Author(s): Saul Steinberg

Art

A seminal work by an artist whose drawings in The New Yorker, LIFE, Harper's Bazaar, and many other publications influenced an entire generation of American artists and writers.

Throughout his career, the acclaimed artist Saul Steinberg created a series of unique, wondrous books. Far richer than simply catalogs or collections of drawings, these carefully arranged works formed a kind of continuous visual autobiography--a record, in drawings that are simple and detailed, comic and beautiful, of an inimitable mind's encounter with the world.

The Labyrinth, first published in 1960 and long out of print, may be the best of these, an irresistibly witty and humane compendium of thinking and drawing. Here is Steinberg, as he put it at the time, "discovering and inventing a great variety of events: Illusion, talks, music, women, cats, dogs, birds, the cube, the crocodile, the museum, Moscow and Samarkand (winter, 1956), other Eastern countries, America, motels, baseball, horse racing, bull fights, art, frozen music, words, geometry, heroes, harpies, etc."

This NYRB edition, featuring all the original art along with new editorial material, allows readers to discover (and invent) Steinberg's world all over again.