ABSTRACT
The art of Saul Steinberg is an oddity–a happy oddity, a marvelously comic oddity, an oddity of breathtaking intelligence and wit, but an oddity all the same. Between the world as it exists and the way Mr. Steinberg renders it, art–not only Mr. Steinberg's own, but the whole amalgam of styles he brings us in brilliant parodic form–intervenes with a comic vengeance. For Mr. Steinberg is a draftsman of genius, and an exhibition like the present one reminds us that there is no substitute for seeing the work of his own hand. But he does something more than satirize this material–and this is his great distinction. Mr. Steinberg takes hold of the whole range of the visual language that modern art has thrown over experience like a magic blanket and treats this language as if it were the vocabulary of the unconscious, which, at certain levels of culture.
