STEINBERG AT THE NEW YORKER, by Joel Smith
There’s a lot of misleading or incorrect information out there regarding the life and work of artist Saul Steinberg, which Steinberg at The New Yorker attempts to rectify. As friend and colleague Ian Frazier notes in his introduction, Steinberg hated to be misunderstood, and hated even more, to be understood too easily. The book’s author, Joel Smith, therefore tries to correct the situation by being the first to draw on unpublished material in Steinberg’s papers to create this comprehensive study of the artist.

The book’s dust jacket says it well: “In 1941, a young Romanian escaped wartime Italy, where he had recently completed a degree in architecture, and began submitting cartoons to a weekly Manhattan magazine. For the next six decades, Saul Steinberg’s covers, cartoons, features, and illustrations would be a de. ning presence at The New Yorker. As the magazine became a standard-bearer of taste and intelligence in American letters, Steinberg’s drawings emerged as its visual epitome, and the artist gained recognition as one of the great originals of his epoch.”

Often copied but never duplicated, Steinberg’s hard-hitting style made a graceful accompaniment to the magazine. He tackled wartime, peacetime, politics, workaday life, family life, travel, historical and literary . gures, human relationships, government, and art with wit and honesty, and a little make believe to boot. Steinberg’s work was a perfect companion to the publication that became known as “a magazine for people who read” after he was commissioned to create newspaper ads promoting it as such in 1969. His work was so dense with ideas that it went well with the similarly literate and idea-dense writing in the magazine.

Every one of Steinberg’s 89 New Yorker covers is reproduced in full color, as well as many inside drawings that were originally printed in black and white. Frazier’s introduction sheds light on the artist’s charismatic personality—like his opening sentence, “Saul Steinberg once said that after he died he would be reincarnated as a dog’s eyebrow.” Frazier also claims, “Saul was, in all, a magic person. He could enchant ordinary life in an instant, as if with a . nger-snap.” Perusing this volume full of insightful sketches and illustrations, it’s evident that he was a very deep, intense person.

Steinberg and The New Yorker invented each other—the magazine gave him his career and his fame, and he lent that fame back to the magazine. They invented a postwar visual culture all their own, still recognizable today.
$50, hardcover, 240 pages, Abrams Books

IT IS BEAUTIFUL ... THEN GONE, by Martin Venezky
Martin Venezky firmly believes in age-old, cut-and-paste design: “I don’t encourage my work toward permanence. The materials I use—tape, cardboard, copy paper, pencil, wax—practically beg to disintegrate. If pieces flutter off, what remains means more to me. It can come apart. It ages. It is more alive than a digital file, whose permanence and fidelity have no precedence in our organic, decaying, wonderful world.” Venezky believes that there are two kinds of design: “top-down” and “bottomup.” Top-down design is “properly schooled design, the dictates of fashion, the needs of industry, the art on view in museums of taste,” he explains. Bottom-up design is not so predictable—it’s the “messier stuff that “covers all of vernacular design, alternative magazines, independent music, theater, and art. It may ignore propriety. It can be expressive and immediate.” Venezky considers himself to be in the school of bottom-up design.

Filled with examples of his commercial work, as well as hundreds of designs and images created especially for this book, It Is Beautiful … Then Gone attempts to question and explain his transient design aesthetic. With essays, notebook entries, photographs, and Venezky’s enormous collection of ephemera, it is a fresh take on a designer’s work and mindset. It is not just a history of his work, but a look into his thought process in design and in life. As he states in his introduction, “Given time, we will all crumble together.”
$40, hardcover, 192 pages, Princeton Architectural Press

100% EVIL, by Nicholas Blechman and Christoph Niemann
Five years ago, the authors of this book were participants in Fresh Dialogue One (see review of Fresh Dialogue Five on page 127), along with Paul Sahre. Now they’re incredibly well known among creatives, and have produced several books in their 100% collaboration, the theme of this installment being Evil. Filled with over 180 pen-and-ink drawings doodled between deadlines and after work at bars, 100% Evil is sure to both frighten and delight with its illustrations of “evil furniture, evil shoes, evil toilets, evil flowers, evil keyboards, evil bunnies, evil pizza, evil doers, and an evil introduction by Chip Kidd,” jokes Niemann on his website.

Kidd (who happens to be the current Fresh Dialogue edition’s moderator) contributes to 100% Evil with his hilarious introduction in which he explains his “all-purpose response” to an oftenposed question: “When you’re in a group, and someone with some sort of petty authority—say a waiter or a tour guide or a stewardess —is presiding. … At some point they finally stop. And then they ask it: ‘Does anyone have any questions?’” If he’s feeling particularly rambunctious that day, Kidd will raise his hand and catch the leader unaware by asking, “Um, why does evil exist?” A simple enough question, though the answer is not so simple, and the context in which the question is raised is the fun part of it all. Kidd suggests that the next time you’re asked this question by some sort of group coordinator, “you might as well ask mine. Who knows, you may just finally get an answer.”

The illustrative work of Nicholas Blechman and Christoph Niemann, focusing on the topic of evil, fills up the rest of this small-sized book. Blechman, principal of Knickerbocker Design in New York, is author of Empire and publisher of the award-winning magazine Nozone; Niemann is an illustrator, animator, and graphic designer whose work has been featured in The New York Times and several magazines. Perhaps we need to pay more attention to the talent featured in Fresh Dialogue editions?
$14.95, softcover, 176 pages, Princeton Architectural Press