It is the summer of 1970 and Saul Steinberg, principal cartoonist at the New Yorker, is thinking dark thoughts. The Artist is the title of his latest drawing, an acerbic meditation on what it might mean to be “a painter of modern life” – to borrow Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century phrase – in late twentieth-century America. The artist in question turns out to be a Mickey Mouse figure. He stands on the summit of a barren hillock, Steinberg’s mocking symbol of a modern Parnassus, with his precariously perched easel before him. Meanwhile, all hell is breaking loose. A cruise missile heads straight for the painter’s canvas. A great fanged bird dive-bombs him from another quarter of the sky, while a crocodile, jaws gaping, creeps up on him from behind. Lower down the hill, a topless floozie clutching a crucifix lies comatose next to an emaciated Minnie Mouse in fishnets. Empty whisky bottle beside her, stiletto in hand, Minnie might be contemplating suicide but lacks the energy to do the deed. A solemn dog and anguished cartoon cat constitute a chorus of dismay.

 

 
Steinberg was not alone in questioning the relationship between modern American painting and modern American reality in 1970. That was also the year when Philip Guston, former stalwart of the Abstract Expressionist generation, turned traitor on what he saw as the increasingly tasteful irrelevance of high art in the American modernist mould. “American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit,” Guston scribbled angrily in a notebook at the time. “A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be ... an escape from the true feelings we have, from the ‘raw’, primitive feelings about the world – and us in it.” Appalled by the unfolding tragedy of the Vietnam War, disgusted by Nixon’s presidency, Guston turned to the scabrous language of the cartoon to revitalise his painting. Whether he had seen it or not, he was acting on exactly those feelings embodied in Steinberg’s drawing.

Steinberg’s world is weird and familiar at one and the same time – thronged with the sights and sounds of modern America, yet always refracted through his habitual attitude of wry disenchantment. The artist’s work is subtle, his satire often perplexingly oblique. Almost everything he touched is shot through with a melancholic sense of man’s foolishness, cupidity or tendency to malevolence – a legacy, perhaps, of his childhood, when he was forced to flee Romania by a wave of anti-semitic pogroms. Touched by a migrant’s sadness, Steinberg’s art is also vibrant and ultimately life-affirming. It most definitely cannot be filed away in the drawer marked “mere illustration”.

Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) was a self-avowedly “low” artist, in the sense that he was proud to see himself as a successor to the likes of great Georgian satirists such as Cruikshank and Gillray. He even took a perverse delight in the prejudices of those who failed to see that work such as theirs (or his) might be worthy of consideration as fine art. “Cartooning”, he remarked with characteristic acuity, had “remained modern through a lack of respectability.” For Steinberg, the greatest challenge facing the contemporary artist was how to avoid selling out: “you can decide to become a museum artist ... but in my eyes that’s just as bad as becoming a commercial artist, in the sense that you are not anymore a modern artist. You are subjected to the pope and the prince. The nature of the modern artist is to search, is to be in a precarious position and to be non-professional.”

Steinberg was in fact friends with numerous “museum artists”, including Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. His breadth of awareness and his fluent eclecticism – a matter both of intellect and style – meant that he could punch far above the weight of the average cartoonist. He often flirted with the mannerisms of high modern art, but never for their own sake. His golden rule was that the artist had to have a subject and had to have a point to make.

So in Steinberg’s hands, the meshed structures of Synthetic Cubism became a vehicle for observing the way in which American cityscapes – notably that of Manhattan – looked like built versions of “difficult” modern art. Conceptualism came in handy when he was searching for an image of the rise of bureaucracy and the onward march of the faceless corporation in post-war America. In 1964, Steinberg drew a mock-sublime American landscape, complete with dazzling sun breaking through clouds, completely tapestried with acronyms. “TWA”, “KLM”, “CBS” and “NBC” fly through the air, while rolling green plains are carpeted with “DDT”, “KKK”, “IBM”, “AAA” and an army of other initials besides. “Word Art” had barely been invented, yet here was Steinberg adapting its forms to his own, satirical ends. In other cases, the cartoonist could even claim precedence over his presumed superiors in the white cube of the modern art gallery. Steinberg’s vivid cartoons of the early Fifties, alive with the acid and synthetic colours of a new urban cityscape, ubiquitous from Manhattan to the mid-west, provided the American Pop Artists with a primer in both style and subject matter.

Steinberg is not easy to pin down, partly because he refused to settle on a single manner (or even two or three). There is also, often, a sense of exuberance lurking behind the solemn mask of the social satirist and the observer of modern urban realities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the truly wonderful Chinese scroll of a drawing of 1954, entitled The Line. The conceit behind it is simple, the execution brilliant. The “line” of the title issues from the hand of the artist, and as it moves along the page acquires a hundred lives of its own. It is a washing line, the horizon of a seascape, an aqueduct and a desert plain. It is a fairground, a train station, the surface of a pool and the shivered outlines of two swimmers seen underwater. It is the swirling line traced on an ice-rink by a nonchalant skater. The artist created this drawing in preparation for a mural in a “children’s labyrinth” at the 10^th Design and Architecture Triennial of Milan –the city to which he had first escaped, in the 1930s, from troubled Romania, and for which he retained a lifelong affection.

The fact remains that Steinberg, like so many European emigres of his era, truly found his feet – and his subject – in America. His greatest legacy was the many-faceted, composite image of his adopted homeland that he spent nearly four decades assembling – above all, but not exclusively, in the pages of the New Yorker. The range of work brought together at Dulwich is remarkable, ranging from perhaps the most famous of all his many covers for that magazine – The World Seen from Ninth Avenue, a memorably dry comment on New York’s inimitable blend of manic metropolitanism and backyard parochialism – to such less well known treasures as the spidery black-and-white masterpiece of 1959, Motels and Highway. The last-named work was actually commissioned by the English poet Stephen Spender for an edition of Encounter. When he saw it Spender said one of the best (and truest) things about the nature of Steinberg’s achievement. “We are all hypnotised by this image of America,” he said. “And that is because it is the image of what is happening to our civilization.”