Saul Steinberg’s Masterful Language of Lines

Saul Steinberg, the Romanian American artist and longtime New Yorker contributor, is as celebrated for his elegant line as he is for his razor-sharp wit. His 1945 début American collection, “All in Line,” recently reissued by New York Review of Books, puts both characteristics on striking display. “I’m unfit to do anything not funny,” Steinberg confessed to Life magazine in 1951. But for him being funny was always a very serious business.

When I joined The New Yorker, in 1993, learning I’d be Steinberg’s editor felt like being told I’d be Einstein’s math tutor. He didn’t come to our office, so every month or two I would travel to his Upper East Side sanctuary to choose ideas for publication on the cover or in portfolios, helping him unearth the original concepts from among the thousands of drawings he had accumulated.

These visits followed a ritual as precise as Steinberg’s line work. The doorman would announce me, and, when the elevator doors parted, there stood Saul—freshly shaved, often wrapped in pastel cashmere. He’d whisk away my portfolio and guide me to his kitchen for an espresso. Then we’d settle in his living room where he’d educate me, a fellow-immigrant, on the peculiarities of America—the subtle poetry of baseball (“an allegorical play about America”), the architectural flourishes of the neighborhood post office, or the singular beauty of O. J. Simpson’s infamous glove as a plot device. Only when the afternoon light began to wane would we finally approach his flat files, where I’d sift through for something that felt fresh to him. Saul, by then in his early eighties, didn’t want to repeat himself.

Iain Topliss, the cultural historian who provides an afterword for the reissue, explains that curating his own work was always a serious and somewhat tortured endeavor for Steinberg, even in his early days in America. Steinberg, born in 1914, fled Romanian antisemitism for Italy, where, from 1933 to 1940, he trained as an architect while moonlighting, to some success, as a cartoonist. He graduated as a Dottore in Architettura in 1940. When he saw that his diploma was stamped with “di razza Ebraica” (“of the Jewish race”), he began to plan his escape from Europe. He managed to get on a ship leaving Portugal with a “slightly fake” Romanian passport (an early use of rubber stamps), but once he got to the harbor in New York City he was taken to Ellis Island and deported. He spent nearly a year in Santo Domingo awaiting a proper visa to the U.S. From there, he shipped regular packages of drawings to César Civita, a fellow-refugee from Milan who’d already planted his flag in New York’s illustration world. Civita became Steinberg’s artistic matchmaker, connecting his work with PM, Liberty, American Mercury, and, of course, The New Yorker.

Eventually, in June, 1942, The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, extended Steinberg the golden ticket to America, where he met Hedda Sterne, a fellow-artist and Romanian refugee—they married in 1944. After a year, with more help from Ross, he joined the U.S. Navy, and later was assigned to the U.S. Army’s propaganda division. They handed him citizenship papers and shipped him to China, Italy, and North Africa.

“All in Line” began as a collection of humor drawings gathered by Civita, who wanted to sell a book while Steinberg was overseas. But Steinberg was particular: he dismissed a drawing from the October 30, 1943, issue of The New Yorker as “an old drawing” made during his “transition from my European style to The New Yorker’s,” deeming it “a very stupid drawing” that did him “no favor.”

But when everyone—Hedda included—insisted that this fan favorite deserved inclusion, Steinberg relented with a classic artist’s compromise: he’d include it only after redrawing it in his “American” style.

The gag remains the same, but the execution makes all the difference—telling the same joke again, but with perfect timing. Steinberg adds another reading chart on the wall (removing any ambiguity about the setup) but his masterstroke is compositional: by increasing the distance between the patient and the giant letter, he has room to place the optometrist center stage. The doctor’s eyes are now turned to the subject, focussing our attention on the patient himself and his (now visible) expression—that quintessential Steinberg look of slight puzzlement.

It is these crystalline absurdities, constructed with watchmaker precision, hallmarks of Steinberg’s wit, that the first part of the collection showcases. In these early drawings, we see many Steinbergian themes emerge, including the connection between the hand and the line it draws. “I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing,” he’s quoted saying in a 1978 piece in Time magazine. “But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can’t be reasoned in the mind. It can only be reasoned on paper.”

Meanwhile, in 1943, while Civita’s version of the book was taking shape, Steinberg, posted overseas, discovered new and unexpected artistic territory. In Kunming, China, surrounded by “thousands of people looking behind the shoulder,” he created observational sketches of military and civilian life.

One of these drawings became Steinberg’s first cover for the magazine, but most appeared in portfolios inside, providing a nuanced and vivid alternative to the war coverage of photo-heavy weeklies like Life.

These drawings—direct yet distinctively Steinbergian in style—solved a crucial problem for The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, who had refused to publish photographs but needed authentic visual war reporting. Ross celebrated them as “the strongest pieces of art we have run in a long time,” noting that they even impressed officials in the Air Force.

Their success led Steinberg to consider dropping the book of humorous images to publish a separate book of war drawings. But, after returning to the U.S., in October, 1944, he dismissed Civita’s vacillating plans and took firm command of his book’s final form. He kept the two beats, adding “war” sections for the second half, and refined the working title, “Everybody in Line,” to a more concise “All in Line,” with its whiff of military order.

In this reissue, we witness the full arc of Steinberg’s early mastery—from his precise architectural eye to his philosophical wit, from European émigré to American observer. The collection reveals how his seemingly simple line evolved into a profound artistic language capable of expressing both the gravity and the absurdity of peacetime and war. What endures most powerfully is Steinberg’s uncompromising artistic integrity. Steinberg’s work remains timeless—because he understood that a drawing, rendered with absolute precision, could capture truths about human experience that no other medium could reach. “All in Line” isn’t just a collection of cartoons; it’s the blueprint of a singular artistic mind learning to navigate between many worlds. ♦

These images are drawn from “All in Line.”