Saul Steinberg’s drawing “Bleecker and MacDougal, Feb. 1523” ca. 1965-1980.
Although Saul Steinberg was born in Romania, studied in Italy, and was an inveterate traveler, he would become the quintessential New Yorker from the moment he arrived in 1942 and he remained an integral part of the literary and art scene of the city as well as the visual identity of The New Yorker magazine for half a century. He called himself a writer who draws.
The corner of Bleecker Street and MacDougal was the crossroads of Greenwich Village’s avant-garde culture in the 1950s and 1960s, where Cafe Figaro, San Remo and Cafe Borgia were the haunts of Bob Dylan, the Beat poets, Warhol, and Miles Davis. Steinberg signed a lease on a 15th floor apartment at the newly constructed Washington Square Village at Bleecker and Laguardia in 1960, where he had front-row seats of it all.
After 1968, then working at 33 Union Square near 16th and Broadway (upstairs from the Warhol Factory), he gained a new vantage point to observe the city: his 11th floor studio, a view corresponding with a new era of artistic revolution and Pop.
In the 1980s, Steinberg had begun sitting in Zen meditation, including a Zendo in Sagaponack where the novelist and wilderness writer Peter Matthiessen was Roshi. The silent introspection seems to have been generative, as his important exhibitions at Pace Gallery in that decade, and books like his 1983 collaboration with Roland Barthes, all except you, can attest.
It was in this fertile period that Steinberg drew what he called “ex-votos,” pictures inspired by memories. He compared them to “film exposed 60 years ago and only now developed and printed.” Like these ex-votos, the landscape in Bleeker and Macdougal, Feb 1523—one gem of more than 250 items being displayed as part of the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures—seems to have blossomed from his vantage point on rapid rewind, ending up in a pre-Steinbergian age where this bustling cosmopolitan corner would have been seen solely by Lenape people and wildlife.
Steinberg, as a frequent traveler within the United States and throughout the world, was interested in the ways that postcards operated as visual communication, and created a number of series of drawings based on postcard imagery, sometimes with an emphasis on the horizon line of the landscape, and other times fanciful interpretations of the built environment. In the introduction to Steinberg’s 1992 book The Discovery of America, Arthur Danto notes that Steinberg’s form of discovery is that of exposing, laying bare, as he has done with this Greenwich Village street corner.
Saul Steinberg was vocal about not wanting to be associated singularly with any one image, especially following the success of his iconic “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” published on a New Yorker cover of March 29th, 1976 and then sold as a poster. As his New York Times obituary noted, he did not want to be known as “the man who did that poster.” The ironic tone is all in the caption in Bleecker and MacDougal, as the drawing alone is a meditative reserve. It is an antidote to the New Yorker’s view of the world.
This story is part of our partnership with the NYPL around the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures, which showcases items spanning 4,000 years from the Library's research collections—we'll be publishing one NYC-related object a day throughout September, and you can see everything at gothamist.com/treasures. The Treasures exhibition opens Friday, September 24th, 2021 at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Free timed tickets are now available here.
