Saul Steinberg

Born in Romania and schooled in Italy, Saul Steinberg began creating cartoons for The New Yorker soon after his arrival in American in 1942. Many of his early works, of which this drawing is representative, were collected in his book, The Art of Living, 1949. Steinberg was engaged throughout his career with the question of how to draw America, a question inseparable from his status as an immigrant. Many of his works deal in conceptual ways with the strangeness of his experience and his own confrontation with American perceptions of status and place. By depicting the dapper outfits and tobacco accoutrements of businessmen leaning on one another and growing progressively smaller, Steinberg places a fine point upon the idea of hierarchy and the “corporate ladder.”