Saul Steinberg Up Close

From October 6th to November 26th, 2022, the Braidense National Library presents the exhibition “Saul Steinberg Up Close,” an exhibition that celebrates and has as its core the important donation of a large number of the artist’s works to the Braidense by the Saul Steinberg Foundation of New York. The donation concerns mainly drawings, but also works made with stamps, wooden objects, metal plates, paper masks and small oil paintings, which document the tireless ability of Steinberg, among the greatest American draftsmen of the 20th century, to use the most diverse techniques and styles in a continuous process of invention.

Already presented in part in the “Saul Steinberg Milan New York” exhibition in October 2021 at the Triennale, the generous donation, is one of the largest in the history of the Saul Steinberg Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit organization established at the behest of the artist himself.

The exhibition, curated by Francesca Pellicciari, traces, in a time span from the second half of the 1930s to the first half of the 1990s, many features of the artist’s career. In addition to the works donated to the Braidense, thanks to a collaboration with the New York Public Library, the exhibition is enriched by a loan of fifteen portraits to writers, artists, friends, and celebrities: from Jean-Paul Sartre to Bernard Berenson, from Constantine Nivola to the Queen of England. It also represents a unique event because of the presence of texts by Steinberg himself, many of them previously unpublished, which wind their way throughout the exhibition suggesting possible keys to interpreting the works and revealing, alongside a better-known Steinberg artist, a writer of “great and special qualities,” as his fraternal friend Aldo Buzzi wrote.

Texts taken from interviews, letters, but especially from Steinberg’s conversations with Buzzi in the summer of ’74 and the fall of ’77, some of which have already been included in the volume published by Adelphi Reflections and Shadows. These texts were chosen because they were particularly suited to accompany the works in the collection in a narrative journey that could provide suggestions rather than explanations, show the hidden gifts of the writer Steinberg alongside the better-known ones of the draughtsman Steinberg.

So in the end it is the artist himself, through his writings, who guides the visitor and induces him to move freely through the space. Panels and captions are composed of short textual fragments for a nonlinear, highly personal exploration without necessarily a single point of view. Also emblematic in this regard is the double entrance to the exhibition route, from the Library and the Pinacoteca, underlining the physical connection between the Braidense National Library and the Pinacoteca di Brera, naturally linked, or connected, as if they were a pair of “non-identical twins.” Thanks to the opening of the glass opening that connects them, the user will be able to decide to start his or her visit, accessing indistinctly from both the library and the museum. This is a dual possibility of fruition and reading, in a fluid path, with no obligatory beginning or conclusion but seen in a continuous coming and going between word and image, which finds in the magnificent spaces of the Library its ideal synthesis.