Provenance:
The Estate of the artist, New York
The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York

Exhibited:

East Hampton, New York, Guild Hall Museum, Saul Steinberg, May 8-June 13, 1993, no. 3

Literature:
Steinberg, Saul & Strassfield, Christina

Saul Steinberg, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, 1993, no. 3

Lot Esssay:
Mesa with Figures is one of Steinberg’s postcard-style landscapes. Exquisitely brushed or sponged in oil or thin watercolor wash, they are simple compositions, with cloud-sky formations above, punctuated by rubber stamp sun-seals, and a horizontal expanse of flat land and/or water below; sometimes a bit of faux calligraphy feigns elucidation. They are peopled with rubber-stamp figures, the kind of embellishments called staffage in earlier landscape painting. “If I use a rubber stamp…I do it to show that this paint is not real paint, it’s a symbol of the thing painted.” Steinberg didn’t depict nature, but nature as translated by art, from high to low, the low end here represented by the clichéd vistas of tourist postcards. Explaining one of his multipaneled postcard-style landscapes to an interviewer, he said:

“These postcards represent not the reality, not the truth—they represent our convention and our idea of what nature looks like. So in a sense, the greatest influence [on] landscape has been Poussin, [one of] the inventors of landscapes, who have also been the inventors of the postcards. So that now nature looks to us like imitating art, …or it imitates the slapstick of the sunset, all the histrionics of nature and light and sun.”

The titles of the postcard-style landscapes are often as generic as the compositions— “landscape,” “sunset,” or just “postcard”; but they are just as often christened with the name of a locale where Steinberg lived or visited. Travelogue by fiat.

© 2020 Saul Steinberg Foundation

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