Young Steinberg lived for more than seven years in Milan (1933-41), arriving from his native Bucharest to enroll in architecture school. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York Ink, gouache, and watercolor, 29 ½ x 20 ¾ in. On the island is the word “Milano,” while on the shore northeast of the island we find a locality named “Tortoreto (Teramo).” Fig. A very blue, winding river flows through the territory, and on the bottom right it skirts a small lake with an island. 4 Entitled Autogeography, it is a bird’s-eye view of a green territory dotted with the names of many locales, large and small, from every corner of the world. 3 There is, however, another splendid map, completed ten years earlier although intended for The New Yorker, it was never fully published in Steinberg’s lifetime ( Fig. Often the maps are of actual places refracted through the artist’s mental constructs, as in View of the World from 9th Avenue, his famous MaNew Yorker cover, which, reprinted as a poster, copied, and appropriated for many other cities of the world, became his personal nightmare even today, it remains the icon that most easily identifies him. The way dearest Italy turned into Romania, hellish homeland.” 2 Life as Artįor most of his adult life, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) drew maps-maps of real or imaginary locations, maps of words and of concepts. “I didn’t want to accept the reality, the betrayal. The text of this journal is also published here in English for the first time. The essay is illustrated by photographs, documents, and Steinberg’s drawings, many of them from a journal he kept during his last nine months in Italy. The present essay, building on an earlier study by the same author and using several unpublished archival sources, sheds light on these fraught years, while also examining Steinberg’s sometimes contradictory attitudes to political events as well as art. This crucial period in Steinberg’s biography has until now remained largely unknown because of Steinberg’s own reluctance to discuss it. Forced to live as an unwanted “foreign Jew” and unable to obtain the visas necessary to leave Italy, by late 1940 he was under threat of imminent arrest a few months later, he spent several weeks in an internment camp before finally managing to flee the country. These first years in Italy, which he would later remember as a “paradise,” turned rapidly into “hell” in 1938, with the institution of racial laws that deprived him of income, a profession, and a legal residence. In 1936, while still an architecture student, he started contributing gag cartoons to popular Italian humor newspapers and soon became renowned for his clever visual wit. Steinberg arrived there in 1933 to study architecture, having left his native Romania and its virulent anti-Semitism. ![]() The aesthetic persona of Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), who became one of America’s most beloved artists, began to take shape in Milan during the 1930s.
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