TALK: Saul Steinberg with Alicia Longwell, Andreea Mihalache, Daniela Roman
2020-05-22 17:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY, 11976, United States
Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Museum, will give a livestream illustrated talk on Saul Steinberg, joined by Steinberg scholar Andreea Mihalache, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Clemson University, and the artist’s niece Director Daniela Roman. As a special feature, the live program will include excerpts from the 26-minute film Saul Steinberg’s Line, directed by Daniela Roman and Thierry Fontaine. The film is a portrait and tribute by French cartoonists, intercut with Steinberg drawings as well as footage of Steinberg in the process of drawing and creating masks.
Steinberg, who lived and worked in Springs, East Hampton, for nearly half-century, is acclaimed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age through the works exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries, and six decades of covers and drawings published in The New Yorker. The artist reveals his unique perception of the world in whimsical depictions of birds, and cats and other real and imagined creatures, quirky abstract portraits, offbeat scenes of quotidian life, and animated architectural drawings.
Last fall, The Saul Steinberg Foundation gifted 64 works to the Parrish Art Museum. The acquisition spans 45 years (1945-1990) and features the artist’s signature drawings in watercolor, pen and ink, pencil, crayon, and other media—plus rarely shown work: wooden assemblages, wallpaper, and fabric. Forty-nine works by Steinberg are featured in the exhibition Saul Steinberg: Modernist Without Portfolio, part of the Museum’s 2019-2020 overarching exhibition What We See, How We See.
About Saul Steinberg
Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through his parallel yet integrated careers. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between fine and commercial art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination. The son of a manufacturer of decorative boxes, Steinberg grew up in Bucharest. In 1933 he moved to Milan to study architecture and in 1936 began contributing to the Italian humor newspaper Bertoldo. The promulgation of anti-Semitic racial laws in 1938 led him to seek refuge elsewhere, finally arriving in the U.S. in 1942. Through an agent in New York, his drawings had already begun to appear in U.S. periodicals; his first drawing in The New Yorker was published in October 1941.In 1946, Steinberg was included in the critically acclaimed Fourteen Americans show at The Museum of Modern Art, exhibiting with Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell. In 1959 he purchased a house in Springs, near Amagansett, where he began to spend more time after the mid-1960s. He was embraced by the artistic community and the house became a refuge from his busy New York City life.

Friday Nights at the Parrish are made possible, in part, by Presenting Sponsor:Additional support provided by The Corcoran Group and Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder.
