Volume 39, Number 20 · December 3, 1992
Pilgrim's Progress
By John Updike
The Discovery of America
by Saul Steinberg
Knopf, 208 pp., $50.00
Published to coincide with Columbus's rather sour quincentenary, The Discovery of America, a handsomely produced album of over two hundred works by Saul Steinberg, made a rather melancholy impression upon this peruser, the causes of which I will try to discover. Any selection, even one made, as in this case, by the artist himself, raises the jealous specter of the excluded. The theme, though it reaches back to Steinberg's arrival in this country in 1941, has tended to exclude some of the very best types of his art—the mock-document, the cleverly imitated old photograph, the desk top, the collage, the self-conjuring creatures of a wandering ink line, the comic reifications of words and grammar. This is determinedly an art book, heavy on the sinister art brut of the last ten years, and I missed Steinberg the cartoonist—the exquisitely individual entertainer, the juggler of American icons on New Yorker covers.
Review, 2494 words
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