Gallery Opening event, including dinner by-the-bite, a cocktail hour, live entertainment and a ribbon cutting ceremony the evening of February 15. 

This winter, six 7½-foot-square Formica laminate mosaics by Curtis Goldstein and Matt Lynch have occupied the north-eastern wall of the gallery. In June 2018, these works will be shown as part of a suite of 10 artworks by Goldstein and Lynch at the Weston Art Gallery presented in conjunction with an exhibition of studies, photographs and historical material from the Reiss project.

The Schmidlapp Gallery, originally part of the Schmidlapp Wing or Schmidlapp Extension, was the first expansion beyond the museum’s original 1886 building. The gallery has been home to sculpture, antiquities and, more recently, museum “icons” by Van Gogh, Gainsborough, Warhol and Tiffany.

Cincinnati Art Museum
953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org